The Email Wars

David Hallerman, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the just-published report, E-Mail Marketing: How to Improve ROI, says e-mail is still a powerful marketing tool — if used properly.

“Despite the assault e-mail marketing endures from spam and phishing, even with the drag on delivery rates imposed by the filters, and regardless of the sheer e-mail overload in most people’s inboxes, 71% of US online advertisers used e-mail marketing in 2004,” says Mr. Hallerman. “That’s only six points less than the number of respondents using paid search — the current interactive marketing favorite — and 12% of advertisers plan to start e-mail campaigns in 2005.”

See the Charts on what vehicles e-Marketers are Using

See the Charts on Email User Attitudes

Read the Complete Study

Email messages mistaken for spam by filtering software — known as “false positives” in the anti-spam business — have caused four in 10 workers to miss a deadline, according to a survey released this week at a London security conference.

The Infosecurity Europe conference partnered with a US-based vendor of email server and security appliances for the survey, which noted that 42 percent of UK workers said they’d missed a deadline due to an email message gone astray.

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=18663

So yesterday we were able to spend and hour in a “fun” discussion with an ISP Relations Department in a region with a 200K Cable subscriber base. The reason for this call is that they have started a policy of blocking ANY email that looks like marketing. This is what the ISPs in the old days did, unsuccessfully, but not the way they do them today.

Imagine this “scenario” that was explained.

1. You go to buy a ticket on United Airlines. You request an email confirmation of your ticket information.
2. They send it to you
3. Your ISP blocks it as it is “marketing”
4. You don’t get your ticket info, and now need to call United to see why

The ISP says that they don’t care. At least until one of thier customers calls to complain, which they are going to take a long time to do as they think that it is the fault of the Airline.

(more…)

My Initial take on this is no. It seems that we are just starting to scratch the surface of understanding what is “viral” and what is media and pr driven events. Just this past week I saw a Carl’s Jr campaign that started to “go viral” and talked to the team behind it. They were actually surprised that it was getting as much attention as it was. Not saying that they weren’t happy, but sometimes you really can’t control what goes viral.

We know that some campaigns we have either done or seen are built with the intent of spreading the word. Humor, animals and sex sell no matter if in email or on TV. (Is there a difference now?)

Take a look at this article and here his take on this issue. My mind tells me that as marketers we have heard the term “viral” too much. How about changing it to well planned media campaings instead. Not as 1999 buzzworthly, but true.

I don’t know if this is old news or not, but thought I would pass it on.

I just got off the phone with one ISP director and told us that he thinks that SpamCop is a scam because they do not adhere to RFC822 and they live in their own little world. He is a strong advocate against them and has convinced other ISPs to stop using them. Below is a description of RFC822.

Q: Why not allow bounces? They are required by RFC822!
A: Originally, SpamCop made attempts to forgive misdirected bounce messages - to reject them as evidence of spam. However, there are two factors conspiring to force us to rescind this policy. First of course, is that these misdirected messages *are* spam as we define it (Unsolicited Bulk Mail). They are objectionable to recipients and can even cause denial of service to innocent third parties. Users of our blocking service want us to stop them.

Second is that spammers have taken advantage of this policy, disguising their spam as bounce messages in order to avoid SpamCop. If we did not change the policy, this would become a highly popular way to “beat SpamCop”.

Although bounces are required, it is possible to avoid the situation under which they are required (see above). So they aren’t really required unless you have already ‘painted yourself into a corner.’

We’ve never heard an email broadcast firm ‘fess up and say their delivery isn’t all that great. But, all industry insiders know some vendors get notoriously dreadful delivery.

So, we figured you’d be interested in an exclusive look at new study data from delivery “optimization” consultancy eDiagnostix.

How the study worked

The researchers picked six email broadcast firms at random and opted in their own seed email addresses (email accounts set up specifically for tracking incoming mail) at 15 large ISPs including AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Earthlink, and Roadrunner.

The goal was to see which vendor’s own newsletters were actually delivered to the in-box (not junk folder).

Plus the researchers also ran the newsletters through almost a dozen filters commonly used by “client-side” — ie. companies’ IT departments filtering in-coming email. These included Norton, McAfee, Brightmail and SpamAssassin.

(more…)

Although e-mail marketers say their biggest challenge is getting their messages delivered into consumers’ inboxes, more than half, or 54%, say they don’t use e-mail delivery auditing tools to proactively improve results, JupiterResearch says in a recent report.

(more…)

Here is a chart from eMarketer that is interesting. It shows delivery an filtering of legitimate emails by ISP.

View image

Spam is bad. So no spam must be good, right? Wrong.

E-mail has unquestionably changed the way people communicate around the globe. IDC estimates that the number of person-to-person e-mails sent worldwide in 2004 was 7.8 trillion, and projects that the number will reach 10.4 trillion in 2008. But the researcher reports that most people get about almost as many spam messages every day as they get e-mails.

A report in the San Francisco Chronicle stated that as much as 70% of all e-mail, 12 billion messages a day, was spam.

Read the study

Commercial emailers are finding the vast brunt of their messages actually getting through, according to Internet Retailer, with retail and catalog emails seeing deliverability rates hovering around record levels in the last quarter of 2004. The figures, provided by Bigfoot Interactive, show Q4’s deliverability at 94 percent, down just a tad from Q3’s 94.6 percent. Response rates climbed to 4.8 percent in Q4, up from 3.8 percent.

IronPort Bonded Sender Program looks more like a protection racket than solid anti-spam technology

With great fanfare and plenty of headlines, MSN and Hotmail have joined the IronPort Bonded Sender Program, a scheme that requires companies to post a bond before being allowed to send email. The program is rather expensive to get into, putting it far out of the reach of legitimate email marketers, small businesses and non-profits that don’t have deep pockets. The whole thing smacks of an inside job: IronPort’s CEO is a former employee of both Hotmail and MSN, for one thing. It also looks more like a way to extract dollars from businesses rather than really solve the spam problem: money posted by businesses who want to participate goes directly to — guess who? — IronPort.

(more…)

Well from a Study we did with Marketing Sherpa last year, we were happy to see that ET not only tried to DEBUNK our quarterly study (while confirming it) but also went as far to credit us with creating a trend with marketers in the 4th quarter of 2004 (which… surprise… changed the target for the best day of the week.

A big thank you to the ET team for not only verifying us, but also for sharing our name with the industry and your customers in your monthly email.

“Best” day shifted

Email firm ET released a study on the effectiveness of email campaigns relative to the days of the week emails are sent. Several earlier studies suggested that Monday and Tuesday have been the most effective days of the week. But the new study suggests that the best day for opening emails aren’t necessarily the best days for conversions.

Now just who could have such an impact with thier deliverablility studies that so may people responded to to try it out on Mondays and Tuesdays? Hmmmm.

How about eROI?

Read our studies and how marketers listen to our quarterly reports here >>

Or find the most recent one from 4th Quarter 2004 here >>

Email Send Day Studies Prove Self-Influencing

SHOT FIRED OVER THE BOW

A common e-mail marketing misconception is e-mail is filtered because it contains words such as ‘free’ in the subject line or body. By itself, that won’t get your e-mail filtered. Though certain content combinations may get a message filtered, ISPs may be trapping your legitimate e-mail for infractions you rarely pay attention to.

How HTML Code Affects E-Mail Deliverability

54% of e-mail marketers don’t know if their message is being delivered

Although e-mail marketers say their biggest challenge is getting their messages delivered into consumers’ inboxes, more than half, or 54%, say they don’t use e-mail delivery auditing tools to proactively improve results, JupiterResearch says in a recent report.

The report, “Delivery Auditing Tools: Tactics to Improve E-mail Delivery”, says that many marketers rely on post-campaign methods to identify delivery problems, a strategy that does little to proactively determine the likely delivery success of campaigns.

It adds that the rate of non-use of delivery auditing tools rises to 65% among marketers who conduct their campaigns in-house instead of through an outside e-mail services provider.

Read About Email Delivery