eROI Days Email Agency

At eROI, we try hard to be a resource to folks in the email marketing industry, and one of the ways that we’ve done that over the past 5 years is to do a quarterly study (based on a survey or aggregate data from our email marketing platform) and present those results to everyone in the industry.  It always amazes us that there is a HUGE difference between what email marketers know to do as best practices for their campaigns versus what is actually done in the real world (where time, money, process, and other factors get in the way of best practices).

In this Q3′08 eROI study called “The Elements of Email“, there is a shocking difference of best practices vs. real world practices.  For example, only a quarter of marketers test their subject lines.  Fifty-five percent of online marketers don’t know how they authenticate emails (to ensure that more of their emails reach their email subscriber’s inbox.  Lastly, only 10 percent of us create mobile versions of our email campaigns.

People are talking about the study, so make sure you check out what they are saying.  And, if you’d like to draw your own conclusions, click here to see the full study >>

Articles on this study:
http://directmag.com/magill/0819-email-markers-slopping/ 
http://www.marketingvox.com/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-040449/
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/email-marketers-missing-opportunities-5665/

Please comment below to let me know your take.  Also don’t forget to subscribe to this blog.  Now that I’m refreshed from vacation, I promise to post blog entries more frequently.

Loren McDonald explains it well. With rapid agreement among email industry insiders, Loren really nailed the answer to the question of the relevancy of the common email metric “open rate.”

The MediaPost article begins:

Email Open Rates: What’s the Alternative?
by Loren McDonald , Thursday, May 8, 2008

MY PREVIOUS COLUMN, “WHY THE Email Open Rate Must Die” spawned a spirited debate, mainly on these three topics (click here to read the first column and all 17 comments):

Don’t kill the open rate, but view it in the proper perspective.
PLEASE let it die!
What can we replace it with? You don’t offer any suggestions other than to say we can do better.

I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.

The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine

So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?

1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track “open or read rates” because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.

2.So, let’s rename it the “Email Render Rate” or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed “render rate” would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient’s email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients’ inboxes or smart phones.

Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don’t. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I’m sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.

3.Next, let’s de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I’m not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.

But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.

Read the full article here >>

Here at eROI we go to great lengths to keep you up to date on the latest trends in email marketing. Our latest survey asks for your input on the Subscribe/Unsubscribe Process.

This survey should take just a minute or two, and we will share the results with you when complete.

All survey participants will be automatically entered to win one of a handful of iPod Shuffle mp3 players!

Take the Survey Now »

On June 21st at 11am PST, Eyetools Inc. CEO and founder, Greg Edwards will join eROI’s Dylan Boyd to speak about best practices in email design and how eye tracking studies can impact your design. You will be amazed at how eye tracking is so different from click tracking and what it can tell you about how lift your email campaign results and metrics.

Learn the ‘What to dos’ and the ‘What not to dos’ from these seasoned industry professionals. They’ll be looking at some before and after case studies to explore the difference even the smallest tweaks can make to the performance of your emails.

Register today for next week’s event.

A recent study from DMA shows just how critical an element email is when it comes to successful direct marketing campaigns. While the study’s main focus is to show that the lines of direct marketing and brand marketing have blurred through multi-channel campaigns, the study’s statistics point to the predominance of email – and web in these campaigns. It is email’s ability to personalize and track and motivate with clear calls to action that makes it a key ingredient. By Integrating and coordinating across multiple channels, marketers can create cohesive brand messaging that can lead to powerful brand experiences.

How does email fit in? In a fully integrated campaign email is an element that can breathe “interactive life” into 2 dimensional print campaigns. Direct mail and print advertising should no longer be stand alone elements. Email and web can be coordinated with traditional marketing efforts to dynamically drive messaging. Even more, email opens the lines of communication with your audience allowing them to respond, participate and own your brand. This leads to a better understanding of your audience and your brand, which will improve messaging, targeting and personalization. Check out the study to see how email is influencing today’s best direct marketing tactics and principles.

Does Design and Coding Matter in Email Marketing?

We are closing this survey down at the end of the week. We would love a few more people to take part. IF you have 5 minutes and would like to get the results of this study, please give us your answers. We really appreciate it.

We like to ask people what they think about certain issues facing email marketing. We started last fall asking people about their email inbox preferences. Seemed that we hit a nerve as so many marketing sites and bloggers picked up on it and carried the message around the global block.

This month we are curious about another issue, Email Design and Coding Perceptions. Does either design or coding of your email marketing campaigns really matter? Do you design emails for specific segments in your audience or do you keep your messaging broad so that you don’t seem like you are only speaking to one group of people? With the email client market so fragmented, are you changing the way you design and code emails?

Help us understand how you feel about this issue and we will post the results for you this month in our latest quarterly study. Thank you for your help with this study.

Take the Email Design and Coding Perceptions Survey

Does Design and Coding Matter in Email Marketing?

We like to ask people what they think about certain issues facing email marketing. We started last fall asking people about their email inbox preferences. Seemed that we hit a nerve as so many marketing sites and bloggers picked up on it and carried the message around the global block.

This month we are curious about another issue, Email Design and Coding Perceptions. Does either design or coding of your email marketing campaigns really matter? Do you design emails for specific segments in your audience or do you keep your messaging broad so that you don’t seem like you are only speaking to one group of people? With the email client market so fragmented, are you changing the way you design and code emails?

Help us understand how you feel about this issue and we will post the results for you this month in our latest quarterly study. Thank you for your help with this study.

Take the Email Design and Coding Perceptions Survey

In my last blog posting, I mentioned Microsoft’s deliveribility guy Brian Holdsworth but ran out of time before jotting down my notes about his talk, so here they are:

MS Outlook and Windows LiveMail (formerly Hotmail) represent 600 million people / users in the world. Microsoft expects this to climb to 1 billion in the next few years.

Big change in Outlook 2007: it automatically postmarks emails to email addresses NOT in your address book. It delays the send several minutes per email address not in your address book. This will significantly reduce the amount of spam generated by botnets and zombies that send email through unprotected PCs (which is responsible for 80% of the increase in spam in the past year).

Spammer Trends and Tactics:
Microsoft has brought 376 successful lawsuits against spammers in the past 3 years. Part of the lawsuit process requires the spammer to come into Microsoft’s office and explain why they spammed. Recently, a 17 year-old came into to talk to the Microsoft deliverability team - he started when he was 9 years old and was now sending 25 million emails per day and made $300 per day on affiliate revenue (which breaks down to roughly $1 per 100,000 emails - not great ROI, but pretty good when considering there are no costs other than his eventual fine and jail time).

Of the 4 billion emails per day that Hotmail processes, 90% is spam. Much of this is image spam, and spam generated from botnets and zombies.

Next version of Hotmail is Windows LiveMail which is very similar to Outlook.

An Unsubscribe link is built into every email in Windows LiveMail in the Return Header.

Microsoft Goals:
1. Reduce Spam in Inbox
2. Improve deliverability for legit senders:
a. volume based reputation
b. Sender ID + past reputation (Outlook postmark)
c. Unsubscribe built into Windows LiveMail

Last note is the phenomenon of communication barriers within Microsoft. The Outlook team makes major changes/shifts every 3 years, and for Outlook 2007, they are moving to a content rendering engine built in MS Word instead of the natural choice of Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s deliverability found out about this at the same time the general public saw the press release a couple weeks ago - doesn’t know why this decision was made by the Outlook team. Maybe the next ReturnPath event can address this topic in more detail…

I attended Return Path’s Seattle Workshop yesterday and learned a lot more about “Email Strategies that Increase Deliverability and Response” than I expected. They even had a guest speaker from Microsoft Hotmail (now branded Windows LiveMail) - Product Planner Brian Holdsworth who shed light on Microsoft’s deliverability strategies. Apparently, over 50% of email browser use is MS Outlook, so maybe we should listen to what he has to say.

Here are my notes from the event (Return Path speaker):
Large ISPs getting significantly more email volume each day - recently showing 7.4billion emails per day.

What is Email Reputation?
1. Complaints (Informal)
2. High Unknown Users (unclean list)
3. Spam Traps (spamcop.com and other types of spam-catching email addresses)
4. Sending Infrastructure (IP address must be clean)
5. Sending Consistency (similar daily email volume)

Where you are sending from matters a whole lot more than domain reputation and email content.

Feedback loops are important - automatically unsubscribes people who complain. Added benefit of decreasing complaint rates up to 40% at Yahoo, Hotmail, when feedback loops are implemented by senders.

Strategies to Reduce complaints:

• Welcome email upon subscription 
• Link to sample newsletter
• Use double opt-in
• Always respect unsub requests
• Make it very easy to unsubscribe
• Content relevancy is key
• Conduct complaint analysis

Home and work users have different preferences.

For e-mail marketers looking to make the biggest impact, it makes sense to pay attention to whether users are receiving their e-mail at home or at work.

According to a Q2 2006 study of e-mail marketing preferences by eROI Inc., 79% of people who subscribe to business-to-business e-mail marketing messages receive them at a business e-mail address. Just 19% of people who receive consumer-oriented e-mail marketing messages subscribe with their business e-mail address.

Those who receive consumer-oriented messages were also much more likely to use an e-mail address created specifically for e-mail marketing: 24% did, vs. 6% of those who received B2B messages.

Read and Download the Study

In an effort to expand our latest study we are currently working on, we would like to invite you to participate in this survey. This survey will help us to combine some key data points we analyze over our emailROI network and provide you with the combined results in August.

Take the short survey

Sign Up for our Study Release and download past studies.

It’s time again for the eROI quarterly email study on deliverability. The eROI, Q4 ’05 email study breaks down, by list size, which day is the best day for email campaigns. In general terms the Study indicates a 29 percent drop quarter over quarter in read rates, and a 21 percent drop in click rates in Q4 over Q3 2005. Additionally, the Q4 data shows a similar trend from the third quarter in that the noticeable high point in the week occurs on Friday for both reads and clicks. So, from this quarter eROI reaffirms that sending volume is inversely related to how reads and clicks react.

For Q4 eROI sees similarities to last quarter with read and click rates generally declining as list size increases, but there are some major differences. Read rates are much more erratic between 500 and 10,000 emails. Click rates see a more consistent behavior and do not decline in nearly as consistent of a pattern as last quarter. Volume for 250,000+ lists takes a huge jump upward resulting in approximately 20 percent read rate. We believe this goes to show, segmentation works and the general B2C marketer really needs to adopt more targeted mailing campaigns. B2B mailers are starting to adopt them more and more.

For the full study and charts go to: http://www.eroi.com/eroi-email-marketing-statistics-q405-study.html

Just an FYI, we released our new study this AM. Look for it on MarketingVox today, eMarketer Friday and others in the days coming. Read the overview below, and get the whole PDF at our site.

Get the PDF

In Q3 of 2005 we notice that the middle of the week is the low point, as far as read and click statistics go. Noticeable high points in the week occur on Sunday and Friday for both stats. So from this quarter we reaffirm again that sending volume is inversely related to how reads and clicks are going to react with the one exception of Saturday.

Why is this shift in behavior occurring? As we close in on the holidays, consumers are beginning to think more of how they are going to spend their money this holiday season. While we anticipate these stats to start even out more as we come closer to December and through the new year, this behavior shows marketers are getting an early start and secure the consumer awareness and solidify a place in their, um, your, wallet.

Overall By List Size
This quarter eROI takes a different look at day of the week stats. When looking at aggregate stats we see less dramatic changes in read and click statistics and they are not always applicable to large and small senders. eROI decided to take a look at day of the week statistics by list size.

Get the PDF

by Dylan Boyd, eROI

We created a test email blast to see what the limitations of HotMail and GMail are in terms of CSS. We know that many email clients limit the use of CSS, but it in some cases it is possible to use it. If you are familair with your audience, you may look to segment lists by ISP and email client to maximize delivery. This is a real limited analysis, but we found out some guidelines that should help us in the future.

Specifically, here’s what we found:

GMAIL

Ignores all styles in “” “” tags. It doesn’t matter if they are in the “” or in the “”
Does render inline styles, with the exception of:
a. Background Images
b. Specific Heights
Doesn’t display ANY images by default. It needs to be activated by the reader to “include external images”.
Make sure that you use complete alt tags to illustrate the images with text placeholders.
Be careful as to the extent of the words you use as your competitors can
server Adwords alongside your email based on the keyword index.
When displaying external images, it does render traditional background images correctly, for example: ”

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