The Email Wars

I know that most of you are one of these “Tethered Workers”. Don’t be ashamed, as I am not better than any of you. We can form a 12 step group for internet addicted people. I bet in 10 minutes we could have a support group of hundreds of millions. 

Do you think that if 50% do work email, what is the percentage of people that are checking personal email? Now once you digest this, think about how your campaigns can be targeted to these type of workers based on time of day, day of week, and by the type of behavioral interactions they have on the weekends. 

Below is a snippet from the study found here in full.

Tethered to Email

Some 22 percent of employed email users say they are expected to read and respond to work-related emails, even when they are not at work. Blackberry and PDA owners are more than twice as likely to report that their employer expects that they will stay tuned in to email outside of the office. Fully 48 percent say they are required to read and respond to email when they are away from work.

50 percent of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends.

22 percent of employed email users say they check their work email accounts “often” during weekend hours, compared with 16 percent who reported the same in 2002.

46 percent of employed email users say they check email when they have to take a sick day; 25 percent say they do so “often.”

34 percent of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email while on vacation; 11 percent say they do so “often.”

“Email is still the primary artery of workplace communications in many professions, and it has clearly started to spill over into personal life,” said Sydney Jones, coauthor and research assistant for the Pew Internet Project. “Over time, workers have become more likely to check their email outside of normal working hours, and many are expected to do so by their employer.”

Read the full study here.

Fingerprint just finished writing their first email client market share report. It’s the biggest study of email client usage ever conducted, using a sample of almost three million email recipients.

It’s exciting for them because it’s the first time they’ve released any of the data that’s been collected through Fingerprint. It shows the top 10 email clients in use for both consumer and business mailing lists.

I have been working on deploying it for our own newsletters (have you subscribed yet?), and will share OUR results soon.

Business Email Client Use from Study: 

Read the full report

Consumer Email Client Use from Study:

The EEC and Chad White have published their Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season. Worth a read if you are in the consumer markets or have campaigns that will touch people during the holidays.

Executive Summary:

Long before retailers hang any wreaths or tinsel in their stores, they send out emails promoting their Christmas deals to their subscribers—lots of emails! Last year the Email Experience Council tracked more than 3,300 emails from more than 100 top online retailers during the fourth quarter and released daily reports on strategies, tactics and trends via the Retail Email Blog. Based on that monitoring, the eec has produced this helpful roadmap to the email holiday season so retailers and other B2C companies can better formulate their campaigns this year.

This guide includes benchmarks and advice on when to begin your campaign, how much to increase your email volume, which days to send on, and how to stand out in the inbox during the holidays. For instance, last year 88% of major online retailers increased their email volume during the holiday season, with retailers boosting their send volumes by 45% on average.

It also discusses and provides examples of the “16 Phases of Christmas,” the 16 strategies that retailers use at different points in the holiday season. Those strategies include promoting e-gift cards and “buy online, pick up in store” services.

Check it out and get the Guide >>

Do you ever stop and pause to think about how much time YOU spend on managing your email inbox? I know that I deal with between 300 and 600 emails a day. Yikes that is a scary number. Sure many of these are junk and ones that do not require any action on my part, but let’s turn the lens on our subscribers. Just how much time does the average consumer spend on managing, processing and reading email? 

As I do not have any hard figures around this number as it exists today I took a look at a program I use that measures what applications I use on my laptop on a daily and weekly basis. Scarily enough over 40% of my time each week is spent in and around the inbox. Wow I need an intervention. 

So what about the subscribers that we are all trying to target better, be more relevant to, and grab the brand mindshare of our products and services? Do they have time? And if they do are your messages standing out during the barrage of daily email triage that they are waging as well? I think taking this into consideration might help you to think more about how, when and what you are sending. Think in terms of your subscribers and not your programs. 

Now I am sure that most of them are not like us. But many of them have their own lives, jobs and issues to deal with. So one campaign is not going to make you hit your goals. But dropping campaigns over time (I like the number 3 for a messaging metric myself) with a few touches that are relevant based on behavior might make the difference in this busy environment. 

Funny but back in the day we named the company that is now an interactive marketing agency eROI, emailROI as this was our first product. Did you know how we came up with the name? Well it was a tag line based on the French word “le roi” meaning the KING with the whole ROI thing out there. We knew back then that email marketing is king and not going to be dethroned no matter what was next out there. 

Over and over again people have tried to attack email in hopes of shifting people to the next “trend” in communications. Let me tell you this, email is not a trend, unless you consider the chart released from Social Media company ShareThis that only shows it as the leader in communication percentages. So if being a leader is a trend… sign me up to drink the punch. 

CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL CHART LARGER

Read the whole study at the ShareThis Blog

Return Path’s Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

Return Path recently released its  Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Here is George Bilbrey’s high level take on what they found:

Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were legitimate, well-configured, static email servers. It’s important to point out that this doesn’t speak at all to the quality of the messages from those servers - lots of horrible spammers know how to configure a mail server. The other 80% of the mail is coming from servers that are either identifiably bad or unidentifiable and probably bad. No wonder ISPs and other large receivers feel besieged. 

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I found an interesting string about Gmail possibly getting a Trends system for analyzing your email similar to the Google Reader system. It has legs to be an interesting tool that not only users but email marketers might find a good use for. With so many email software systems I have seen falling short of being able to paint the full picture of your campaign history in order for you to easily find the trends of your campaigns (best day of the week to email, when you typically send email, when you email arrives at the inbox etc), this might be something others could use for email campaign strategy and analysis.

Imagine if you could harness the power of Gmail to start campaign frequency analysis of your campaigns, those of you competition or any other trend you are tracking. Seems from the post that it might be possible to do yourself now using the Google gmail IMAP structure. Now I am fairly smart, but I think that this might be beyond my skill set. 

Read the full post on RWW

Here it is… another great survey on email marketing and email marketer from eROI. Now this one is juicy as well as good looking. I know I am a little biased, but I love the design work our team is doing. Also be on the look for new case studies coming out on Email Design, Campaign Sites, Publishing Client Campaigns, and new methods of email marketing that are delivering ROI in social media.

Here is what you will get in the new study:

We examine all the elements of a great email, and show where email marketers are hitting (and missing) opportunities to increase deliverability, opens, clicks and conversions. We uncover rising trends and current opportunities. How do your email marketing campaigns need to evolve to take advantage?

Download our presentation of the full results!

When Do You Check Your E-Mail?

I might not be like you and you might not be like me. I know two people that actually wake up, roll over and the first thing that they do is scroll through the blackberry. Sick? Maybe. But it is their routine. Personally I check mine before I head out the door to work, look for breaking news or fires that might have sprung up overnight, and then drive in to work… where I will check continuously throughout the day. 

I will also be driving, yes hate me but I swear I have a 3rd eye in the middle of my forehead, and at stop lights and check emails then. I need to stop that behavior. But really where do you check email that is odd or where do you check it that is normal? Do we know best times of day when people are showing that they are ADDICTS?

Do we care? As it seems that people are checking email everywhere and at all times of day and night. Even from places like the bathroom and in locations that they might have not reported. 

Is this a sickness? Do we all need to chill out a little bit as addicts? Or should we embrace it as email marketers (aka dealers) and sling them what they want when they want it?

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Daily Search Engine Users Closing in On Email Users

(NOTE: I am blogging this for you in the back of a cab after a red eye, on the drive into Manhattan for meetings. Not easy)

According to a recently released PEW Internet study, the percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of 49%. The number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email on a typical day.

Underscoring the dramatic increase over time, the percentage of internet users who search on a typical day grew 69% from 2002 to May 2008. During the same six-year time period, the use of email on a typical day rose from 52% to 60%, for a growth rate of just 15%.

Get the Pew Study PDF here

Read the rest of this article here at Mediapost

That’s right boys and girls… a new Email Marketing Guide in the Resources center @eROI. And not just one… but 3 new guides. And hold tight… wait for it… wait for it… wait for it… now - Look next week for the RESULTS of our latest email study there as well. 

I know you say this is TOO good to be true, like the Flowbee or the GoateeSaver, but it is not it is 4 for the price of 1 visit. I know these guys at eROI really go above and beyond to think about what is working in email marketing and how to share this knowledge with the world. One would think that they are a 3000 strong global force of Ninjas and Revolutionaries (we are but less that 60 with 2 offices) but alas we just like to make you smarter to do your job better. 

Now if we share like this with everyone can you JUST imagine what we share with our clients and customers? I would wager that some AWESOME ideas come out of here and some campaigns that rock. 

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Just a little email marketing food for thought that I saw last week from David Daniels, Vice President JupiterResearch (Dec. 2007).
274: Average number of personal emails weekly.
304: Average number of business emails weekly.
26%: Opt-in email campaigns as percentage of total inbox email.
74%: Email users with 2 email accounts.

These are some good numbers to get your head around. Look at how many business and personal emails we are dealing with each and every week. And then think about you are working against close to 600 other emails on average for the attention and the midshare of your subscribers. So you better make them impactful, relevant and worth our time.

The funny thing is that on average the typical person has 2 inboxes. One work and one personal. Now this is the typical number we have, but I would wager than many of you have even more than this. This is because we are not average. So stop thinking about what you would do or where you would read your emails. We are not marketing to the abnormal person, or are we? The answer to this really depends on who you are marketing to. Mothers (maybe 2), blue collar (maybe one), tech heads (maybe 4-5). But my point here is to think like them. Understand who your market is and act accordingly.

“For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Ill., the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (S.P.A.M.) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool’s Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants. She told her story to Network World.”

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/070108-mcafee-spam-experiment.html?hpg1=bn

I have been reading over this study a few times now. It is well done and yet totally confounds my sense of thinking around keeping it short, driving home the point, telling me what to do, and being relevant. So if you have not read it yet it is the Alchemy Worx study that is reporting longer subject lines have a great impact on read to click as opposed to shorter subject lines that are just read…

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Email Preferred Communicator by Consumers For Business Dealing
According to the 2008 study of consumer attitudes towards email and online interaction with businesses, completed in May 2008 by research firm Ipsos for Habeas, Inc., 67% of consumers prefer email as a primary method of communications in their personal and business capacities, and 65% will continue to prefer email in the future despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communication channels and Web 2.0 applications.

http://blogs.mediapost.com/research_brief/?p=1720