Are All Webmail Users The Same?

The big 4 webmail services are Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail and while their users should generally behave in the same manner there are subtle differences that a marketer should be aware of. The most obvious one is that Hotmail is used by more home users and I would think a younger audience versus Gmail which is used by a lot of business people.

MailChimp, an email distribution service studied success metrics for marketing e-mails sent through  these 4 services showed that Gmail users were most likely to open and click on e-mails. Another important metric, open rate, varied from a low of just over 20% for e-mail sent to AOL users to a high over nearly 31% among Gmail users. The click rate, or the number of times users clicked on links on e-mails sent to Gmail accounts was more than 7.4%, compared with rates between 4% and 5% for Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail users.

Open Rates
Hotmail-23.8 %
Yahoo! Mail -24.5 %
AOL- 20.1%
Gmail- 30.9%

Emails Sent
Hotmail – 63.5 million
Yahoo! Mail – 54.8 million
AOL – 28.8 million
Gmail – 29 million

According to comScore, Gmail is the third-most-popular e-mail property among US Internet users, though it posted the highest growth rate between July 2008 and July 2009. Unique visitors to the service rose 46% to nearly 37 million.

Top  Email Properties (thousands)
Yahoo!Mail – 87,224 (2008) 106,166 (2009) Up 22%
Windows Live Hotmail – 45,886 (2008) 47,115 (2009) Up 3%
Gmail – 25,304 (2008) 36,959 (2009) Up 46%
AOL – 45,111 (2008) 36,407 (2009) Down -19%

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Wow! Email Increases Likelihood to Buy by 50%

As the founder of inboxFX Communications, a leading provider of custom email stationery, I am always looking for studies that reinforce the effectiveness of email. A recent study from Epsilon and conducted by ROI research reports that more than half (57%) of American consumers have more positive opinions about companies that send them emails, and 50% say getting email increases the likelihood they will purchase – either online or offline — from these companies, according to a survey .

• 57% of consumers feel they have a more positive impression of companies when they receive email from them.
• 40% said that simply receiving email has a positive impact on their likelihood to make a future purchase a company.
• 71% remember email communications when making purchases at the sending company’s web site.
• 50% said they’re more likely to buy products from companies who send them email, whether their purchases are online or at a place of business.
• One-third said they usually visit sites directly instead of clicking on an email link.

One other interesting result was the disparity between men and women saving emails for future reference.  60% of women and 49% of men regularly save email in their inbox to refer to it later when making purchases. This suggests that men are more likely to make impulse buys while women will wait for a deal or contemplate a purchase further.

There is no question that email is not only effective, but is increasingly the number one contact with clients and prospects so it only makes sense to consider using email stationery to enhance your image.  Check out samples by clicking here.

Handyman Service

Retail Store

Service Company

27 Email Pet Peeves that Tick People Off as Much as Spam

As the founder of inboxFX, a leading email stationery service providers,

Junk Mail Concept by Agne Kveselyte

my life revolves around email. The good, inboxFX; the bad, junk mail and the ugly, spam.

I just read a great article about email Pet Peeves by Peggy Duncan, a personal productivity expert. Check out her book, Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette, and Outlook 2003 to develop skills that will help you manage email overload.

Before I share Peggy’s list I have a personal pet peeve and that is people who have to send that one last email after an email conversation is over.  Is it really necessary to say thank you a second time? In an effort to reduce the volume of distractions in a day I have started adding NNTR to the end of an email with the explanation beside it “No Need To Respond”.

I have edited some of these and added my comments in italics so for the complete list please visit Peggy’s website by clicking here.

1. Sending or responding to all to CYA (cover your butt). Stop sending to all if all do not have a need to know.
2. People trying to solve complex issues using email. If it needs more than 3 responses pick up the phone!
3. Dirty (messy) email messages.  Peggy is referring to carets (>>>), or pages and pages of email addresses that weren’t protected using a blind copy feature. Is it too much to ask for the sender to clean dirty emails before sending it? Would you send a letter out on your company stationery like that?
4. Subject lines that don’t match the message. Don’t pull up an old message, hit Reply, and send me a message that has nothing to do with the previous one. At the very least, change the subject line!
5. Last-minute cancellations. Cancelling a meeting at the last minute and letting me know via email. I show up, “Oh, didn’t you get my e-mail?” When did you send it? I left my office two hours ago, and now my whole day is shot.
6. Procrastinators. People who wait until the last minute to ask you to do something as if you had nothing else to do. You know the work was in a pile on their desk, and while they were digging for something else, they found it, and sent you an email message, marking it urgent. Then when the deadline isn’t met, it’s not their fault because they “gave it to you.”
7. People who call you instead of checking their email. You’ve done your job, and sent an email message to people with information they need. They end up calling you asking for the info because, “I’m too busy to check email. Please always call me with the information or at least call me to let me know you sent it.”  Closely related to this one is people who’ll send you a message, then they call you or come by your desk asking if you received it!
8. No response. You send a legitimate email message to someone who has requested information. The message clearly needs a response, but nothing happens. If you’re too busy to hit Reply to say “No,” you need to examine how you’re working. Why did you make me waste your time and mine?

Email Newsletter Deliverability Metrics

I send a monthly newsletter to my inboxFX clients (for past issues in pdf format click here) I have tried each day of the week and different times of day and the results have not changed dramatically. I have checked industry statistics and my 50% deliverability is considered to be a huge success.  It is interesting that when I resend the newsletter to the 50% who did not open it, my open rate is considerably less.  What does this tell me?  Some people do not take the time to open a newsletter regardless of who sends it.

If you are interested in subscribing to my newsletter which features a lot of marketing advice pease let me know and you can help me get m y open rate higher.

MailerMailer, is a web-based email list management service for creating and tracking opt-in newsletters and email campaigns. You can create and send personalized, targeted emails based on your subscribers’ interests and demographics. They recently released the results of their analysis of more than 350 million emails sent by 3,200 clients and this is what they found?

How Soon Do People Open Their Email?
Much sooner than before! Nearly one- third, 32.26% be exact, of all opens occur within the first two hours compared 29.57% six months ago and 29.40% a year ago.

Open Rates
There was only a marginal decline in average open rate, now at 13.20%, compared 13.98% in second half of 2007, which was a refreshing surprise after seeing these numbers tank last year. Recipients are opening emails just a little sooner, too. About 75% of all opens occur within first 24 hours compared 74% last year. Open rates began declining in late 2004 as more people started using email programs that disable automatic image downloading by default.

Click Rates
Recipients continue click at about same rate they did six months prior, with click rates sliding down just by a hairline of 0.17% to 2.73%.

Best Days to Send
Sundays, yes Sundays, and Mondays still hold crown. Seems that a lot of us check email on Sunday nights prepare for upcoming week.

Subject Lines
Our newest chart shows a pretty convincing metric: in general, shorter better. But you really should test what works best with your audience and types of messages you send.

Personalization
Personalized messages result in higher click rates, but now get lower open rates, probably because so many spammers use as a trick get people open messages we are now conditioned not open personalized emails.

Deliverability
Bounce rates dropped again half, meaning more messages are getting delivered.

Number of Recipients
Emails sent fewer people were opened and clicked on more, just like in previous years. A smaller list size does not directly affect open and click results. However, mailings smaller lists may be targeted better, contain more relevant content, or have more recent subscribers.

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Email Audit Trail – Email Stationery

Have you ever wanted to have an audit trail of every email you send?  While sent emails can be found in your Sent Folder it can get clogged up quickly with mundane replys that are not worth keeping.  If you have more than one email address you also have more than one Sent Folder so it makes it hard to maintain an audit trail.

Adding a bcc to every email is also time-consuming and what if you forget?

We have the solution at inboxFX.com the leading, “on-the-fly” email stationery in the world.  We have now added the ability to automatically bcc or blind copy yourself on every email that you send so you can easily find your email correspondence.  One idea is to set up a different account just for this purpose which will accumulate your emails.  Any email sent using our service will automatically be blind copied to you.

You can then refer to sent emails as a tickler system to follow up on proposals, as proof you actually sent an email or as reference for future emails.

This service is available with or without our customer email stationery designs.  Samples of our customa stationery can be found by clicking here.

Call Mike Blaney at 800-568-8338 or email me at mike@inboxfx.com for more information.

To Squidoo or not to Squidoo

I posted my first lens on Squidoo about email branding and I thought I would see what you think.

What made me try my hand at this?  I receive daily Google Alerts on the search terms “email branding” and the other day one of the matches was a Squidoo post.  I decided in my never-ending quest to try every new marketing tool I would give Squidoo a whirl.

It is too early to tell, but I am hoping it will eventually drive traffic to my inboxFX web site.  I will keep you posted on whether Squidoo makes a difference.

What is Squidoo?
“Squidoo is a hand-built collection of half a million pages built by people just like you.”
“Squidoo is about finding people when you care what they know instead of who they know.”
“And Squidoo raises big money for charity every single day by donating money from the ads and links you see on every page.”

What is a Lens?
A lens is just a single, easy to make, free webpage–it’s your signpost on the web, you place to talk about or promote things that mean a lot to you.

Three or four facts
1. Squidoo has more than 600,000 hand built pages.
2. Squidoo has been reviewed by the New York Times, Mashable, BoingBoing and sites and papers around the world.
3. We are one of the 300 most popular websites in the US.
4. We generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual royalties to charities and to our users.

What about the money?
Squidoo makes money from ads and affiliate links.
We give 5% of what we earn, right off the top, to charity. We keep 45% to cover our overhead and stuff.
That leaves 50%. That goes to charity or to the people who build the pages. And we leave it up to you to choose one or the other.
It’s that simple. You can earn a dollar, a nickel or a dime at a time for your favorite cause or for you.
Did we mention that Squidoo is free? Always has been.

Top 5 Reasons Recipients Hit ‘Spam’ or ‘Junk’ Button

Late last year, MarketingSherpa conducted a study with Q Interactive, a leading interactive marketing company, with a very interesting population: people who had recently hit the ‘Report SPAM’ or ‘Junk’ buttons in their respective email clients (AOL, MSN or Yahoo!).

The study explored how these buttons get used, the perceptions of spam and the effect on “legitimate” email marketers. Why the quotation marks around the word legitimate? Because the defining theme of the study is that, in the eyes of more recipients, many opt-in mailers are merciless spammers.

This chart details the reasons why people hit the ‘spam’ or ‘junk’ buttons over a 30-day period.

#1 – I didn’t sign up to receive email from the sender
#2 – The email I received was not of interest to me (has nothing to do with permission or responsible mailing practices. The content simply wasn’t compelling so the recipient simply wrote off the mailer.)
#3 – I receive too much email from the sender.
#4 – I receive too much email from all senders.
#5 – I found the email offensive.

Inbox overload – the #1 challenge as ranked by more than 2,000 respondents to our last survey – is cited by 20% as a reason for hitting the spam button. As filters get better, the competition for eyeballs is going to be less with vendors of romantic pharmacology than with other legitimate emailers.

Top 5 Reasons

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New Study: Email Increases Brand Favorability and Awareness

Datran Media, a leading online marketing solutions provider, today released new Dynamic Logic research that shows inbox advertising can provide significant branding benefits in addition to the acquisition strengths typically attributed to the media channel. The just released results of a branding study conducted with online dating site eHarmony, shows that email inbox advertising can provide significant branding benefits:

1. Inbox advertising increased brand awareness in 37.7% of respondents
2. Unaided brand awareness increased 11.5 percentage points.
3. Brand favorability increased 7.3 percentage points.
4. Brand awareness and favorability both improved when those researched were exposed to the campaign more than once.

” Until now, marketers hypothesized that the key role of inbox advertising was an acquisitive one, and there was no formal research to verify the branding benefits. This study makes it clear that inbox advertising provides significant brand impact across each of the key branding metrics, including brand favorability. This applies to both contextual ad inclusions and targeted stand-alone branded acquisition-focused email advertising. ” reports Jason Oates, Vice President of Media Services, Datran Media.

Perhaps it is time for you to start with custom email stationery from inboxfx Communications.

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When Do You Check Your Email?

There was an interesting article in eMarketer about frequency of reading email that I would like to share with you.

According to a AOL-sponsored survey by Beta Research Corporation nearly one-quarter of Internet users surveyed in June 2008 said they were most likely to check their email upon waking. But more than one-third said they checked throughout the day and the rest of respondents said they checked at various times, including throughout the night.

More than seven out of 10 employed respondents also said they checked their personal e-mail at work—and nearly one-third said they did so more than three times a day.

Nearly 70% of respondents said they had multiple e-mail accounts.

Email Marketing – How the CAN-SPAM Changes Affect Your Company

If you are asking yourself what the CAN-SPAM act is then you are among an estimated 81% of email marketers who are unaware of the CAN-SPAM Act and its requirements. Until today I did not even know what the acronym stood for, but now we all do “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003″

To bring you up to speed, in 2004 when the law took effect, a lot of topics were unclear. It didn’t answer a lot of questions surrounding multiple senders or forward-to-a-friend. Also, industry critics were concerned that the 10 business day rule for removing opt-out requests from a mailing list was too long. It was clear that a little tweaking would be necessary to clear up confusion among commercial e-mail marketers.

So on July 7, 2008 the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules for the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 went into effect. Here are some of the highlights:

Opt-Out Process: The new requirements specify that senders cannot complicate the opt-out process. You can only require an email address on the opt-out page that visitors get to when they click the “unsubscribe” link in your email, and you can’t require a user to visit more than one Web page to opt out. If you require users to log in to an account with a username and/or password to “manage their email preferences” when all they want to do is unsubscribe, you’re out of compliance. If you have an opt-out survey or a five-page opt-out process designed to make your customers think twice before opting out, you are definitely not in compliance with the law. Charging a fee or requiring any information beyond their email address is now strictly prohibited.

One thing that did not change is the 10 day opt-out rule. The reality is that spammers do not honor opt-outs at all while legitimate marketers have not been opportunistic with the 10 business day window, so the FTC saw no reason to shorten the time frame.