Kikabink News

Some sobering news from eMarketer: fewer consumers worldwide are opening marketing emails, according to a November 2008 study by MailerMailer.

MailerMailer found that the average marketing email open rate was just 13.20 percent in the first half of 2008, compared with 16.11 percent in the first half of 2007. Click through rates also decreased - from 3.18 percent in the first half of 2007 to 2.73 percent in the first half of 2008.

MailerMailer found that some industries had higher open rates – namely banking/finance, religious/spiritual, government and telecommunications.

It also found that shorter subject lines performed better than longer ones. Subject lines of less than 35 characters had an average open rate of 19.6 percent and a 3.1 percent average click-through rate. Meanwhile, emails with subject lines of 35 or more characters had an average open rate of 14.8 percent and an average click rate of just 1.9 percent.

As we’ve discussed before, lower open and click-through rates are to be expected as more people use email clients that require them to actively download images. Since an ‘open’ is only recorded when a small image is downloaded, a lower open rate is almost inevitable. Also, the study focused on email subscribers in general… NOT on customers, which would be expected to generate higher open and clickthrough rates alike.

Having said that, it is likely that with more email hitting people’s inboxes than ever, fewer people will actually open and click on their emails.

In any case, it’s DEFINITELY worth monitoring the trends in YOUR open rates and clickthrough rates, and aiming to continually improve responsiveness by testing subject lines, content, offers, email frequency, and other variables. Watch for sharp spikes or drops which may indicate content and/or offers that do or don’t resonate with people… or may even indicate deliverability issues.

Source: eMarketer, “Consumers Opening Fewer Emails”, eMarketer, November 14, 2008

When the volume of spam hitting my inbox dropped suddenly last week, I thought it was just me. It seems, however, that Internet users around the world have seen a significant drop in spam. And now the intriguing story behind the sudden drop has emerged…

Brian Krebs, reporting in the Washington Post, says that at about 4:30 p.m. EST last Tuesday, the volume of spam being delivered across the world dropped by about 65 percent. It seems that various Internet service providers discovered that a web hosting company in Silicon Valley called McColo Corp. was hosting organizations responsible for much of the world’s spam.

Unfortunately, the relief is likely to be temporary. Those spammers are likely to find other hosts! But Brian Krebs asks a reasonable question: why did it take so long for anyone to work out that a firm in the heart of the Internet and computing community - we’re talking Silicon Valley of all places - was distributing the bulk of the world’s spam?

It appears that McColo - which has not been charged with any crime - hosted a number of key Internet servers (i.e. computers that host websites and send out email, etc) which controlled networks of computers. These networks were used by their various owners to turn hundreds of thousands of compromised PCs into spam distributors or ‘botnets’.

McColo effectively ran the ‘master servers’ that the various dodgy spam organizations used to take over the botnets which, in turn, were used to send out all the spam. When McColo’s Internet service providers took it offline, the master servers went offline… which meant the botnets could no longer be used to send out spam.

Source: Brian Krebs, “Answers Trickle Out as Spammer Networks Remain Compromised”, November 19, 2008

One of the burning questions on the lips of many email marketers is: when is the best time of day to send out emails?

Well, an interview between MarketingSherpa and Hunter Boyle, Managing Editor of MarketingExperiments reveals that it might just be dawn. Apparently:

1. Emails sent before 9 a.m. achieve higher click-through rates;
2. Early risers on the U.S. east coast tend to respond to email before their workday begins; and
3. Marketers with international lists should test list segments based on timezone.

You can hear the interview by visiting MarketingSherpa.

Despite these findings I would urge you to test different times for yourself. Dawn may or may not be best for YOUR market…

Source: MarketingSherpa, “Podcast: New Test Results for Email Send Times: 3 Major Takeaways”, MarketingSherpa

A recent MarketingSherpa case study is instructive for anyone selling a high-priced subscription or membership based product or service, and wishes to boost renewals.

MarketingSherpa profiled Corbis, a photo licensing agency, which was having difficulty handling the renewals of its content licenses.

The solution? To introduce a process for identifying licenses about to expire and allow sales representatives to target those account holders with about-to-expire licenses and persuade them to renew. Sounds simple… but Corbis had licenses covering 4 million online images with varying types of licenses as well as varying license periods. Around 7,000-10,000 image licenses were expiring each month. And at the time only about 2.5 percent of those licenses were being renewed.

Corbis developed a renewal program that used automated emails to remind clients that their licenses were about to expire, and gave a prioritized list of account holders to sales reps who could then contact the relevant members. While this is relatively easy to set up in most off-the-shelf membership scripts, it’s not so easy when you’re a large company and need to modify existing technological infrastructure.

Essentially, the steps which Corbis took - and which YOU can model, especially if you’re running an expensive membership program - are as follows:

1. Automate the sending of reminder emails to members whose membership is about to expire;
2. Automate the sending of emails to you (or your staff) about the members with accounts about to expire (e.g. by email). Ideally prioritize account holders based on renewal value or other relevant factors; and
3. Call those clients (in order of priority).

Corbis’ automated email efforts resulted in doubling its online renewal rates – from about 2.5 percent to 4-5 percent. The follow-up calls further boosted renewal rates to 10 percent in some locations.

What I find particularly compelling is the use of follow-up phone calls. So many Internet marketers seem averse to contacting their customers by phone… but if you have members paying, say, a few hundred dollars per month, isn’t it worth it?

Source: MarketingSherpa, “How To Double Renewals with Triggered Emails and Sales Reps: 6 Steps”, MarketingSherpa, November 6, 2008

My mother sent me one of those email hoaxes today. You know the one that’s supposedly from Johns Hopkins University and warns against putting plastic containers in microwave ovens and freezers?

I thought I’d seen it before… and vaguely thought it might have been a hoax… but the emotive language and severe warnings managed to disturb me somewhat. What if it was true? Had all that microwaving and freezing in supposedly microwave and freezer safe plastic containers put my family and I at risk?

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to take the word of an email that had obviously been forwarded to me from my mum, who had received it from her friend, who had received it from her friend, and so on. I was going to check it out for myself. So I went onto the official Johns Hopkins website and guess what I found?

An article entitled “Email Hoax Regarding Freezing Water Bottles and Microwave Cooking” at http://www.jhsph.edu/dioxins

But it seems my action - verifying the supposed source of the email - is something most people don’t do. Presumably, that’s a key reason why we keep seeing all these email hoaxes: most people just forward them along rather than checking to see if they have any merit or truth.

Actually, let’s explore why email hoaxes are so effective in terms of viral marketing. Maybe we can learn something we can apply to LEGITIMATE email marketing:

1. They’re sent by people we know, like and trust, so we tend to open them. In this case, it was my mum. (Actually, I don’t always open my mum’s emails as she tends to forward email hoaxes and silly jokes… oh, the irony!)

2. They use emotive subject lines that appeal to most people. In this case the subject line was ‘Cancer update from Johns Hopkins’. In a society gripped by fear of the big ‘C’, that’s an email many of us are likely to open.

3. The email copy is also emotive. It taps into a fear many of us have, given our lack of understanding of the various technologies around us, our fear of cancer (nearly all of us have been personally touched by its horrors), our concern for how we live our lives, and all sorts of other fears.

4. The email copy is seemingly authoritative and trustworthy. As well as mentioning the respected U.S. hospital and medical institution Johns Hopkins, the email also mentions the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Dr Edward Fujimoto as supporting the content of the email. Notice how by dropping these big names the email piggy-backs on them to convey proof? In this case, it’s a lie… but there are perfectly acceptable ways to do this.

5. There is no apparent sales pitch, reinforcing the supposed legitimacy of the email. Although the call to action is obvious: to forward the email to others.

Now, go through that list of 1-5 again… has it sparked any ideas about how to boost response rates to YOUR emails? Just promise me one thing: you won’t send out a lie or hoax…