Response Posts
Aug
16
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out - shocking!) email still isn't dead yet.
Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it "legacy" or "uninteresting" is backwards. The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less.
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Aug
11
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
When it comes to engaging subscribers and understanding the relationship between engagement and permission, you probably have a lot of the same questions as attendees at a recent email deliverability webinar put on by Exact Target where I was a panelist along with Jamie Tomasello, Abuse Operations Manager for Cloudmark and Al Iverson, Director of Privacy and Deliverability. Chip House, also of Exact Target, moderated the discussion and shared some stats from the extensive Exact Target research bank.
We talked about the history of email filtering and how it has changed from a primarily content-based system looking to keep the bad stuff out, to a sender reputation-based system looking to get ...
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Jul
26
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Retailers (or any marketer or publisher) seeking higher conversion rates must adopt an "innovation attitude" to guide them amid a fertile landscape for new ideas, advanced technology and customer behavior learnings. So advised speaker after speaker at the Shop.org Merchandise Summit held earlier this month in sunny Huntington Beach, California. Despite the pleasant weather, attendees stayed focused in the conference rooms (strategically chosen for their lack of windows!). It's clear there is a pressing need to ...
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Jun
29
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
Pizza Express has kicked off the World Cup emailing fest by inviting me to miss the soccer - sorry, football - barrage. My only recent experience with the game of football is participating in the office sweepstakes and randomly selecting a team that's not an odd-on favourite to win, so I was pleased to see a company targeting football lovers and haters at the same time. (See image below)
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May
24
Our new episode of Reputation Radio is now available on iTunes. You can also get the MP3 directly here.
In this episode we interview Stephanie Colleton and learn more about the Email Marketing Wizard Quiz.
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May
12
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Resist opportunity. How's that for some counter-intuitive advice? In the wake of too many opportunities, too much data, and so many social networks, tools and conversations, how can marketers effectively set priorities, identify the most meaningful audiences and develop the necessary content needed to participate? This idea was posed by keynote speaker and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger. I believe the answer has to be in accepting that none of us can successfully test everything, so we must resist the urge to try everything, and at a micro-level embrace the fact that we will never be able to track, follow or participate in every customer or industry conversation. ...
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Mar
03
Opt outs are always a bummer, but they are a part of email life. People have changing interests, jobs and lifestyles and your email may not longer be relevant to them. Better to have them move on than...
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Feb
11
Book lovers are a perfect audience for email newsletters - they love to read and they love to read about books. But book publishers often have few marketing resources and need to maximize every email they send. Paired with a diverse array of products to promote and this can...
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Feb
08
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Is it better to get permission up front for your email marketing program, or just beg for forgiveness later? This was a central question we discussed during my deliverability panel at the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit with fellow panelists Dennis Dayman of Eloqua (@ddayman) and Jared Hanson of Hewlett Packard (@hpnews).
The short answer is YES, of course it's better to get permission. It's always better to get permission. Permission is the first step toward setting expectations, creating relationships and keeping data clean. However, it's only a first step. Permission does not give marketers a license to just send whatever and whenever - permission must be re-earned with every message. Lots of subscribers who gave permission also complain (click on the Report Spam button), which depresses inbox placement for all subscribers. They also unsubscribe or just ignore/delete.
What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned, every time a message is sent. If we adopt this attitude, then we'd make decisions like:
Categories: Response
Feb
03
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
The recently released Return Path Deliverability Benchmark report revealed that email deliverability problems plague marketers across the globe. European marketers, with an 85% inbox rate (messages delivered to subscribers' inboxes) are slightly better off than their colleagues in North America who only make it to the inbox 80% of the time. Europeans are a bit worse off than their counter-parts in Asia-Pacific who get delivered 86% of the time.
Here are some key findings from major markets in Europe:
+ In the United Kingdom, 89% of email made to the inbox. France did almost as well with an 88% inbox rate while Germany was in line with the European average at 85%.
+ For email being sent to the "spam" or "bulk" folder, the United Kingdom had the lowest rate at just 3% while Germany had the highest with 11%. France was right in the middle with nearly 5% of email sent to the "junk" or "bulk" folder.
+ A significant percentage of email was categorized as "missing" or not delivered at all. In both the United Kingdom and France 7% of email went missing. Germany did slightly better with just 3% in this category.
The report also looked at non-delivered rates (messages routed to junk/bulk folders or blocked all together) by Internet Service Provider (ISP) in France, Germany and the UK. Inbox placement rates varied significantly from ISP to ISP. In the UK, toughest inboxes to get into were Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!. In France, it was SFR, AOL, LaPoste, Yahoo!, and Orange and in Germany, it was Web.de, AOL, Yahoo!, Freenet, and GMX.
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