A recent MediaPost blog posting by Jack Loechner caught my eye. It highlights a new study by search engine marketing firm Engine Ready that sought to uncover which advertising tactic generated higher returns: pay-per-click or search engine optimization. By studying all the different ways visitors arrive at Web sites, the analysis wound up yielding some very interesting results regarding email.

The study, which looked at 20.8 million visits to 26 e-commerce sites from July 2008 through June 2009, shows that paid search visitors are nearly twice as likely to buy as those who arrive from organic search. For those who arrived at an e-commerce site from a PPC ad, the conversion rate was 2.03 percent. The conversion rate for SEO visitors was 1.26 percent.

But, as it turns out, email visitors blew both out of the water. For visitors who came to an e-commerce site by clicking a link in an email, the conversion rate was 6.58 percent—more than three times that of PPC and five times that of SEO. Not only is email a relatively inexpensive channel by comparison, but its conversion rate and ROI is clearly unmatched.

Posted by at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A colleague read my recent post and asked me how marketers could prevent spammers from spoofing their domains. In other words, it's pretty hard to fake an IP address, but isn't it easy to fake a "from" field and domain? (For example, Outlook Express easily allows me to put "bnussey@whitehouse.gov" in the from field.)

The solution lies in some recent technology advancements that come with easy-to-remember names like DKIM and Sender ID. These solutions provide a way for receiving email servers to validate that an incoming message is REALLY from the domain it claims to be. They are pretty foolproof and ensure that only the REAL whitehouse.gov can validate messages that purport to be from that domain. As long as the receiving email server goes through the trouble to check, it can always be sure that the sender is legitimate.

For those of you curious how this would work, read on. (For everyone else, thanks for checking in <grin>.)…

The authentication techniques work on top of one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet—the domain name system (better known as DNS). You see, when Internet-connected computers talk to each other, they only do so using IP addresses—things like URLs are a convenience for we human beings. While it's invisible to users, every time you enter a Web URL or send an email to, say, whitehouse.gov, your browser quickly goes out and checks a DNS server to get the underlying IP address. DNS information is tightly controlled and is generally only updatable by the company that owns the domain. Email authentication solutions add an additional piece of information on the DNS record that can only be updated by the domain owner. When an email domain is being validated, the receiving email server simply checks out the DNS records for that domain and confirms that the authentication "key" matches the one in the email. That's it.

Posted by at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently had a chance to pick the brain of my esteemed industry colleague, Deirdre Baird. Deirdre is the CEO of Pivotal Veracity, Silverpop’s email deliverability partner, and one of the most knowledgeable people in the industry when it comes to getting your email successfully delivered to the inbox.

Specifically, I wanted to get her thoughts about an important and impending shift by ISPs away from IP-based to domain-based email reputation filtering.

Under the current IP-based reputation monitoring scheme, ISPs deliver or block your email based on the reputation of each individual IP address from which you send email. Under domain-based reputation monitoring, ISPs would assign the same reputation to all authenticated email from your company or domain, regardless of IP. (You can read more about it in this recent Direct magazine article.)

Can you describe that change and tell us when it will be in place?

"Currently, ISPs and spam filtering entities "attach” reputation to a particular email campaign—as is the case with "signature type filtering"—and/or a particular IP address. If, for example, a particular email creative is associated with high spam-complaint rates or a particular IP address is the source of high unknown-user rates, the ISP will then filter all mail like that particular creative or originating from that particular IP address.

"While both these methods are useful and will continue to be used, their efficacy is declining somewhat as spammers have learned to dramatically change the content and mail from thousands of hijacked IPs. The major ISPs are now moving toward a more holistic method of holding a mailer accountable for their actions. Specifically, ISPs are now moving to authenticated, domain-based reputation, whereby core filtering metrics such as spam-complaint rates, unknown user rates, and spam-trap rates will be computed at the domain level.

"This change is being tested now at AOL and Yahoo with DKIM-authenticated domains. It exists in some degree at Hotmail with Sender ID-authenticated domains, and is being considered by a number of other ISPs.

"While domain-based reputation will initially be used in addition to IP-based reputation at ISPs such as Yahoo, it will take a front-seat at AOL and, we suspect over time will become one of the most important methods ISPs will use to identify good mailers."

What will it mean to Silverpop’s customers and other email marketers?

"The impact for mailers can be summed up this way: You will be held accountable—good or bad—for everything you do under your brand, that is, your domain.

"This is great news for legitimate companies who have consistently followed good mailing practices across their enterprise and developed meaningful relationships with their customers. It is not so great news for folks who have relied on a change in IP to escape the fall-out of an email append program that went south, or a purchased list, or a leap in spam complaints due to over-mailing."

What percentage of an average B2C email marketer’s list will be impacted by this, and how will that change through the rest of 2009 and 2010?

"Yahoo is usually the first or second largest ISP on both B2C and B2B mailers' lists. AOL typically ranks in the top 5 or 10 for B2B. Their combined market share on a typical commercial mailer’s list ranges from a low of 30 percent to a high of 70 percent.

"Mailers will begin to see the impact of domain-based reputation at AOL as early as this fall, and at Yahoo in late 2009 into early 2010. Additionally, Hotmail already considers domain-based reputation, although historically they’ve placed more weight on IP-based reputation. Comcast and Road Runner are actively researching how to execute a domain-based reputation system, but are not likely to have anything in place until late 2010 at the earliest."

From a B2B perspective, do you foresee any of the popular corporate spam filters using this new approach?

"Absolutely. The large enterprise filters such as Brightmail, Cloudmark and Postini already attach a reputation of sorts to a piece of content. It is certainly plausible that the domain will play a role in their algorithms. However, as it is now, it will be a lot more difficult to isolate the impact of a domain’s mailing history from the impact of other factors—for example, content characteristics—used by the spam filters, whereas the ISPs tend to be more transparent in what caused a filtering issue. For instance, that the mailer has high spam complaint rates."

My thanks to Deirdre for sharing her thoughts and expertise with readers of this blog. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them below.

Posted by at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The use of social media as a marketing tactic has shot up dramatically in the last two years, according to an online survey of B2C and B2B marketers. Moreover, marketers have shifted from using social media channels primarily for brand building and now use them as a tool for driving awareness and interest in their products and services.

This despite the fact that marketers also cite as a top concern an inability to prove ROI and having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media. And, interestingly, although roughly half said they are planning to spend less on marketing this year, a majority said they are actually planning to spend more on new media platforms.

The survey, which included 172 marketers and was conducted in June, is an update a survey conducted two years ago by BtoB magazine and the Association of National Advertisers. In the updated survey, 66 percent of the marketers said they were using social media, compared to 20 percent of respondents in 2007. Among B2B marketers, the number is 57 percent, up from just 15 percent in 2007.

Two years ago 65 percent of respondents said their main objective in using social media was to build brand. Today that percentage has dropped to 51 percent, while using social media to generate demand has increased from 10 percent to 30 percent overall. Among B2B marketers, the percentage is even higher at 47 percent.

So why are marketers flocking to new social media despite an uncertain economy, admitted concern over how to allocate and measure, and why is the use of social channels evolving so drastically?

I’m sure we could have some great discussions around it. But in a nutshell, smart marketers have realized that the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive someone toward measurable lifetime customer value. To do that, marketers must create relationships that benefit both the customers and the company. The rise of online social networking means that it's the buyers, not the marketers, who define their brands today. And social channels invite them to define the kinds of marketing they will receive. Successful marketers are evolving with their customers, going where they are, and providing them with opportunities to participate in dialogues and interact with their brands.

Posted by at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For a while now, I've been a vocal proponent of marketers participating in social marketing, and clearly many others see the potential as well. In his July 30 ClickZ column, Bill McCloskey shares some great data that illustrate the enthusiasm with which marketers have embraced social networking.

Since 2007, Bill's firm, Email Data Source, has been tracking how often brands embed a link within their email marketing messages back to their social networking site. The data point to two interesting facts: 1) the number of email marketing campaigns that contain links to the two top sites, Facebook and Twitter, have dramatically increased, and 2) in 2009, No. 2 Twitter began closing in on No. 1 Facebook, and in April surpassed its rival as the top social networking site for email marketers.

In 2007, Email Data Source tracked 215 emails with Twitter links and 729 with Facebook links. By June of 2009, the number of campaigns with a link to a sender's Twitter account soared to 41,399 and 41,052 for Facebook. You can view the stats here.

I do find it interesting that Twitter has surpassed Facebook. While Facebook's user base towers over Twitter's, Twitter is clearly the king of micro-blogging (at least today). A lot of the content that gets shared socially is the kind that lends itself to the quick shares that Twitter has made famous, but I have to believe that some of this traffic spike is due to Twitter still being in its “novelty” phase.

Posted by at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)