Emailhead

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.

Lyris: Email False Positives Still High for Big ESPs

False-positive filtering (emails incorrectly identified as spam) remains high among leading email service providers (ESPs), including Hotmail and Gmail.

The false-positive filtering rate for Gmail nevertheless improved dramatically in the second quarter, with only 2.97 percent of emails falsely identified as spam, compared with the previous quarter's 44 percent, according to a study (pdf) by email marketing solutions provider Lyris Technologies, MarketingVox reports. However, Hotmail's false-positive filtering, though improving, remains high - 18.2 percent in Q2, compared with 23.4 percent in Q1.

Nevertheless, U.S. ESPs' rates overall improved approximately 4 percent for both gross and inbox deliverability compared with Q1 rates. "While false positives are increasing among some ESPs, the industry as a whole is winning the fight to reduce the amount of spam," says Dave Dabbah, Director of Sales and Marketing, Lyris Technologies.

Users with addresses with one of the top 10 U.S. ESPs were 27 percent more likely to receive opt-in email in their inbox than those who used one of the bottom 10 providers: 97.8 percent versus 70.6 percent. Still, that rate for the bottom 10 is an improvement of 11.2 percentage points in deliverability compared with Q1.

False-positive spam filtering among European ISPs remains lower, achieving an average rate of only 0.075 percent compared with the U.S. average of 3.29 percent. This disparity is again due in part to excessive false-positive filtering at two ISPs - cs.com (Compuserve.com) and iwon.com - and U.S. ISPs' and ESPs' more stringent filtering of unsolicited emails.

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.

Most email-sending IPs Have Bad Reputation

The reputations of 97 out of 100 email-sending IP addresses are bad enough that email providers would likely block their messages, according to an email study.

A mere 0.9 percent of IP addresses score high enough to ensure that emails they send would likely be delivered, according to a study by email deliverability services firm Return Path, Directmag.com reports (via MarketingVox). Luckily, most commercial marketers' IP addresses are within that 0.9 percent. However, their "Sender Score," as monitored by Return Path, tends to be closer to the borderline 70 than the highest-level 100.

Return Path uses six criteria (e.g., complaint rates, email volume sent, unknown-user rates) to assign each address a 1-100 score. Senders with scores above 70 would likely have their email delivered; those below 30 likely wouldn't. The highest-scoring IP addresses tend to be corporate accounts that don't send much email and don't spam.

"Most marketers are between 60 and 80," George Bilbrey, general manager of Return Path's delivery assurance solutions unit, is quoted as saying. "Most marketers are in the gray area. The question is: How gray are you and how can you get yourself to a lighter shade of gray?" The answer lies more in reputation and less in email content, he says.

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).

AOL Confirms Ads in Email; Subscribers Annoyed

AOL has confirmed that it is indeed testing ads within AOL Mail, a move considered unusual because, while both Yahoo and MSN Hotmail run ads on their front email pages, AOL is a paid service and subscribers who pay generally expect the service to be ad-free, writes DM News (via MediaBuyerPlanner.)

The media company said that it has been testing banner ads at the bottom of the Read Mail screen for the past several weeks. Ads do not appear within emails, and are not targeted in such a way that they appear alongside relevant emails (as they do in Google's Gmail). Ads are served from AOL's general ad rotation, the company disclosed, but it declined to say how many advertisers are participating in the test.

At least one subscriber posting on an AOL message board is unhappy with the ads, writing, "I have flashing banner ads at the bottom of individual emails now, and they are incredibly annoying! They're like having spam inserted directly into my emails!"

AOL has seen substantial subscriber losses recently - losing 835,000 U.S. subscribers from Q4 2005 to Q1 2006 - as email subscribers switch to other, free email services. To combat the loss of revenue, it has been seeking new marketing and media partnerships.

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.

eROI: Email Open and Click Rates Soared in Q1, Peaked on Weekends

In the first quarter of 2006, the best email open and click rates were on weekends, according to online marketing firm eROI's most recent, Q1 2006 email study, reports MarketingVox. Moreover, open and click rates increased significantly in the first quarter (40 percent and 60 percent increases, respectively), compared with rates for Q4 2005, when open and click rates decreased 29 percent and 21 percent, respectively, from the previous quarter.

The highest click rates in the first quarter were on Sundays - 6.6 percent - when the open rates were 25.9 percent, the second-highest open rate for the week. Tuesdays had the highest open rates at 26.4 percent, and the second-highest click rate, at 6.2 percent.

According to eRoi's April 2006 survey of email marketers (a fairly even distribution of B2B, B2C and hybrid approach - 38, 28 and 34 percent, respectively), email marketing lists are growing. Some- 83 percent of marketers see a significant increase in their lists from this time last year. Only 34 percent of email marketers use behavioral data for segmentation and targeting, whereas 66 percent use demographic information to position their offers and newsletters.

The Q1 2006 study also breaks down the open and click rates by mailer size: Micro-mailers (fewer than 5,000 recipients); small senders (5,000 to 24,999 recipients); medium-sized (25,000-99,999); and large mailers (100,000+). Large mailers - unlike their polar opposite small mailers - see poor statistics on the weekend.

But eRoi points out that the "important takeaway here is not what day is best for both opens and reads but finding which day is best for the goal of your email."

Email Disaster Recovery

Have you ever sent out an email that you wish you could pull back from your customers' inboxes? Unfortunately, you can't. But there are steps you can take to mitigate problems that arise from problems like misspellings or promotional errors in emails. Here are a few tips from a Mediapost article.

1. Assign a disaster team. Convene immediately to discuss the error and outline potential courses of action. Don't wait until your vice president, who is seeded on the list, sends a note down the chain.

2. Minimize impact. If you see that there is an error and all the e-mails have NOT been sent, many ESPs have the ability to cancel the e-mails in the queue.

3. Why did it happen? 99 percent of the errors we see are due to teams sacrificing good process for urgency. Was it a system error? A human error? Did you sacrifice what you know is right to get it out quickly?

4. An error doesn't always justify a response. Spare your customers from a slew of meaningless apology e-mails. Discuss what constitutes an apology and who should receive it, and if you should reward the consumer.

5. Develop a protocol for apology e-mails. Use them for marketing and loyalty purposes. You'll get a higher response, so use this as an opportunity to let them know how important they are to your business.

Of course, the first step is to always proof your emails by as many people on your in-house and outsourced teams possible. Most errors come about because people didn't look closely at the email before hitting send.

ISPs Block One In Five E-mails

About one in five marketing e-mails didn't get delivered in the second half of last year, according to a new report by Return Path, Mediapost reports.

Excite filtered our 42.9 percent of messages, while Gmail filtered 40.4 percent, Lycos didn't deliver 33.8 percent, and Adelphia failed to deliver 31 percent of messages. On the other end of the spectrum, EarthLink filtered out just 7.8 percent of e-mails, while Mac.com, Compuserve, and USA.net all filtered out less than 10 percent. AOL didn't deliver 12.4 percent of messages.

As for corporate filters, MessageLabs didn't deliver 30.5 percent of messages, Postini failed to send 24 percent, and Brightmail blocked 21.5 percent.