By Bill Nussey, on December 15th, 2009
In the never-ending fight to block spam, Internet service providers first created content filters. Then came the “spam” button. And now, the gatekeepers of deliverability are looking at a new way to determine whether your email makes it to the inbox:
Engagement.
Every marketer talks about engagement (and we are big fans of the idea here at Silverpop). But the inbox folks at America Online, Yahoo and others are taking the idea to a new level. In short, if your recipients aren’t interacting with your messages, it could affect whether an ISP delivers your email.
As you can see in this Direct article on the topic, spammers have found a way around the spam button by artificially driving down complaint percentages. This is one reason the big ISPs are looking for new, even more inventive ways to determine if your messages are truly desired by your recipients. Engagement is becoming the new spam button.
While the details are still private, it’s a pretty good bet that ISPs will be looking at factors like opens and clicks to determine just how engaged your recipients are. If you want to successfully make it into the inbox and stay there, a low complaint rate will no longer be enough. Your recipients will actually have to read and interact with your messages.
This is definitely bad news for spammers. But in the greater scheme of things, it’s a move that will help legitimate marketers and recipients alike. As we move into 2010, it’s more important than ever to make sure your messages are relevant and engaging. Your lifetime customer relationships, ROI—and increasingly your email deliverability—are counting on it.
By Bill Nussey, on December 9th, 2009
Silverpop just released its analysis of early holiday email marketing campaigns, and the results make for some quick and meaty reading. Our research team looked at the email marketing programs of 70 retail and consumer product companies, comparing last year’s campaigns with those sent last month. Among the findings:
- Marketers sent 25 percent more emails in November this year than they did in 2008. During the week leading up to Thanksgiving through “Cyber Monday” following the holiday, they sent 22 percent more emails this year than last.
- Response jumped for subject lines offering discounts. Sixty-two percent of marketers studied this year used a discount offer of some type in the subject line, compared to 66 percent last year. In 2008, the open rate for emails offering discounts was only 17 percent. This year, it jumped to 31 percent.
- What kind of subject-line offer generated the most opens? A gift with purchase or buy-one-get-one (BOGO) promotion was far more likely to generate an open (36 percent) than a percent off (21 percent), or dollar or British pound off purchase offer (12 percent).
For more results, including list growth, deliverability, and open and click-through rates, check out our news release here.
By Bill Nussey, on December 8th, 2009
Nearly one in four email messages sent on Cyber Monday failed to reach the inbox, according to a ClickZ article citing findings by deliverability services firm Pivotal Veracity.
According to Pivotal Veracity, only 76.2 percent of the emails sent out on what has become one of the busiest e-commerce days of the year were actually delivered, compared to deliverability percentages generally reported to be in the 80s to mid-90s.
Pivotal Veracity attributes the lower deliverability to an unmanageably high volume of messages going out almost simultaneously on Cyber Monday. The most popular time to send was between noon and 2 p.m. Central Time.
“It’s not so much a matter of what marketers did wrong individually, but what they did wrong collectively,” Pivotal Veracity’s Len Schneyer was quoted as saying. “They all sent at what appears to be the exact same time…” As a result, Internet Service Providers were forced to take stiffer measures than usual to contend with the volume of email that required processing.
Marketers are always looking for the best day and time to send email in order to get the best response. But even if there’s an optimal day to send your message, there’s no one best time for everyone on your list. Your subscribers are all different. Because your message is most likely to be spotted when it’s at or near the top of the inbox rather than buried somewhere toward the middle, the best time to send a message isn’t a specific hour that applies across your list, but rather, when someone is most likely to be in their inbox.
If more marketers had been able to optimize their send times on Cyber Monday so that they coincided with when their recipients were most likely to be checking their inboxes instead of blasting them all out during a two-hour window, they may have been able to avoid the glut of email that caused the drop in deliverability.
As an aside, in our 2009 Cyber Monday report due out tomorrow, Silverpop clients, many of whom presumably also used our Send Time Optimization feature, did considerably better than the industry averages cited by Pivotal Veracity, scoring deliverability percentages in the high 90s.
By Bill Nussey, on November 12th, 2009
Social networking site Tagged.com has agreed to pay $750,000 in penalties and costs to settle lawsuits alleging it engaged in deceptive email marketing practices. As part of the settlements, reached with New York and Texas, the San Francisco-based company also agreed to adopt reforms around its use of invitation emails. You can read more in this MediaPost Online Media Daily article.
The two states sued Tagged earlier this year for allegedly duping new members into providing their email addresses and passwords. Tagged then sent emails to members’ contact lists that appeared to have been sent directly from the members themselves.
In addition to paying the fines, the agreement calls for Tagged to provide clear and conspicuous notice to users before accessing their email inboxes and to obtain users’ explicit consent before sending email invitations to their contacts. On its blog, Tagged says it has overhauled its registration and invite-your-friends processes, and will soon be adding more new features to increase member privacy.
This is an interesting case on its merits, but what struck me is the potential implications for forward-to-a-friend and viral emails. While it’s not the same thing, many marketers elect to have their viral emails appear to come from the friend who signed the person up rather than from the marketer. In this case, the friend had more knowledge about the resulting email(s), but I have to wonder if some future court will take this ruling and seek to apply it to the age-old forward-to-a-friend technique.
By Bill Nussey, on September 29th, 2009
Many people think of Silverpop as a self-service marketing tools provider. And while most of our customers are self-service, we have a large number of high profile full-service clients as well. And, when we do work with clients on a full-service basis, we do it as well or better than anyone in the world.
I had the distinct honor last week of meeting the CEO of American Honda Motor Co., Tetsuo Iwamura, as he presented me and my colleagues at Silverpop with Honda’s esteemed Premier Partner Award. From more than 1,000 eligible vendors, ranging from parts suppliers to firms that transport cars to dealers, Silverpop was recognized as one of the top partners for Honda here in the United States. And, it wasn’t until I attended the ceremony itself and saw a string of high-level execs, including the CEO himself, praise the work of Silverpop and a select set of other vendors, that I finally realized that their teams value Silverpop as much as our teams value Honda.
The heart of a truly great partnership is not measured solely by yesterday’s deliverable or tomorrow’s project plans, but also by the character and passion each party brings toward making the partnership successful. The marketing team at Honda has been tremendous to work with, and their support has been critical as we’ve worked together to evolve and grow the Honda email marketing programs over the years. Additionally, my deep gratitude goes to my colleagues at Silverpop who work with Honda, and to those who make the tools and services behind the scenes—you guys should take a short breather and pat each other on the back for a job well done.
By Bill Nussey, on September 1st, 2009
If you’ve heard rumblings emanating from Maine and been caught by surprise, you’re not alone. Nobody noticed when a new privacy law intended to protect teens from predatory marketers sailed through that state’s legislature amidst a flurry of bills earlier this year. But now various groups and trade associations say the privacy law goes too far, and are working frantically to stop the measure before it goes into effect on September 12.
In a nutshell, the law, titled “An Act to Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors,” states that teenagers can’t give their personal or health information to marketers if they’re under 18 without their parents’ consent. It also bars marketers from selling or transferring the information if it individually identifies the minors, or will be used to market to them.
At first, it sounds like a great idea. We should definitely be protecting our children online. But this has created a huge uproar for a lot of reasons. First, the federal government has already enacted a law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which addresses many of these concerns. But it only applies to children under age 13. The Maine legislation seeks to impose restrictions on the collection of personal information from teens up to age 18.
The new law also requires marketers to obtain verifiable parental consent before they can gather information from minors. But how do you stop a determined teen from faking parental approval? Nevertheless, marketers can be held liable for damages in the courts by both the state and by private individuals.
The law is being challenged in court by several groups on First Amendment, interstate commerce and other grounds. The measure is unconstitutional, the plaintiffs say, because it violates teens’ rights to free speech and prevents them from registering and receiving information about beneficial health care products and services. A coalition of Internet companies including AOL and Yahoo are also challenging the measure. They contend that the restrictions are so onerous that teens may not even be allowed to register at their Web sites.
So, very interesting stuff. From my reading, it appears the law has implications and consequences far beyond its original intention of protecting teens. Even the Maine attorney general said last Friday that the law is so poorly designed that her office will not enforce it.
I think the bottom line is, as we move forward trying to protect ourselves and our children from the Wild, Wild West of the Internet, it’s going to be a whole lot harder than any of us want to believe.
You can read more about this issue in this Portland Press Herald article, and at MediaPost here, and here.
By Bill Nussey, on August 27th, 2009
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.
By Bill Nussey, on August 17th, 2009
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.
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