Monthly Archives: July 2012

Can seed lists measure email deliverability? A practical guide by the numbers.

A seed list is a set of artificial email addresses, which are meant to be interspersed into campaign dispatches. The underlying seed list inboxes are then checked automatically by software after a certain time. Marketers use seed lists in order to monitor their deliverability. If all emails to the seed list accounts hit the junk folder or got lost, there is a certain probability that this was the case for the subscribers’ accounts, too. However, the reliability factor is often forgotten. I want to shed some light onto the question, under what circumstances seed list results allow good estimations of inbox placement rates or spam filtering rates for a whole campaign… Continue reading

New email benchmark data for your records

I just stumbled over “The myth of the Email Newsletter” – an interesting blogpost from Kelly Lorenz. She shares some thoughts on email marketing differences between Nordic countries and the United States. Let’s bump my ecommerce statistics from the European Commission into the discussion. In addition, I want to enrich them with brand new email benchmarks coming from one U.S. based and one European email service provider… Continue reading

Email pre-testing: Determining required group sizes and margins of error

When testing, it’s a good idea to have some formulas to hand. For instance in split A/B/n test scenarios, you may want to inspect the relationship between sample size, level of significance, and power. Also when renting lists, no one likes to buy a pig in a poke. Instead, the campaign has to be tested on a small segment first. Only if the test turns out to provide a good return on investment, the full run will be booked.

However, the question is, how many recipients should one book for the test? Including too many recipients would only cost in case the list proves to be unprofitable. Renting too few subscribers on the other hand bears the risk that the test results are due to chance. Here’s a hands-on solution. Continue reading

World map of email service providers (ESPs)

Ever been looking for a list of email service providers (ESP) near you? Or have you been wondering, what specialists possibly exist for sending emails into specific foreign countries – e.g. in Malaysia, India, or in China? Then maybe I got some good news for you. Here’s an interactive world map containing about 300 ESP markers that guide you through the jungle: Continue reading

Europe: British spend most online hours, Turkey leads in page impressions per visit

Among other things, comScore released new data concerning European internet usage by country, yesterday. They list the number of unique visitors per country in May 2012, their average internet hours, and the average page views per visitor. These numbers probably don’t translate into email marketing wisdom directly, e.g. in the form of “more online hours mean more email open rates”. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist putting them into shape. The result may be another helpful piece in the mosaic of understanding European e-commerce (and email marketing) differences. Continue reading

Did Hotmail unblock images?

Good news from Hotmail: The world’s oldest freemailer service does not only turn 16 years old in two days. It also may have turned on images and links by default, now. That is for email senders with good reputation scores, as it seems. The phenomenon has been reported on emailmarketersclub.com before. Remains to be seen, if it will be persistent and rolled out globally. Continue reading