What your inbox says about you

Interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about how one organizes and manages their emails and what it says about you. Are you a Hoarder or Deleter?

Tale of a Spammer & His Gold

Interesting story here on a Spammer who may have buried his profits as gold underground.

Wine Batch & Blast

I read an interesting article on the changing wine industry in the New York Times Sunday and it grabbed my attention even more with a mention of how email is used to move product.

"After the wine received the 90, Brian Zucker, who oversees online sales for K&L Wine Merchants, a large retailer in San Francisco, decided to promote the Valentin Bianchi cabernet in an e-mail message to tens of thousands of customers."

This with it retailer even has a blog! They also do a nice job educating the user before they opt in about what they should expect for content and frequency

Additional Proof that Email Frequency Deserves More Attention

MarketingSherpa's Business Technology Benchmark Guide 2006 finds some potentially disturbing trends on the damage overmailing can do:

"Nearly half of business users now define 'spam' as email from a company they do business with, but that is sent too frequently."

Do you want your permission campaigns to be grouped with Spammers?

For my take on establishing the right frequency mix, please read this article

Speaking of Open Rates...a must read!

Without further ado, Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa.com - The Annoying Imprecision of Email Open Rate Metrics

Cornucopia of Email Metrics (Part 2)

If I could have a nickel for every time someone asked me which day of the week if the best to send email campaigns....My answer is below but it could change every month to reflect the results from studies that pop up. Of course, they change partially due to marketers shifting their campaigns to ride the successes indicated on these reports.

For Q2, Email open and click-through rates were higher on Saturdays than any other day of the week, according to a new report by online marketing firm eROI.

Saturdays saw email open rates of 38.3 percent, and click-throughs of 5.4 percent. Open rates also were high on Sundays, at 37.1 percent, while click-throughs reached 5.2 percent for three days--Sunday, Monday, and Thursday. Fridays performed the worst for both open-rates (32.7 percent) and click-throughs (4.4 percent).

eROI also examined recipients about their email habits and preferences.

Most recipients of B2B email--79 percent--said they subscribed using their business address.

57 percent said they subscribed using personal email addresses, while 24 percent subscribed using an address created for email lists and 19 percent subscribed using their business addresses.

Monday (33 percent) and Tuesday (36 percent) were the most popular days for when they wanted to receive B2B email.

For personal email, the most popular day was Friday (31 percent), followed by Wednesday (26 percent).

Truth be told, these studies are fun to read but remember what works best for you may be completely different than these aggregate studies. Test and try out different days and times of the week - don't bet the farm on these studies, especially since they change so often.

Cornucopia of Email Metrics (Part 1)

Email is widely used and loved for its wide range of metrics. Everyone loves stats - especially in the business and sports world. So consider yourself lucky... Take a gander at these newly released statistics:

- A recent WebTrends survey of online retailers revealed the following:
- They ranked email marketing as the most important demand-generation activity for holiday success, with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking second and third.
- Reflecting this importance, the biggest increases in marketing spending for the holidays will be in email marketing (52%), SEM (46%) and SEO (38%).
- Eighty percent of retailers use regular customer emails to build customer relationships
- 63% still evaluate campaigns using response metrics (clickthroughs) and activity-based metrics (page views, visits)
- However, 27% of respondents don't consistently measure demand generation activities

What surprises me is that only 63% use email metrics (what are you doing with all of that good info big retailers?) and a much smaller amount don't so it on a frequent basis. No surprise on email's importance, including on the budget side.

Foster's - Australian for Web Only Advertising

In a remarkable move for a CPG, Foster's, the Australian beer company now owned by SAB Brewing, will move ALL advertising to the web. Ironically, this is a company that saw its brand (and sales) increase dramatically due to catchy television spots. This company is pretty savvy if they can swallow their pride and recognize that money is better spent (and measured) online.

It seems most of it will go to targeted online ads. I am curious about how much of that $5M will be devoted to email and search, the most targeted and measurable of the online ad family.

Read about it here

No Surprise Here - Email & Search Are Near Universal Business Marketing Channels

eMarketer reports that nearly all interactive marketers send email. According to a recent Forrester Research report, "Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2006," 93 percent of the 259 respondents cited email as a marketing channel they use or plan to use to reach consumers. At 13 percentage points more than even highly touted search marketing, that makes email as universal as a marketing method can be.

Email is extremely important in the B2B realm, too. This was indicated by the 60 percent of marketing executives at U.S.-based manufacturing companies who said they planned to increase email usage in 2006 (12 percentage points over search engine marketing) in an April 2006 survey by SVM E-Business Solutions.

Increasingly, to make the most of their existing opt-in email lists and to grow those lists even further, companies look to blend word of mouth into their email marketing mix.

The timing of this report is fantastic as email marketing seems to be making a resurgence among all online marketers. Always less hyped than other "flavors of the month", email obviously works wonders for busineses, or you would not see more dollars to flow into this channel.

Good stuff to read headed into the weekend.

PowerPoint madness

check out this
Dilbert cartoon

Avoid the Spam Reflex

Many email users hit the Spam And Junk Email Buttons instead of the Unsubscribe link. Why? Because of those spammers, of course. Well, I dont spam so I am in the clear, right?

Not at all - email users are afraid to use the unsubscribe link due to fears of ending up on more spam lists. Even if you are a permission email marketer, you must be aware of this. Of course, having your unsubscribe link as a working feature is required as part of CAN-SPAM http://www.brightwavemarketing.com/canSpam.html but many users will take the safer route and hit JUNK. This can have many negative effects on your brand and your list/delivery rates.

Speaking of that - does yours work without exception?

Now to the study http://www.returnpath.biz/resources/archives/2006/08/the_spam_reflex_1.php

In a recent Return Path survey, nearly 79% of consumers admitted that they have hit the "spam" or "junk" email button to get rid of email they don't want. And nearly 37% do it as a way to unsubscribe from things they had asked to receive

Mobile Use of Email on the Rise - Adapt Your Emails

M:Metrics released a study on U.S. mobile subscriber monthly usage of content and applications. They found an increase of 5% in the mobile activity of viewing personal email. The report also noted an increase of 6.4% in the mobile activity of viewing work emails.

This means not only must your content and links be mobile friendly but your subject lines should be shorter if your audience is apt to mobile use.

Save the Diamonds or Flowers - "More Plasma & Email please" according to majority of women

A new study says Technology is a girl's best friend.

Diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend, according to a new U.S. study that found three of four women would prefer a new plasma TV to a diamond necklace.

This further validates that women are some of the most receptive audiences for targeted offers and news via email.

The study found over the next five years women see themselves increasing their activities in six tech areas: digital cameras, cell phones, e-mail, camera phones, text messaging and instant messaging.

And still plenty of upside!

How Email & Search Have Made Magazines Cleaner

Sort of. The Wall Street Journal reports on how Philips Electronics is paying Hearst $2 million to eliminate subscription cards from the September issues of four Hearst titles -- Redbook, O At Home, Weekend and House Beautiful.

Each magazine will instead run a two-page Philips ad with the line "Simplicity is not having subscription cards fall out of your magazine." The ads give information about Philips-branded Web sites, created specially for the promotion, where readers can subscribe to the magazines.

Acquiring magazine subs has become too expensive in this new economy and most magazines are still underutilizing email and search marketing to acquire and retain subscribers.

Some other interesting statistics from the piece:

Cards now generate about 12% of the magazine industry's new subscribers, down from about 20% several years ago, according to Washington, D.C., circulation consultant Dan Capell.

The Internet, on the other hand, has grown strongly in recent years and now accounts for about 10% of new sales. Direct mail is even bigger, generating 22% of new subscribers, he estimates.

The net cost of signing a new subscriber through a card runs from $5 to $10, less than the typical cost of many magazines' annual subscriptions, estimates Greg Wolfe, president of Circulation Specialists, a Norwalk, Conn., consulting firm. The cost of signing subscribers through direct mail, on the other hand, is often more than the subscription price, he says.

"We are very confident that any sort of losses from that one month will be made up elsewhere, and that's part of our plans," says John Hartig, senior vice president of consumer marketing and development at Hearst Magazines. Hearst intends to cross-promote the four titles across its various magazine Web sites and other Web venues.

Mr. Hartig predicts that the Internet eventually "will begin outpacing inserts in total subscription new business volume."

Poking Holes in Google's Halo (and Wallet)

Interesting article from Financial Times on Google's cash cow - Ad words - and the real threat of click fraud.

World Map of Spam

Some interesting stats on where global spam is coming from - this study is from XE-Filter - they can be found here http://www.praetor.net/XEFPro/Lib/XEFSpamPercent.htm

The Top 3

1 United States 33.43%

2 China 22.54%

3 Korea, Republic of 7.39%

...see the rest at http://www.praetor.net/XEFPro/Lib/XEFSpamPercent.htm


Top 10 spam producing countries excluding the USA = 49.11% of all spam email

European Email Blockade

As if the global political and economic universe doesn’t have enough trouble, here come more geocentric email challenges for global marketers. We recently sent our client base that have European operations and databases an advisory memo that is summed up below:

An increasing number of leading ISPs in Europe are more aggressively filtering high volume email campaigns that are sent in English and other non-native languages. Our recommendation is to monitor European deployments and if the delivery rate seems to decrease, we advise that the content should be “localized”. This means taking the extra step to create the content in the native languages of the European recipients (French recipients receive mailings in French while Spanish members receive the message in Spanish).

So far our clients have not seen any decrease in delivery rate but it is something we will closely monitor. No one said email marketing is boring or easy, huh?