If you have been reading my posts over the last months or have spoken with me you will know I am always talking about email deliverability, the ability to deliver marketing emails into the inboxes of intended recipients.
Historically the delivery rate has been measured as all the emails sent less all the emails that had a hard (fatal) bounce. Today, deliverability is measured as all the emails sent, but not bounced, less those that did not reach the intended inboxes. Surprisingly few email service providers (ESPs), agencies or marketers measure this very important metric.
This week eMarketer let us in on some recent research that shows 68% of marketers using email are worried about deliverability. In the September 13 edition of eMarketer Daily, the leading piece called Delivery Dilemma tells us these people are concerned about Email Filtering, ISP Blocking, Blacklisting and much more.
If you are not already tracking your email deliverability here are some things you can do to start.
Month: September 2005
This week DoubleClick released its Email Marketing Trends Report covering Q2 2005 (press release). The report concludes three forces are pushing down open rates, which have declined 23.6% from 36% in Q2’04 to 27.5% in Q2’05: ISP technology changes, aging lists and changing consumer behaviour.
ISP Technology Changes
Most readers here will know that changes to settings in Outlook and AOL 9.0, and the default in Gmail, have greatly impacted open rates. Open rate tracking often relies on image data and with these email clients defaulting to not display images, that information can not be tracked by email marketing software. Many marketers would argue that open rates are not reliable and not an effective way of measuring campaign success. DoubleClick’s research suggests that what has most influenced open rates is changes in new versions of Outlook, indicating as many as 47% of users use their preview pane to review email.
It seems like it’s been eons, but a little less than a month ago I found out that I got a dream job at an “online start up”:http://www.ojos-inc.com in Silicon Valley. Since then, I really haven’t had the chance to stop and think about what that means. So, when Ken suggested I put together a short post on the difference between working in corporate Canada and being at ground zero of the online world, I finally stopped and reflected.
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