Sorry I'm late! - OME'09 Madrid

As those of you that read my last post announcing that the results of the survey I ran this month was to be released this week-end might notice, I'm late.
Since I am in Madrid this week for the OME Madrid trade show, I will probably not be able to release the results before next week-end (but I will provide a feedback on the trade show this week).
Please accept my apologize for this and stay tuned.

If any of you goes to the OME Madrid this week please feel free to drop by and say hi!
I will be on Cabestan's stand (Stand 73).

More information on the OME'09 available on the OME website.

Email Ethics Q1 2009 Survey

As some of you might know, I ran a survey on email marketing habits and strategies. While the final results analysis will be released over the week-end, here are the first elements that came out after a first glance at the statistics:

On the "best practices" side of things:
Over 80% of respondents segment their DB.
Over 80% of respondents seem to believe email Personalization is a key to successful email marketing strategy and
Over 80% of respondents use a mix of images and text in their email creative.

on the list hygiene side:
Almost everyone claim to get rid of Hardbounces, complainers and unsubscribers.

According to respondents, the 3 most important elements in email marketing are:
Database hygiene, Delivrabilty and attractive subject lines.

Stay tuned for the full report !

RoadRunner FeedBack Loop released!

A new feedback loop has just been released today by ReturnPath (yes, again), it's the Road Runner Time Warner feed back loop.

This feedback loop has been available for almost a month now for Returnpath customers, it is now open to all.

As always, once accepted on the program, you will receive on the registered abuse emails the list of complainers.

You will then be able to remove these emails from further communications and therefor reduce the number of spam complaints over time.

I will add the registration form in the list of available feedback loops page.

And then what? Stamps?

The more time passes, the more Whitelisting companies appear on the market, each granting whitelisting services to a given number ISPs.

What bothers me now is that it's more and more looking like a tax paying system.

My point is, should we consider whitelisting as a seal of quality, then one certification SHOULD be enough to demonstrate your good practices and the quality of your broadcast.

Problem is more and more ISPs sign up with (different) whitelist systems. Should you want to be transversely whitelisted on all (or most) ISPs, then you have to pay for 3-4 different whitelist systems.

My concern is that email marketing is the highest ROI direct marketing vector since the costs are very low and the revenue very high.
By increasing the broadcasting costs through all these additional costs, aren't we damaging the business itself?

What is the real value of these whitelists anyway? Isn't it true that if you match all the requirements to be whitelisted, you probably don't need to be whitelisted anymore?

If you are a high level email marketing ace, then whitelisting will be some kind of insurance on your deliverability (along with some side benefits like displaying the images and activating the links without any action needed from the user).

I'm really hope this whitelist frenzy will end one day...

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

Once in a while, it's good to talk about something else than email marketing and email strategy and best practices.

Yesterday, a colleague showed me a great website and I thought I would share this with all of you.

The website name is musicovery. This website is something like a web radio (kind of), the funny thing here is that you can select a single genre or several, select a mood or a tempo, a time period and a range (from 'discover new titles' to 'play only my favorites'.

You can create an account and flag songs as favs or ban it from further lists.

All of you that are lucky Mac OS X users can also install an iTunes plug in.

I advise you to take a look, very handy in the office when you want to save the battery of your iPod/iPhone/MP3 player and that you are tired of last.fm and Deezer.

Google email Security presentation

An interesting post has been made on the Official Google Enterprise Blog. This post gives a lot of information on how Google secures on-premise emails (including Gmail). You will also be able here to gather some useful information on Postini.

I advise all of you to go through this 35 minutes tutorial.