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September 30, 2005
Is this a new Weapon?
Today a new service was launched in the UK that is using the term "reverse search". This is a very interesting idea, as we met with a US based company that was looking to get into this a few months back. It is the idea of a customized page that you can build an advertiser portal that can target you. Not too different from adwords, but enough to stand out.
Basically you can create a profile and post things that you are looking to buy or interested in, advertisers can then buy in to target you based on your personal profile. Think of it as an eBay, Craigslist, Google Adwords Mashup.
Good idea and already 120K subscribers in the first few days in the UK. But what really makes this different from opt in or affliate co-registations? The verdict is still out.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 11:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 29, 2005
New Alert in MSN for Sender ID
I noticed this AM a new yellow bar in my MSN account that shows if an email is not sender ID complaint. Altough this email came straight to my inbox, once opened, it flagged a yellow bar at the top letting me know that it might be one not to be trusted.
The funny thing about this is that this was an email sent to my msn.com address from my msn.com email address. So is msn.com not sender ID compliant itself? We will watch and see.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 28, 2005
Office 2003 SP2 cans spam
Could this be the end of Spam and a signal to the end of the WAR? I doubt it, just another system of blocks and tackles. But as an email marketer, you should be aware that your data can skew if people are not loading tracking images.
Only hours after Sun Microsystems Inc. released the newest version of its StarOffice desktop productivity suite, Microsoft posted an update to its own Office desktop software.
Microsoft's Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was posted on Tuesday. It adds an improvement to Outlook that helps prevent phishing, as well as improved handling of spam, Microsoft said. Junk e-mail is now rendered as plain text and links are disabled within the message.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 27, 2005
Gmail Listed by SpamCop
So Google talks about if you sign up for gmail, you get less spam. Well what about when multuple gmail IPs show up in SpamCop as blocked IPs. Do you get less of you own mail delivered? And how can SpamCop block and ISP like Google? This IP and others, have been flagged for days and are listed as the top sending IP addresses.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
If you state Less Spam, do you Deliver?
I love this. They are promoting that they can control spam more than others. I have used gmail since the BETA and I do get less spam than with MSN and Yahoo, but that might be because it is only used for select opt in marketing lists and not to sign up for anything else.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 26, 2005
How Much Time do We Spend Reading Email?
Interesting Study posted today by emarketer.com. It shows just how many hours a day the US population spends reading email. I know from those in the business world I interact with and work with that this must be a Higher number.
In the consumer world I would expect that time per day would be 1-2 hours at most for personal and transactional emails.
How much time do you spend reading email?
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 25, 2005
Sneak Attacks on the Increase
Report: Can Spam Compliance Down In August
JUST 3 PERCENT OF MARKETERS who sent unsolicited e-mails in August appeared to be complying with the federal Can-Spam law--down from 4 percent in the first seven months of the year, according to report issued last week by MX Logic. Those numbers are based on a random sample of 10,000 unsolicited e-mails a week. To determine whether a message satisfies the requirements of Can-Spam, MX Logic assesses the subject line, whether there's a way to unsubscribe, and whether e-mails relating to pornography are tagged with the phrase "sexually explicit" in the subject line.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 23, 2005
Our Radio Communication is Blocked
We are growing our client's use of SMS opt in messaging. It is a great medium to target people on the go and the lower age demographic. Here are some challenges we expect to see grow.
Court: Federal Law Bans Text-Message Spam
An Arizona appeals court has ruled a 1991 federal law blocking autodialers from calling cell phones applies to unsolicited ads sent as text messages.
An Arizona court has ruled that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which bans junk faxes and unsolicited telemarketing calls to cell phones, also applies to unsolicited text message advertisements sent to cell phone users.
Read the Full article at: http://news.designtechnica.com/article8364.html
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 22, 2005
Flank, Over Run or the End Around? I think I will use the Bomb.
Email Marketing Tactics - From Part of this article is taken from Email Insider on Sept. 12 on MediaPost.com (by David Baker from Agency.com). He does a GREAT Job and we thank him for providing GREAT content. You shouldsubscribe to Email Insider at Mediapost.com for all the great weekly coverage and insight.
Both our clients and eROI lives and dies by metrics. We both measure the success of e-mail programs by metrics, and justify budgets based on these very sensitive variables, yet should they all be looked at the same way?
We are huge proponents of domain modeling - that is, modeling behavior by the recipient's e-mail domain (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com). There are good reasons for this strategy. Consumers are becoming more advanced in their online behavior with broadband - they process things faster, and they have multiple e-mail accounts (2.7 on average, not sure what the .7 is actually for) and typically have different e-mail personas (work, personal, catch all for signups online). Add to that the fact that each ISP's interface is littered with obstacles to gaining a measured response (view or click); image blocking, filtering, and preview methods.
So, if they all represent different challenges, why should we look at them all the same way? E-mail clients are not all created equal, like browsers--and it's not as easy as disabling a pop-up blocker. Here are a few ISPs and basic descriptions of these obstacles.
America Online represents over 20 million subscribers, with the majority using version 8.0 or higher. AOL can represent almost 20 to 30 percent of consumer e-mail databases. In default mode, AOL will only render roughly a 350x350 pixel view before users have to maximize their screen. On top of that, image blocking is a standard setting - unless you are a trusted sender or part of the receiver's address book. If you are unlucky enough to get filtered to the spam folder, image blocking and links are disabled, and recipients must click on "Show Images" at the top of the window. Realistically, it could take up to two clicks (one to open the message and one to show images) before you even get a measured "open," and three to four clicks to get a measured click. Unlike Outlook and GMail environments, where the alt tags can give you a description of the image or link in the absence of images, AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail/MSN do not allow the viewing of alt tags, rather they render blank or grey areas.
Yahoo! now boasts 60 million e-mail accounts. While Yahoo! does not apply image blocking as a default mechanism, if turned on it can pose a problem for the marketer. A receiver will have to scroll to the very bottom of the screen to click on the "show HTML" link. Additionally, rather than the 350 x 350 view of AOL, Yahoo! will give you a full horizontal view (roughly up to 600-700 pixels wide), but will only give you roughly 200 pixels vertical. This means that a receiver will only see a small portion of the header before they have click to max.
Hotmail/MSN represents roughly 120 million e-mail accounts, according to the last report we saw. This environment represents another type of challenge. Not only does it support image blocking in the inbox for non-white-listed senders; if filtered to Junk Mail, the receiver will need to click on the "this is not junk" button and then work through a series of windows to recognize the sender--then go back in and re-open the mail in the inbox, or they can click on "Enable all message content."
Now are you beginning to see why e-mail providers stress the importance of getting into the inbox unfiltered? To gain a measured response from a non-white-listed consumer with call to actions below 200 pixels, you could potentially have up to four different actions needed and gain a measured response. So, does that one click tell it all? Our approach is to put a weighted value on views (opens) and clicks by domains. Take this along with close monitoring of share of clicks/views by domain, and you'll begin to understand what is really happening and the level of loyalty of your e-mail audience by the environment in which they interact with your brand.
If all these environments are so different, why do we put equal value on response metrics? Continually challenge the value of your metrics, your approaches, and how you put value on response.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 20, 2005
Let's Show Our Weak Side
What pains me about this article is that is really makes it look like email is such a hard to manage and costly effort for IT Teams, that outsourcing it helps them out. I think that this is something odd as we are now over complicating email and setting up so many rules, filters and systems (which are quickly overcome by actual spammers) that they aren't even getting legitimate email from customers and partners. They are building a wall that is preventing them from truly using one of the most powerful communications tools created to date.
Read the Full Story: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003587
Outsourcing E-Mail
Driven by security fears and deliverability woes, more companies are expected to outsource their e-mail services, according to a Radicati report on hosted e-mail.
Radicati estimates there are currently 856 million hosted e-mail accounts, and projects that that number will top 1.4 billion by 2009.
Currently, 69% of all e-mail accounts around the world are outsourced. The majority, at 64%, are ISP/Web mails.
In the business arena, the type of companies using hosted e-mail solutions is set to change, Radicati said. While 64% of the "hosted business e-mail" users are small businesses, a greater percentage of medium and large businesses are investigating and deploying hosted e-mail solutions.
Faced with the growing complexity and rising costs of maintaining e-mail internally, the lucrative "mid-market" of 500 to 5,000 employee organizations represents a key opportunity for hosted e-mail providers, Radicati said. These customers are often frustrated with managing security concerns on their own, as well as responding to growing requirements for e-mail archiving and regulatory compliance.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:14 PM | Permalink
September 19, 2005
Can You see the whole Battlefield?
REMEMBER THE GRAND VISION OF developing one-to-one business-to-business communications, and leveraging e-mail to reach senior executives in corporate America? I do, and I also recall many of the approaches B-to-B marketers have tried. The vision looked great on paper -- until companies ran into the Great Wall of Administrators and Filtering Systems.
Let's take a look at several barriers and see what advances have been made in the world of B-to-B deliverability services, starting with a look at the filtering that exists today.
First, there's the corporate spam filter. According to Michelle Eichner, chief operating officer and vice president of Pivotal Veracity, "Many organizations outsource their spam and virus filtering to companies such as Postini, MessageLabs and Brightmail, because of their ability to provide a powerful combination of content management and sophisticated content analysis to block viruses, spam, phishing, IM worms, directory harvest attacks and other e-mail and IM threats." The other major barrier to be aware of is blacklisting, a service handled by reputation firms like SpamCop. Essentially, these companies collect unwanted e-mails and complaints, and build a list that companies can access and add to their filter rules.
But let's not forget about the ultimate contextual filtering device -- the administrator who scans an executive's e-mails and deletes all irrelevant messages. Remember the days when administrators even answered the e-mail for executives? I wonder if this is still happening, or whether these elusive executives have learned to be more efficient! The bottom line is that your approach to designing programs should take filtering into consideration.
Beside filtering, there's another issue: monitoring whether your e-mail got there safely. While some companies focus on business-to-consumer deliverability and monitoring services, I know of only one that specifically focuses on B-to-B and international monitoring -- Pivotal Veracity. Essentially, this type of service seeds the vast majority of middle-market and larger mail servers hosted for business (much as they do for B-to-C ISPs like AOL, Yahoo! and MSN). By using monitoring services that alert you if your IP address has been blacklisted, or if Postini, Brightmail or MessageLabs has picked you up, you can be much more proactive in resolving these issues.
One client I have on this service recently found an issue with a major bank -- a 70 percent bounce rate. We couldn't seem to get the attention of the company's IT team to deal with the problem. Our approach was to "end around" it by working with the sales department (the actual target of the e-mail) to get our IP address and domain trusted again. Again, we wouldn't have known about this issue at all if we hadn't monitored the domains for bounces.
The problem with B-to-B filtering in general is that its standards tends to be ambiguous, or, at best, ad hoc. So if you were added to a blacklist at some point and a company hasn't updated its filters recently, you could be blocked arbitrarily and not know it.
Here are a few helpful tips that Eichner passed on:
1) Before you send an e-mail blast, score your e-mails to detect any elements that might cause delivery issues.
2) Check your HTML against the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, and verify that you're sending compliant HTML.
3) See how your e-mails render in B-to-B e-mail cients such as Lotus Notes, Eudora and Outlook. Services like eDesign Optimizer will allow you to see how your e-mails render across 15 major e-mail clients.
4) Check to make sure your company's IP addresses are not listed in the major blacklists
5) Review your bounce notices to determine if there are patterns in why your e-mails are not being delivered.
6) Monitor your domain, brand and company names to ensure they are not being discussed on major abuse boards.
If your marketing is dependent on e-mail as a lifeline to your customers in a business environment, it pays to consider these new options to support you.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 9:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBack
September 15, 2005
E-mail Open Rates Decline, Conversions Increase
This is good news in light of the many traps and blocks being established across the ISP world. So the reads are tracking downward this past quarter for thier clients, but conversions are up. What this means is that list hygeine should be the top priority for any company. Making sure to measure your lists and clean them regularly for bad performing email addresses is key. GET rid of the trash and move to those that want to hear from you.
Create 2 lists, one for reads and conversions and the other for everyone else.
TWO KEY E-MAIL METRICS--OPEN RATES and click-through rates--both declined in the second quarter, according to data DoubleClick released on Tuesday. Open rates in the second three months of the year dropped to 27.5 percent from 36 percent a year ago, while click-through rates dropped to 7.2 percent from 7.7 percent in the second quarter of 2004, according to DoubleClick's numbers.
Kevin Mabley, DoubleClick's vice president of account management and strategic service, attributes the decreased open rates largely to new image-blocking measures put in place by e-mail clients and ISPs, which can both prevent e-mails from being read.
Moreover, he said, the "maturation," or the amount of time an e-mail list has been growing, also contributes to low open rates. "Regularly, when we analyze consumer data files, newer people are the most responsive early on, but as those people become a smaller percentage of your file, that has downward pressure on open rates as well," he said.
Despite the lower open and click-through rates, conversions and orders per e-mail are up--a fact that DoubleClick says mitigates and even overrides the drop in consumer attention. The study, which looked at purchasing and open-rate data obtained through DoubleClick's DARTmail product, found that conversion rates rose to 4.6 percent in the second quarter--a 27.8 percent increase from last year. Orders per e-mail delivered rose to 0.26 percent--an 18.2 percent uptick from the second quarter of 2004.
According to Mabley, these increases in conversions and order rates more than override the decreased open and click-through rates. "The fact that those rates are going up, even in spite of the fact that open rates have declined, sort of underscores the strength of e-mail marketing," he said.
"We have seen open rates declining for several quarters and we knew that that it was in part as a result of image blocking by ISPs and Outlook. What this in-depth review shows is that it isn't one individual factor that is putting pressure on open rates but a combination of forces, and with this insight we can help marketers to better analyze and target their emails to various list segments," says Kevin Mabley, VP of account management and strategic services, DoubleClick Email Solutions.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 5:00 PM | Permalink
September 14, 2005
Delivery Dilema
Many marketers are starting to understand just how important delivery is when using email as a vehicle. With the flood of spam blocking and filtering systems on the consumer and corporate markets, we are actually seeing more false positives and bouncing of legitimate emails sent from opt in lists.
So if all of these marketers know there is a problem and a challenge.. what actions will they take to turn the tide. I assume most of them will not take any actions, but complain that something needs to be done. In reality if you are to employ the best practices like senderID, Domain Keys, Whitelisted IPs, double opt in, sending from the same address each time, working to segment lists based on past behavoirs, etc, they would see much better results. But alas, all of this takes time and every marketer seems to have a lack of time.
Delivery Dilemma
Forget about subject lines, creative executions and test offers. The thing that concerns e-mail marketers most is deliverability. Will the message get through?
In a survey of its customers, Socketware, a provider of e-mail solutions, found that 84% of the companies polled had increased the volume of e-mail marketing campaigns over the past year.
"Companies are recognizing e-mail as a fundamental piece of their overall marketing strategy," said Michael Pridemore, CEO of Socketware.
But there is a problem.
The survey also found that 68% of respondents were worried about e-mail deliverability issues. Concerns about e-mail filters and ISP blocking topped the list.
The concern over deliverability was also expressed earlier this year in a JupiterResearch survey, which found that the problem represented the number one challenge to e-mail marketers.
In fact, fully one-quarter of US marketers believe that 15% or more of their e-mails never reach recipients because the messages are interpreted as spam, according to a MarketingProfs.com survey.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:27 PM | Permalink
September 7, 2005
E-mails From the Eye of the Hurricane
A Great Email from Bill that just needed to be shared. Email is important.
From Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, September 7, 2005
WHEN OUR CURRENT E-MAIL AND Internet system was being developed during the darkest days of the Cold War, it was designed to allow communications to flow freely in case of disaster. Never has the need for open, free, and unfettered communication been made more evident than the events of the last week.
I spoke with Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, who filled me on just how important e-mail has been in allowing victims, their families, and those that want to help communicate with each other.
CNN.com's public information group set up a team of volunteers (staff and their families and friends) to answer a deluge of e-mails and phone calls from the public. They set up a special hurricanevictims@cnn.com e-mail address and personally responded to over 7,000 e-mails. Of those, approximately 4,000 needed information on how to search for or register their missing loved ones and approximately 3,000 came from those asking how they could help.
CNN.com set up a special "Safe List" on their site where people who e-mailed in could post that they were safe for their family and friends. Currently over 1,000 people are on the list.
According to Mitch, the e-mails were sorted into different groups:
1. Safe. These were e-mails from people announcing they were out of harms way. Some of the subject lines Mitch read to me were "Safe, but looking..." and "Okay in Ark."
2. Missing: The group of heartbreaking e-mails from people looking for loved ones: "Help me find my kids," "Can't find Mom," "Looking for you," and just plain, "Help."
3. Leads: These were e-mails from folks trying to provide information. In one e-mail a woman said that she saw a TV interview of someone named Shela who was looking for her sister. The woman said she was working as a volunteer and talked to a woman who was missing a sister named Shela and could they be the same?
4. Solutions: These included e-mails from people offering to open up their homes, and ideas on how best to help the refugees, including posting pictures at shelters of the missing and found.
From a coverage standpoint, e-mail was essential in staying in touch with correspondents in the field who often sent their stories in from their Blackberrys. In addition, CNN.com quadrupled the usual number of e-mail news alerts last week to over 2.3 million people.
CNN did special television cut-ins based on some of the e-mails that came in from viewers. In one instance, news anchor Carol Lin was able to reunite a family with their baby based on one e-mail tip.
For all our gnashing of teeth about spam and the problem of e-mail marketing, it is important to realize just why the e-mail system was created and the importance it brings to our lives. Unfettered e-mail communications is sometimes a matter of life and death and the reunion of mother and child.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 10:08 PM | Permalink
September 6, 2005
Don't Kill the Messenger
Deliverability: Are Your Email Messages Trusted?
Deliverability is overwhelmingly the greatest email marketing challenge. What can you do to make sure your marketing campaigns avoid the obstacles and get delivered for the highest possible ROI?
The major obstacles to email deliverability are lack of consumer trust in email, ISP blocking and emerging authentication standards. Consumer trust in email is under assault on two fronts:
1) Trustworthiness: Can I trust that this email is coming from whom it claims to be coming from?
2) Reliability: Can email be relied upon to deliver the communications I want, need and expect to receive?
How can we make email safe and trusted again?
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 4:23 PM | Permalink
September 1, 2005
If this is #1, what is #2?
What a headline: "E-Mailers Call Deliverability No. 1 Problem". I think that if this is your number one problem then you must have some good campaigns in place. I guess that campaign conversion, planning, tracking and execution are all completely understood now and no one needs any help here. I would actually think that if you can't get better at the planning and metrics, then who the hell cares if it actually gets sent or even delivered.
E-Mailers Call Deliverability No. 1 Problem
E-mail deliverability has become the top concern of e-mail marketers, according to a survey released yesterday by Socketware Inc. at its annual client conference in Atlanta.
Last year, 28 percent of customers using Socketware's Accucast e-mail marketing solution cited deliverability as their top concern. That figure jumped to 68 percent this year.
"With constantly changing ISP regulations and new filtering products entering the market every day, ensuring inbox delivery can be a daunting task," Socketware CEO Michael Pridemore said.
More than 100 clients were polled, saying that their greatest challenge is having their messages perceived as spam. Still, 84 percent said they increased their use of e-mail marketing campaigns during the past year.
"Companies are recognizing e-mail as a fundamental piece of their overall marketing strategy," Pridemore said.
Comments (0) | Posted by dylan at 7:09 PM | Permalink
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