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Email Relevance More Than Creative Drives Sales

Marketers using email do not focus enough on relevance, although relevant email messages can lead to sales nearly as often as free, or discounted, shipping offers, according to Jupiter Research.

Roughly one in four marketers launch email campaigns without any targeting or differentiation, and 65 percent use limited personalization and limited segmentation, Jupiter Research VP and research director David Daniels told marketers at the ClickZ Specifics: Email Marketing conference in New York last week, writes ClickZ. Only 11 percent send targeted campaigns using a customer's purchase history, click-stream activity, or other data to send relevant, targeted offers, Daniels is quoted as saying.

The greater the degree of personalization or targeting, the greater the average open, click-through and conversion rates. At the low end of the spectrum, untargeted broadcast emails have, on average, open rates of 20 percent, click-through of 9.5 percent, and conversion of 1.1 percent - compared with, on the opposite end of the spectrum, email campaigns that integrate website click-stream data for targeting, with a 33 percent average open rate, 14 percent click-through rate, and 3.9 percent conversion rate.

Furthermore, a Jupiter survey found that 54 percent of respondents say they have clicked on a link in an email because the product or service interested them; 40 percent, because of the email copy; 35 percent, the subject line; 12 percent, a single large image; and 9 percent, because of several smaller images.

Email Addiction Growing

Email addiction is growing, with no cure in sight, according to eROI's September Email Addiction Survey.

Some 61 percent of survey respondents said they continue to check email even while on vacation, and 56 percent reported a high level of anxiety if they can't access email, Marketing VOX reports. Two out of three people surveyed said they read email every day of the week, 90 percent read email six days a week and 75 percent respond to emails six days a week.

Two-thirds of respondents expect to receive a response from their email the same day. More than 50 percent can't wake up or go to bed without once checking email.

Most resondents - 55 percent - admit that email takes up more time in their life than it should.

Saturday Delivers Highest Open Rate and Click-Throughs

Saturdays had the highest open and click-through rates of any day of the week during the second quarter.

eROI says Saturdays had an e-mail open rate of 38.3 percent, and click-through of 5.4 percent, MediaPost reports. Sundays also had a good open rate at 37.1 percent, while click-throughs reached 5.2 percent for three days - Sunday, Monday, and Thursday. Fridays performed the worst for both open-rates and click-throughs.

When asked which day they would like to receive e-mail, recipients of business messages chose Monday and Tuesday more than any other day of the week. For personal e-mail, the most popular day was Friday - even though Friday performed worst for open and click-throughs - followed by Wednesday.

Unsubscribe Link Only Universally Adopted Email Best Practice

Email marketers have yet to adopt widely accepted best practices -except those required by the CAN-SPAM Act, according to an EmailLabs study (PDF). Inclusion of a working unsubscribe link, required by the CAN-SPAM Act, was the only best practice to be universally adopted.

The company analyzed whether emails incorporated best practices, such as a design that takes into account the preview pane and blocked images, and whether or not they included a link to a profile update, a link to a privacy policy and a forward-to-a-friend button, among others. The top three most widely ignored practices involved including a subscription or administration center, providing a site-search function in the email itself, and including a forward-to-a-friend link.

By industry, travel companies - including airlines, hotels and booking agents - had the highest adoption rates of the 18 best practices considered in the audit, scoring six top ratings and none of the lowest ratings. Financial marketers like credit card companies, mortgage brokers and banks - who rely on trustworthy emails to be delivered to the recipient's inbox - performed the worst of all market segments.

Other adoption trends among the market segments:

-- Travel marketers are increasingly using the subscription link function, allowing customers to easily update their email and personal information.

-- Publishers increasingly optimize their messages for preview panes and blocked images, and incorporate a subscribe link in the email to make it easy for people who've received the original email from a friend to subscribe.

-- The financial services market adopted the least best practices of all the industry segments audited.

Lyris: U.S. Email Deliverability Rates Lag Europe's

Gross deliverability rates of permission-based email marketing messages for European internet and email service providers were better than for U.S. ISPs and ESPs in the first quarter of the year, according to J.L. Halsey subsidiary and email marketing solutions provider Lyris Technologies. European ISPs achieved an impressive 94 percent, while U.S. ISPs' average gross deliverability went down 6 percentage points from the previous quarter, to 86 percent.

U.S. ISPs and ESPs fared even worse in terms of inbox delivery - 82 percent, compared with European inbox delivery rates of 94 percent. The incidence of false-positive spam filtering is also higher in the U.S., with 7.7 percent of valid messages getting blocked, compared with 3.5 percent in Europe.

Lyris also found that users with email addresses with one of the top 10 U.S. providers were 38 percent more likely to receive their opt-in email in their inbox than those who used one of the bottom 10 providers: 97.4 versus 59.4 percent. At 97.1 percent, inbox deliverability for the top 10 European providers was comparable to that of U.S. providers.

False-positive filtering remains high at Gmail and Hotmail. Gmail had reduced its false-positive filtering over the course of 2005, but rates underwent a dramatic increase in Q1, with 44 percent of emails filtered. Hotmail's false positive filtering also increased, from 15.7 in Q4 to 23.4 in Q1.

The term "gross deliverability" refers to the total number of messages delivered to the email inbox and bulk folders, combined, divided by the total number of messages sent. The term "inbox deliverability" refers to the total number of messages delivered specifically to the inbox, divided by the total number of messages sent.

VerticalResponse: Small Email Lists Have High Open Rates

When it comes to email marketing, smaller is better. Retailers' email campaigns using lists of 100 addresses had the highest open rate (38.78 percent) but the third-highest click-through rate (10.67 percent), according to the VerticalResponse Q1 2006 Email Trends Report, Internet Retailer writes (via MarketingVOX). Campaigns using 100,000 addresses had the lowest open rate (14.41 percent) and the second-lowest click-through rate (4.05 percent). Retailers using lists of 250 email addresses had the highest click-through rate (14.7 percent); lists of 1 million produced the lowest rate (3.09 percent).

Don't Piss Off the Customer

Good Email Insider article today that discusses the shift from simple systems centered on the "authentication" of email marketers' IP addresses to an email marketer's "reputation" now being the chief determinant of whether their emails will get through.

My favorite common sense opinion in the article comes from George Bilbrey, general manager of deliverability services for Return Path: "In the end, if you treat your customer right, you'll have a good reputation." And the requirements are pretty simple, he went on: "If you're using authentication and sender ID, and you keep your complaints low and you're not getting spam traffic queries... you'll be okay... Anyone who is using authentication and has developed a good reputation will have their mail delivered."

That about sums it up. We can complicate the issue with other declarations: ask for permission, authenticate, don’t send too many emails, give customers something of value, etc. But here’s the Business 101 point of view: don’t piss off your customers.

AOL Adopts Goodmail, 15 ESPs Follow

Goodmail Systems on Monday announced that 15 major email service providers have agreed to use its email accreditation service after AOL quietly launched Goodmail's CertifiedEmail last week after months of controversy, DM News reports (via MediaBuyerPlanner.com). More are likely to get on the bandwagon since 15 of the 25 major players, such as Epsilon Interactive and ExactTarget, have already signed up.

The ESPs that have signed up to offer Goodmail's CertifiedEmail to their corporate customers include BlueStreak, Acxiom Digital, e-Dialog, Epsilon Interactive, ExactTarget, Exmplar, Harte-Hanks Postfuture, Premiere Global Services, Responsys, Silverpop, SmartDM, TailoredMail, Yesmail, Whatcounts, and Zustek.

Those ESPs account for 50 billion email messages a year, according to John Ouren, SVP of sales and business development for Goodmail. "We've got what we estimate to be 70 percent of the leading full-service providers. And in terms of the top 25, we're in discussions with everyone else," he said.

The CertifiedEmail system consists of two components. First, an accreditation and reputation monitoring service validates that senders are legitimate corporations managing the best opt-in email practices with the lowest consumer complaint rates. Second, approved senders have their messages individually stamped with a unique cryptographically secure token that ensures consumers that the messages are from the represented sender.

Email Summit Wrap-up

Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit in Chicago just wrapped up and the company posted an interesting article on the latest trends marketers were discussing. "After three years of non-stop 'search marketing rocks' focus, seems like the marketing world is taking a second look at its old pal email. And in 2006 email response rates are looking darned good," according to the article.

AOL Blocks CertifiedEmail Critics' Emails

AOL on Thursday apparently began bouncing emails containing the "Dearaol.com" URL - which is for a petition against AOL's controversial certified-email program - according to nonprofit MoveOn.org (as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation), CNET reports (via MarketingVox). Dearaol.com contains an open letter and a petition that calls on people to protest what it calls an "email tax" being imposed by AOL.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said late Thursday that AOL emails containing "Dearaol.com" would be delivered as normal. He said a software glitch had "affected dozens of web links in messages," including Dearaol.com.

That site was set up by a coalition against AOL's adoption of GoodMail's CertifiedEmail, which allows requires marketers to pay in order to circumvent spam filters and ensure delivery of their email messages.