No man is an iland

October 31, 2004

ISPs Band Together Against Spam
A new wave of lawsuits launched by AOL, Earthlink, Microsoft and Yahoo continue the fight back against the spam demon. The cases are based on a failure to comply with Can-Spam (so it does have a use after all).

October 29, 2004

Get Right with AOL, Part 2
Another look at how to avoid deliverability problems with the mighty and great at AOL.

MailerMailer
The company sent me a note with some results from their Email Marketing Use and Trends report. Some interesting snippets:

* The average bounce rate for a customer's first five mailings was 6.60%. For subsequent mailings, after bad addresses were removed, it went down to 3.59%.

* Over 80% of emails that would be opened were opened within 48-hours after delivery. By the sixth day, 95% of all emails that would be opened were opened. (I'd turn that around and point out that 5-20% of your opens can mean a lot of people - so don't base campaign evaluations on immediate results, and keep landing pages etc. active for long enough to catch "latecomers")

* The average unique open rate for all industries was 26.65%.

* The average click-through rate, the percentage of emails containing links that were clicked upon, for all industries was 4.27%.

* Emails with personalized subject lines were opened more often (32.49% compared to 26.65%) and received higher click rates (8.45% compared to 4.27%) than emails with personalized messages only or no personalization.

Using an In-House Multichannel Sweeps to Grow Your House List
Case study of how Ross-Simons used sweeps to...erm...grow their house list. Includes some insight into how sweeps can be used to update email data, too.

October 28, 2004

Gmail Concerns? Don't Press the G-Panic Button Yet
Some more insights into the impact of Google's new email service, including some interesting statistics on its market penetration (summary - it's still but a twinkle in most email users eyes).

Supporters Try to Revive Sender ID with New Version
More technology-related movements in the battle to improve email authentication, which was bogged down by disagreement recently.

October 26, 2004

Email Co-Registration 201
EmailSherpa takes a fresh look at co-registration best practices, with practical advice on various aspects of name gathering and subsequent treatment of co-reg subscriptions.

An Automated E-Mail Strategy?
Jeanne Jennings offers a timely reminder and defense of the need to round off quantitative data and automisation with qualitative analysis and expertise in email marketing.

October 21, 2004

RSS Focus Shifts to Bandwidth Management
An overview of the main issues and potential future developments with this new technology.

October 19, 2004

5 Steps to Successful Email Marketing
A few quick tips on improving deliverability...

October 18, 2004

Customer Service E-Mail Can Compromise Sales E-Mail
Paul Soltoff comments in-depth about a personal bugbear of mine: customer service emails. Email marketing extends to every email contact you have with your customers and is not just about nicely packaged promotional campaigns.

October 17, 2004

RSS Feeds Hunger for More Ads
Looks like RSS is coming of age, as nobody seems to be raising an eyebrow at the inclusion of ads in feeds. Which is not what people were predicting a year or two ago...

mUrgent and Sophisticated Spam: How NOT to Do Viral Marketing - Entrepreneurs Archives
The whole point of viral marketing is to get others to do the marketing for you. This is what happens when you get the wrong end of the stick...

October 15, 2004

Get Right With AOL, Part 1
Heide Anderson cites an example of how one company addressed some issues with emailing to AOL subscribers.

The Email Service 40 Million Consumers Actively Use (That You Probably Never Heard of)
EmailSherpa interviews the folks at Incredimail - an email account add-on used by a lot of people, with its own filters and idiosyncracies that marketers need to be aware of.

October 12, 2004

Improve E-Mail Campaigns With Behavioral Data
David Daniels urges email marketers to measure campaign success through clickstream analysis, and then use this analysis when segmenting future campaigns.

October 11, 2004

Florida hurricanes flatten email spam operations
Every cloud has a silver lining. Not that that's much consolation to the thousands who've suffered in the wake of the storms.

October 08, 2004

3 Before-and-After HTML Email Design Makeovers
Some examples of template changes that had drastic impacts on performance, plus a collection of design tips to improve your results metrics and discourage criminals from targeting your company in phishing attacks.

Use E-Mail to Enhance Lead Generation and Sales
Jeanne Jennings has 10 questions that every B2B marketer should ask themselves about the role of email in their lead generation efforts.

Email Newsletter *FROM* Field Secret
Quick, but very useful, tip relating to how AOL treats the "from" header in your emails. A must read!

October 07, 2004

Email List Rental is Baaaaaack!
Michael Mayor (President of a major list rental company) explains why list rental is the new search and making a strong comeback after the trials and tribulations of recent times.

October 06, 2004

Don't Just Hit Send
Lee-Ann Vermaak outlines some basic advice on improving deliverability, covering sender authentication, Can-spam and filtering.

Put Your Email Lists on a Diet
Jill Keogh explains why you need to rid your list of certain addresses, even if they're not (as far as you know) bouncing.

October 03, 2004

Responsys, Coremetrics Tie Site Behavior to E-Mail Marketing
I'm not usually into reporting on vendor announcements, but this is a really neat thing. It's not a new idea, but seems to be a more comprehensive implementation of it.

Websites can set parameters which define when the behavior of a visitor at that site can trigger an appropriate email to that visitor.

So, for example, if a shopping cart is abandoned, the visitor automatically gets an email a couple of days later with a special offer for the item they had in that cart, to encourage them to go back and complete the transaction.

That sort of thing draws a huge response.

Mind you, what happens when customers realize they only have to abandon shopping carts to get sent a nice coupon later...?

October 01, 2004

HTML Email Campaign Best Practices
Twelve design and five copywriting tips from one of the leading email services vendors.

Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.

Email:      First Name:     
    More info and sample

 via feed | via email | LinkedIn | Facebook

The main website for everything email marketing
Email marketing search engine
Introduction and email advertising basics
Service listings and sources of statistics
Advice on email design and delivery issues

Top 21 email marketing info sources
Outlook 2007 and HTML design
42 HTML email design resources