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

An amazing thing happened. I succeeded in NOT checking my email. Here’s how I did it:
1) I kept my laptop closed. An open laptop screen is like the gateway drug to email addiction. Keep it closed. Period.
2) I found a distraction, otherwise known as a healthy activity. A brisk walk accross the meadow with my dog, a lovable but goofy yellow lab.
3) I found another distraction – finishing up a great entrepreneurial book called “Small Giants” by Bo Burlingham.
4) Have an awesome plan for the day – went skiing at Mt. Bachelor with a friend. We happened to have a bluebird day with 11 inches of dry powder.
5) Stretch, relax, find a hot tub and submerge for an hour, then eat well with friends and family that night.
6) Check email the next morning – don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can avoid email forever – this just causes more anxiety of returning to an overwhelming and urgent stack of emails in your inbox.

Email addiction is reaching epidemic levels in America today. Learn more about this issue by Downloading the In-Depth Email Addiction Survey Results here >>

It is especially interesting to see a large increase in opens and clicks during the weekend. Much of this activity can be attributed to the massive drop off in activities after the holidays, giving people more time to browse online and open and follow up on email. However, this quarter has presented us with some unexplained reactions. Normally, we see higher open and click rates on days with lower volume, such as on Sunday in the chart below, but at the same time we see the highest percentage of open rates take place on the day with the most email sent. What does this mean? Good subject lines and good creative get good results, bad creative and bad subject lines perform poorly. Don’t forget to download our detailed eROI Q1′06 Email Report.

If you’d like to get some different perspectives on this study, go to articles on:
MarketingVox
MediaBuyerPlanner

The issue of subject line length is something that gets debated endlessly around the marketing water cooler. Most people know that anything longer than 55 characters (and, just a reminder, the spaces do count!) will get cut off. And many have heard the maxim that 35 is really a better number to aim for. But, does anyone know how the length of the subject line actually affects response?

Response rate (as measured by clicks) goes down dramatically when the subject line is longer than 50 characters.

Click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.

What about open rates? While the difference wasn’t as dramatic, we found that subject lines with 49 or fewer characters had open rates 12.5 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.

Testing your subject lines on your list is the only way to know what will work and what won’t. But, this research clearly shows that, in fact, brevity is the better part of valor.

I promise to add to this blog entry with the source of this study.

But I was happy to get this one. Like Puxatawny Phil seeing his shadow, this one tells me only 4 more months till it stops raining in Oregon. Well at least until we can garuntee dry days for a few months.

One thing I wanted to point out in this was the use of a survey. I love surveys and we know that people like to vote. But the problem is that I got this in the new MSN LiveMail and it kills all surveys and even from opening a new window for this survey, which is odd. So lesson for today, it rains in Oregon, Scotts takes a break from the lawn just like my dog, and surveys should have links in them if you want people to be able to participate.

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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