Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server A newfound flaw in Google's Gmail allows would-be spammers to treat the service as an open-relay server. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo "trust" Gmail. This may facilitate e-mail delivery, but it also makes it easier for spammers to reach their intended targets.

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This is just one of the great things that the eec is doing for the not only the non profits out there, but the email industry as a whole. Way to go guys.

How E-mail Impacts Society
This week I wanted to share something inspirational happening in the e-mail industry -- and some best practices! It's a recap of the Email Experience Council's (EEC's) Eality project. The Eality project originated as a way to enable peers and competitors in the e-mail marketing industry to put business aside and work as a team to create the best e-mail efforts for a good cause.

In 2007, the EEC selected the Women's Bean Project (WBP) as its Eality focus. Stephanie Miller from Return Path volunteered countless hours to lead this initiative and its team on behalf of the EEC. I spoke with Miller to get the inside scoop on the project.

Read the whole story

A service that will enable consumers to receive digital receipts through big box stores, such as Best Buy and Target, is set to launch May 16.

I have always loved how Apple stores do this for me and it is about time others do as well. I don't need any more paper receipts crammed in my wallet or pocket. They get lost or thrown away. In the inbox is a great solution. Not sure the "green" factor as some studies I have been reading actually put data use in higher carbon/greenhouse gas levels than commercial airlines by 2010, but it makes sense none the less.

http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9937567-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

My question is have they thought about making this a transaction email marketing opportunity instead of JUST a receipt. If they follow best practices of a 20% use of the email for cross marketing/promotion, they might just drive online or even back to store sales with an offer....

The team is hard at work procuring music, entertainment, booze and maybe the return of the now iconic ice luge. This year it is going to be a little more locked down as we can only hold 700 quests we assume and the fact that we are in Old Town, we need to have some security with all the bars and fun neighbors around.

So IF you did not get the email, you need to get on the list. And not just you, unless you are attending solo, but anyone you want to bring with you. It is going to be a blast and we are really excited to have you over from near and far. So email those that you might know at eROI and get on the list.

Here was the hold the date email that went out, with a little easter egg hidden in the FIVE logo that drives you to a peak of what may occur.

Mashable has a good article around it as well.

What can we do this year as email marketers to make it die a painful death?

1. Stop sending to people that don't want your email. Sure they opted in in 2002, but they have not read it for the past 3 years and you keep them on your active email list. Time to purge them. They are of no value to you and you are of no value to them no matter what you think.

2. Start segmenting your lists and send relevant campaigns based on their profile, what they tell you, and past behaviors.

3. ESPs need to be more vigilante on the lists that their clients load into their systems. Although sometimes tricky when you are bringing a client onto your email platform that you have no history with, you need to set some guidelines, educate them, and keep your eyes on the feedback loops and bounce reports from an account by account level.

Help us all help each other. No one no matter who they are want spam emails. Really.

Often times I see emails with so many things to do, too much copy, and not laid out in a format that is going to display right in the inbox. This layout rocks.

Now to have full disclosure this designer used to work for eROI. So he earned his chops at the school of hard knocks. And it just doesn't hurt as well that this designer is also my younger brother. Nice work Bryan, you make me proud that you stayed awake at eROI U.

Best part about this is his using Twitter as another communication vehicle in the footer. Not over the top, but right in link with his audience of young urban hipsters. Guess the tech addictive measures run in the family as well.

Still time to get your own shirt or limited run hoodie from his new line.

But what is amazing is that the agency they hired to create the brand mark never took the steps to look before presenting it to the client. I really want to know who this agency is and if they will ever get hired again.

Here is the response from our law firm:

"Here's a win for the good guys! I just got off of the phone with Rob Anderson, President of PostNet Canada. He got our letter and wanted to apologize for their use of the "Email ROI" mark. Apparently, their marketing company didn't complete any diligence at all to make sure that no one was already utilizing that name in this space. He said that they will immediately cease all use of the mark."

Thanks Rob for realizing this mistake and taking the high road on this. I know that it is going to be painful to pull all the collateral and other elements that are out in all of your stores already, but hey good news... you guys are in the printing business. I bet you can make more.

So I have made sure not to let you down and set up some posts to keep you engaged during my absence. Hope you enjoy them and I will be back next week in the flesh, although I hope it is tanned and not crispy.

Overall we have been actively blogging since July 1, 2003 which makes it 5 years almost. Long time. We mothballed the two first blogs out there, and moved to this one, EmailDays, and ReturnOnSubscriber. In tribute to this work we are adding 2 more blogs this summer. One from our NYC office and the other from the Creative team at eROI. Should be fun.

We have new designs that are in production for the 3 current blogs and I know you will like them. They are well designed of course and I think will allow you to get more information from our collective noggins.

Thank you for your steady readership as over 1000 of you are reading it almost every day and 1000s of others are jumping in a few times a week. Makes me feel like the time is worth it if I am a good resource for you.

You want to create a product called emailROI and roll out as a new product at the FedEx/Kinkos of Canada (PostNet) called emailROI? Guys, ever thought about doing a Google search let alone trademark search before naming a product that purports to be EXACTLY the same thing? OMG these are some dumb SOBs. Sorry if I am offending the smart Canadians out there but this is insane.

Wait, if you type it with a space (email ROI) instead of as one word (emailROI) it must be completely different... right? I have been sitting on this for a few weeks but still cannot wrap my head around this. Guess sending it over to the lawyers is all we can do now.

Tip: Go to Google, enter desired word or name, see what comes back. Revise product names.

Apr 08, 2008 08:29 ET
Email ROI (Return on Investment)
PostNet (Canada Post's Authorized Business Centre) Launches New Business Product
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - April 8, 2008) -

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=841224
ATTENTION: Business, Technology/Printing, and Marketing Editors

PostNet locations are set to launch Canada's only in-store business support centre email marketing service Email ROI, allowing its clients quick and easy email marketing solutions.

Email marketing in 2006 had the highest return within the communication medium, an averaged $51.45 return on investment (ROI) dollars for each $1 spent (Canadian Marketing Association).

"PostNet has seen a significant increase in small to medium businesses choosing cost effect online marketing in conjunction with traditional direct mail approaches. The demand for PostNet to implement e-marketing was too strong for us not to move forward," says Rob Anderson, President of PostNet Canada.

Email ROI promises to offer small to medium sized business owners a wide variety of cutting edge full & self-serve online marketing solutions that will help entrepreneurs take charge of their email marketing and communication efforts from start to finish.

Email ROI changes the way e-business is done.

Email ROI is unparalleled in its appeal to consumers by literally cutting costs of printed materials, postage and time. Through Email ROI, business owners can directly maximize their online marketing initiatives - from organizing, managing and growing your lists; to customizing messaging and deployment (98 per cent delivery rate); to measuring recipient response through unique Email ROI open rate statistics and click analysis; to studying audience reaction and fine-tuning positioning to better suit their needs.

The addition of Email ROI not only provides PostNet customers with tailored e-marketing campaigns but also re-affirms PostNet as Canada's boutique business solution centre.

About PostNet
PostNet is the ultimate business support centre. The company has grown to more than 900 franchises throughout North America and abroad and is working towards a goal of 1,500 global franchises within three to five years.

For more information, visit www.postnet.ca.

So here is a good example of what Corbis did to reach out to me. Does not hurt that it is pretty to boot.

Someone was asking about problems with Yahoo yesterday. I use Yahoo Classic for my personal emails and I noticed yesterday and today that it's making emails that I haven't opened as read. If I mark those as unread, it then marks other unread emails as read. So perhaps there's not a deliverability issue but one with open and click rates because subscribers are not reading messages because Yahoo is telling them that they've already looked at the emails. Anyone else seeing this?
------------

I'm seeing similar problems in the new version of Yahoo Mail. Over the past week, in my personal account:

Previously read & deleted emails have returned to my inbox as unread
The inbox has failed to load & generated JavaScript errors
Individual messages have been failing to load, generating internal Yahoo error messages to try again

It seems as if they may be doing some behind-the-scenes work that's negatively impacting the user experience--and, in some cases, making select messages unreadable for a period of time.

Why is this important? Well you have 10,000 things you are doing this week. Blogging could be one of them. Most likely adding content to your site is the primary task in most cases as static web sites do not bring your customers and prospects back to you. So instead of copying and pasting to create another email that would be using content you have already spent time placing on your site or blog, we give you our system that automatically grabs the content, builds the HTML and Text versions, and then lets you know when it is ready to go at the pre-defined time you set. Simple? You bet it is. And effective. Instead of rushing to put together a campaign, you can sit back and let the campaign build itself from your content fed by RSS.

I can tell you that it is a time saver for many organizations that are eROI clients.

And take a look at how nice it comes out. On brand, relevant, timely, and we throw in an RSS feed from that campaign to boot if you have folks that subscribe to newsletters by RSS.

It seems to me that the email marketing blogger community is not reflective of this study. Maybe we are all just above average?

Gender seems to be evenly reflected.
I would go out on a limb and state that many are around the age found in this study as well.

Tamara Gielen
Chad White
Denise Cox
DJ Waldow
Kath Pay
Alex Williams
Loren McDonald
Anna Billstrom
Jeff Mills
Kelly Rusk
Stefan Pollard
Janine Popick
Jeanniey Mullen
Stephanie Miller
Mark Brownlow
Lisa Harmon

The Study: What's A Blogger?

Bloggers are younger and higher percentages are Hispanic & African American than the general population. A higher percentage of Democrats than of Republicans are blogging.

Now that Blogging might better be called a market segment rather than a market niche, it's useful with regard to positioning the marketing message to understand what a Blogger looks like, as distinguished from the rest of the population. According to the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey, 26% of all adults say they regularly or occasionally blog.

Of those:
53.7% are male
44.7% are married
28.4% hold a professional or managerial position
10.4% are students.

Bloggers tend to be younger, averaging 37.6 years old, compared to 44.8 for adults 18+ (the "general population"). Ethnically:

69.7% of Bloggers are White/Caucasian (vs. 76.1%)
12.2% are African American/Black (vs. 11.4%)
3.7% are Asian (vs. 2.0%)
20% of Bloggers are Hispanic, compared to 14.8% of adults 18+

In addition, Bloggers report a lower income ($55,819 vs. $56,811) and are better educated (14.3 years of education vs. 14.2).

Although Bloggers are more likely to use new media, the analysis finds that more conventional forms of media trigger their Internet searches. Magazines, at 51.6%, rank highest, followed by:

48.8% reading an article
46.1% broadcast TV
44.5% cable TV
42.5% face-to-face communication
39.7% newspaper

Gary Drenik, President of BIGresearch, concludes "Bloggers are a diverse group and not who you would expect..."

Do you have some blogs I should be reading? Share them with me.

You can get the whole PDF in our resources section (Quarterly Studies tab)/ but the call outs below are not in the PDF.

High Level Thoughts:
- Email marketers are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should. Email, search, DM, Print, Call Centers, and sales teams need to get on the same page.

- Email marketers are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates. Are they counting on the ESP to do it? Many ESPs like eROI do this, but some do not. Does yours? Or does your program if you run it in house?

- The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted. There are so many opportunities to be testing the thank you page with Progressive Profiling and offers. As well as setting expectations.

- Not surveying subscribers at opt out. Remember high school when someone wanted to break up? Didn't you ask WHY are you leaving? This still holds true. Exit surveys are key to finding out why you have churn.

- Not allowing frequency changes. Subscribers should have access to change preferences of frequency just like they can manage a profile with your programs. Do they want to hear from you monthly, weekly, daily, as things that are important to them change? Listen before you speak.

Opting-in- the cradle
When obtaining permission to send out emails, only about 30% of email marketers use a confirmed opt-in method, where a confirmation e-mail including an activation web link (or requiring a reply email) is sent to verify the subscriber. This number has grown quite a bit over the years, but is still well below where the industryshould be. confirmed opt-in helps ensure quality of the email list by requiring an action by the user to begin receiving emails. about 75% of email marketers provide only a small number of ways for subscribers to opt-in (one to three), whereas about 4% have more than 10 ways for subscribers to opt-in.

This story got picked up by ClickZ last friday which we appreciate.