Ninety seven percent of sending IP addresses’ reputations are so bad that e-mail box providers are likely to block their messages, according to a study by e-mail deliverability concern Return Path.

Moreover just 0.9% of sending IP addresses scored well enough that their e-mail is likely to be delivered, the company determined.

Read the full article here.

Return Path's George Bilbrey: "when it comes to email deliverability, reputation is the most important element for marketers to work on. It matters more than content, subject lines, and the typical cosmetic fixes that marketers gravitate toward. Sure, content matters for driving response. But it does not make much difference when it comes to blocking and filtering."

Download the white paper here.

E-consultancy.com released a new edition of their Email Marketing Buyer’s Guide.

The guide contains:

• information about the latest email marketing trends
• 23 vendor profiles from suppliers that E-consultancy believes are UK market leaders
• a SWOT analysis for the sector
• market research
• growth forecasts
• tips to help you find the right email services provider

Trends within this market include:

• Increased understanding about the return on investment benefits of effective email.
• Greater take-up of more strategic services over and above broadcast of email, such as campaign optimisation and behavioural response marketing.
• More widespread take-up of best-practice email marketing as industry matures. Relevant and targeted email is becoming a reality.
• Greater sophistication in terms of integrating email marketing within the wider marketing mix.
• Increased use of RSS and mobile as complimentary communication channels.

The guide costs 99 GBP and is free to all E-consultancy.com subscribers.

Download a free sample of this report.

In this week's issue of BtoB's Email Marketer Insight, Karen J. Bannan provides these suggestions to maximize your e-mail customer lifecycle program:

1) Welcome prospects. By now, you are probably using triggered e-mails to welcome new prospects to your marketing or newsletter program, and if you’re not, you should be. “The whole concept is to send prospects a welcome message that tells them in detail what they’ve signed up for, and what they should expect to receive,” Price said.

Your next step should be feeding prospects a curriculum of information, training and special offers tailored to someone who has stepped forward and raised their hand as a potential customer. Never throw new prospects into your existing customer e-mail list, Price said.

“They haven’t been explained the value proposition,” he said. “They don’t know how to interpret your business. Send a welcome letter first. Your next message should be an attempt to explain why they should be your customer in bite-sized pieces, and how they can do so.” 

E-mail list-growth tactics that work well in the US don't necessarily succeed in Europe, according to a recent study by e-mail service provider Silverpop. While the most favored tactic for growing e-mail lists cited by marketers in Canada and the US was offline advertising and direct marketing, the top tactic cited by European marketers was online marketing and search, according to Silverpop's "2006 List Growth Survey". Read the full story.

Click here to register to receive the full report.

Direct Marketing consultant Reggie Brady addressed key e-mail strategies at the MeritDirect Business Mailer's Co-op and Interactive Marketing Conference. Ms. Brady highlighted a series of ways to retain customers through personalized e-mail campaigns with content targeted at segmented clients. Read the story here.

Source: DM News' Email Marketing Weekly

By Wendy Roth, strategic account manager, Lyris Technologies

If you have a website, chances are you have a form asking visitors to subscribe to your email list. Those subscribers are interested in your company and want to know more about what you have to offer.

It's easy to take this key group of customers for granted, especially if you aren't looking for signs that they're tuning out your messages.

You can gauge your campaign's success by looking at these seven key email marketing metrics:

• Delivery
• Opens
• Clickthroughs
• Funnel navigation
• Conversions
• Unsubscribes
• Spam complaints

By tracking these metrics over time for your email campaigns, you'll establish success benchmarks for your email list that will not only show you how effective your campaigns have been, but will suggest changes to optimize future email campaigns.

Source: iMedia Connection

by Kirill Popov and Stefan Pollard

Is more better? E-mailing your subscriber base more frequently can help boost sales, revenue, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth exposure. Or, it could cost money and customers, as we outlined in part one, as well as damage e-mail deliverability. The outcome depends on how well you manage increased frequency and both its positive and negative consequences.

Four key drivers can turn your e-mail financials from black to red if you increase frequency without adequately planning for:

• Additional lost subscribers
• Cost to reacquire these customers
• Potential lost revenue
• Higher spam complaint rate that triggers ISP blocks

In this column, we'll provide a basic formula for your own frequency calculations, delve deeper into the impact on deliverability, and explore alternatives to simply sending to your entire list more often.

In this ClickZ article, Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald provide these 10 common HTML tips:

• Code e-mail by hand. HTML design for e-mail is trickier than Web HTML. HTML design programs such as FrontPage aren't ideal for designing HTML e-mail. They typically add extra code that wreaks havoc with certain e-mail clients. Also, don't use Microsoft Word's "Save as Web Page" functions. It looks easy, but trust us -- you'll commit an HTML abomination.
• Have an HTML programmer code your e-mail template by hand to keep it clean. Alternately, use programs such as HomeSite and Dreamweaver and remove any unnecessary code by hand.

Here's a great technique to display a nicely formatted text-based headline when images are disabled - replaced with the image based version if images are switched on.

Read more here (includes sample code).

By Stephanie Miller

Readers spend an average of 51 seconds with email newsletters, typically skimming the contents. Only 19% of newsletters are read fully. (Nielsen Norman, 2006) That's good news and bad news for B2B email marketers, who are most likely to produce content newsletters rather than tips or pure promotions.

Good news is that 51 seconds is a long time in the email world, as promotional emails get about 15 seconds (Marketing Sherpa, 2005). The average person reads about 200 words a minute, which means, I'm loosely figuring, you'd get about 100-150 words after headlines and images to communicate and engage - or about 5-7 headlines if the reader is skimming.

The bad news is that most B2B newsletters have far more than 7 headlines and 150 words. In fact, we are encouraged to do so: The B2B marketers I've worked with who survey their readers find that subscribers report the length is fine and that depth of material is appreciated.

Yet at the same time, response is low for most newsletters, and this "51 second rule" helps explain why so few newsletters earn any clicks below the fold. Subscribers don't necessarily lie in surveys, they just don't always act (as tracked by response data) the way they think they do.

I've got 10 seconds left to give you some tips for newsletters:

1. Place a table of contents in the preview window to encourage scrolling


2. Use the masthead space to highlight a headline and engage the reader quickly. Think like a magazine cover headline writer -- what will get the reader to dive in?


3. If your key success metric is clicks, keep the abstracts/articles short and punchy and offer compelling info behind the click. Don't frustrate readers by teasing them - provide the full story. But promote deeper info, stats or illustrations to drive the click.


4. If your key success metrics is opens/readership, write the abstracts particular for the email. Tell the whole story, including the punch line. Make the value of your newsletter that it IS a summary - short and sweet and to the point. Think of the What's News columns in The Wall Street Journal front page. It tells the complete story, but in a very concise way.


5. Promote cool stuff that is deeper in the newsletter. One of our clients puts a Quote of the Day at the very end of a long newsletter. Another uses an image of Dilbert and the guidance, "Scroll down for today's Dilbert." Another cross promotes by linking related stories to each other within the email (using anchor tags).

Make the most of your 51 seconds!

Source: Return Path

Forrester Research is organizing an email marketing boot camp on July 20th in Chicago. This Boot Camp will help marketers make their email efforts successful, focusing on when and how to use email, design best practices, create list-building strategies, and measure results. Specific exercises will teach marketers how to evaluate their email campaigns against internal goals and industry best practices.

The Boot Camp will include:

• Interactive sessions on consumer attitudes and behaviors toward email, email acquisition best practices, campaign design, email delivery and spam legislation, email measurement, and email vendor selection and management.
• Training on Forrester's email evaluation tool and in-depth feedback on your email by a Forrester analyst.
• The opportunity to share, learn, and network with other attendees and Forrester analysts.

When: July 20, 2006
Where: Chicago, Ill.
Cost: $2500 or 25 Service Units

To register or for more information, please contact [email protected] or +1 617/613-5905.

Featured speakers:   
Elana Anderson, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester Research, Inc.
Shar VanBoskirk, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

More info here.