e-mail

Tower of Babble: Four billion e-mail addresses and counting.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Billions of e-mail addressesDavid Baker, a global vice president at marketing technologies firm Acxiom and e-mail expert extraordinaire, wrote recently that when speaking with an employee at one of the major online database aggregators, he was informed that this company had a grand total of 4 billion e-mail addresses on file.

And of these, ~2 billion had names and addresses associated with them.

These numbers are dramatically higher than the worldwide estimate of e-mail addresses published by the Pingdom blog in its Internet 2011 in Numbers report.

Think about this for a moment. Considering that the total population of the United States is a little over 310 million, how many e-mail addresses per person are floating around out there?

Strip away the very young … plus teens and ‘tweens who don’t engage nearly so much in e-mail … and we’re left with the realization that among the core adult audience of Boomers and GenXers, there’s really no such thing as a single e-mail address that can be tied to one individual.

Even if we ourselves don’t maintain multiple e-mail accounts for different purposes, surely we know people who do. One person I know is juggling no fewer than 20 separate e-mail addresses; he claims to be keeping them all straight.

This notion of multiplicity is at cross-purposes with how marketers have traditionally viewed prospecting. We’ve been conditioned to think about an individual as being tied to one physical address and one e-mail address – in the same manner as a discrete mobile phone number or a unique social security number.

In theory, all of these are vehicles of monetization, with e-mail being particularly attractive because of the low cost associated with reaching prospects in that manner.

But in actuality, there’s a great deal of complexity:

  • Which e-mails are associated with opt-in permission?
  • Which e-mail addresses are primary (highly active) versus secondary (relatively inactive)?
  • Which e-mails are valid, but lying dormant?

Because e-mail addresses are “cheap/free,” they’re ephemeral. They aren’t “linear” in the same sense as the data on a residence, a business address or even a mobile phone number can deliver.

Mr. Baker concludes that, far from becoming easier, “the ability to engage a customer through e-mail across a portfolio of communications is becoming more costly and complex.”

With 4 billion e-mail addresses sloshing around in the digital space, there’s no doubt e-mail marketing will continue to be a major force in marketing. Even if half of them are cyber-zombies, digital Potemkin villages or what-have-you.

The challenge is in sorting it all out.

I think the e-mail specialists are going to be at this for a good long time to come.

E-mail early birds? The worm may be turning differently.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Best time to deploy marketing e-mail messages.One of the great benefits of the “online everything” world in which we now live is the ability to evaluate nearly anything about marketing not with hunches or speculation, but with hard data.

A perennial question is what time of day is best to deploy marketing e-mails to customers and prospects. The higher the propensity to open and read these messages, you’re closer to the goal of converting eyeballs to clickthroughs … and to sales.

ReachMail, a Chicago-based e-mail service provider, recently studied a large sampling (~650,000) of the millions of consumer and business marketing e-mail messages it sends out for clients daily in order to determine open rate differences based on the time of day. It normalized the data to account for different time zones.

What ReachMail found was that there are differing peak open rate times on weekends versus on weekdays:

 Weekdays: Peak e-mail open rates are between ~11:30 am and ~2:00 pm.

 Weekends: E-mail open rates begin trending upward at ~11:30 am, but don’t peak until ~4:00 pm.

John Murphy, ReachMail’s president, had this to say about people’s weekday e-mail open rate behaviors: “You would think it would spike in the morning, but they’re looking at work e-mails in the morning. Once they’ve cleared out their inbox, they’re looking at marketing e-mails in the afternoon.”

ReachMail’s conclusion: It’s best to deploy weekday e-mails between 10:00 am and Noon. For weekend e-mails, deploy them between Noon and 3:00 pm.

And this additional tidbit also: Don’t assume e-mails sent during the week will perform better than those deployed over the weekend. “People’s engagement rates are up there on the weekend,” Murphy maintains. “It’s our habit of checking e-mail all the time.”

He’s sure right about that.

Changing the Subject (Line)

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of the reasons e-mail marketing has become so huge is because it’s so darned cheap. Compared to postal mail, e-mail costs just pennies. That means most marketers can achieve a better ROI for just a mediocre e-mail campaign compared to even the most successful direct mail effort.

However, a common complaint about e-mail versus postal mail is visibility. Since most viewers choose not to have their preview pane feature turned on, they must physically open an e-mail before they can view any of its contents.

This “one-step removed” dynamic means that many people never get to see and read a marketing message that would otherwise stand out if it showed up in someone’s postal mail delivery as a postcard or self-mailer promo piece.

In this scenario, the e-mail subject line becomes a huge “gatekeeper” element. What the subject says and how it’s said can make a difference in e-mail open and clickthrough rates. But just how much?

A new E-mail Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, a firm providing e-mail marketing and newsletter services, provides some interesting clues. MailerMailer has been producing these reports since 2003. This report, the tenth one issued, was developed by analyzing a sampling of ~900 million e-mail messages sent through MailerMailer throughout the year 2009.

Among the elements tracked were the words used in e-mail subject lines. MailerMailer found that the most popular terms contained in the subject lines were:

 Coupons
 Daily
 Free
 News
 Newsletter
 Report
 Today
 Update
 Week (weekly)
 Year

Notice how each of these terms conveys a sense of WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and/or a sense of time sensitivity. Interestingly, despite a prevailing concern that using the word “free” in the subject line risks more spam filtering, MailerMailer found that this term was one of the ten most popular terms used in subject lines during 2009.

And what about subject line length? The report found that shorter subject lines (containing less than 35 characters) outperformed longer ones. That’s generally just four or five words along with the corresponding spaces between them.

And the difference MailerMailer observed was significant: E-mails with shorter subject lines experienced an average open rate of ~17.5%, while those with longer subject lines had an open rate of only ~11.5%.

The same differential was found with clickthrough rates. For the e-mails with shorter subject lines the average clickthrough rate was ~2.7% … versus ~1.6% for e-mails with longer subject lines.

The MailerMailer report concludes that while composing shorter subject lines may be difficult to do (well), going through that exercise is well worth the extra effort. The results from ~900 million e-mails prove it.

B-to-B e-Newsletters: Just How Engaged are Recipients?

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

B-to-B e-NewslettersIn the B-to-B world, marketers are sometimes disappointed with the open rates for the e-newsletters they deploy to their customers and prospects. While some are opened by a large proportion of recipients, it’s common experience for e-newsletter open rates to hover around 20%-25%.

Does this mean that e-newsletters are a poor substitute for B-to-B print media? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know how these results compare. After all, just because trade magazines are delivered to recipients doesn’t mean that they’re ever read.

It would be nice to compare B-to-B reader dynamics between print and online media, but with quantifiable statistics available for only one side of the equation, that’s pretty difficult.

However, GlobalSpec, the technology services company that operates a vertical search engine of engineering and industrial products, is able to provide us with a few additional clues. It has just published the results of its 2010 Economic Outlook Survey, which queried more than 2,000 U.S. technical, engineering, manufacturing and industrial professionals on a variety of business topics.

As part of the GlobalSpec survey, respondents were asked about their e-newsletter reading habits. And it turns out that more than half of the respondents (~55%) reported that they read work-related e-newsletters daily or several times a week.

Another 30% of respondents reported that they read e-newsletters once a week or several times per month. That leaves only 15% reporting that they rarely or never read e-newsletters.

What’s more, the readership of e-newsletters appears in increasing. In GlobalShop’s 2009 survey, only ~40% of respondents reported reading e-news daily or several times per week. So the increase in activity over just the past year is substantial.

The takeaway news is that more people in the B-to-B segment are “engaged” with e-newsletters than ever before. Whether you’re achieving above or below the 20%-25% open rate threshold is likely a function of the quality of your content … along with how good you’re doing with targeting the right names in your database.

Spam-a-lot? You Bet-a-lot.

Phillip Nones Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s no secret that corporate inboxes are stuffed with e-mail messages that are – let’s be kind here – unneeded or unwanted. And the latest report from anti-virus software maker Symantec Corporation confirms this in spades.

The report, covering April activity, claims that unsolicited e-mail makes up nearly 91% of messages on corporate networks. And it turns out this is nothing unusual, as earlier surveys have shown that spam makes up anywhere from 80% to 95% of all e-mail volume on the Internet.

So when you look at your own inbox, you might be pleased if your spam volume isn’t that high. And probably it isn’t, because corporate spam filters are blocking a big volume of e-messages before they ever hit your own inbox.

So where is all of this spam coming from? Symantec reports that nearly 60% of it comes from botnets, which are networks of hacked computers that can do all sorts of mischief – not only e-mailing spam, but also swiping financial information or launching cyber attacks. The “worst of the worst” are donbot spammers, which are computers that are available for rent on the black market. According to Symantec, those represent more than 18% of all spam e-mail volume.

But of course, nothing stays the same for long in the cyber environment. A new, even more alarming trend is being noted with an increase of non bot-driven spam. In those cases, spammers are renting legitimate network services (usually located offshore) and blasting huge amounts of spam at large individual Internet service providers. The objective is to push as many messages as possible onto the network before the ISP’s filtering software is able to detect it.

How much of this is going on? Hundreds of thousands of messages each day, and getting greater all the time.

And if that wasn’t enough, just like flies at a Fourth of July picnic, spammers have now discovered social networks, taking over an alarming number of Facebook and Twitter accounts and phishing for user passwords. These swiped passwords are then used to spam the friends of victims with obnoxious unwanted promotional mail about various products let’s just refer to euphemistically as “personal” or “intimate.” Experts say these types of attacks are particularly effective because they can’t be filtered at a corporate firewall level, and because any such message looks like it’s been sent by a friend of the recipient.

So if you’re on any of these social networking platforms, despite their apparent safety, the watchword should still be: “Caution.”