Cinemagraph videos – new inbox trend? Here’s a quick way to create one for your newsletter

Powerful visuals “own”. They can be very effective in activating your subscribers emotionally, and they are much more easily processed than text. Thus, images usually catch the reader’s eyes first after opening an email. This is a completely natural and unconscious reaction – the brain consumes less energy compared to reading.

Only videos can exceed the power of pictures. However, as most email clients don’t like modern web technologies, it’s still a challenge to bring videos into the recipients’ inboxes. Converting them to animated gifs, which work most of the time (except for Outlook 2007/2010/2013), isn’t a perfect solution for several reasons. Cinemagraphs are compromise between images and videos. Logically, they grow in popularity among email marketers. Continue reading

History of Spam [Fun Video]

In case you didn’t know: “What is Spam” – new episode on the Glove and Boots Blog;-) (Not as good as the Vertical Video Syndrome, but worth watching.)

Thunderbird wants email advertisers to honor ‘Do Not Track’

After announcing to no longer focus on innovations for their email client, Mozilla now released Thunderbird 15. The last major one comes with a new privacy feature that could possibly have a huge impact on the email industry: Do Not Track for email. That means, the user shall be empowered to opt-out of tracking his user behavior (opens, clicks, …) by ticking a checkbox ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’ in the ‘Security > Web Content’ menu. Continue reading

Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo & Co. – webmail usage in the European Union [study]

In the last months, I shared several European ecommerce, internet and email figures. Here’s another interesting one. Ever wondered, how popular cloud-based email services like Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail are – e.g. in the U.K., in Germany, or in Sweden? Answers come from a recent comScore study. I just felt like putting some of them into a map. Continue reading

[Tool] Bypassing image suppression in emails: Mozify!

I was pretty much amazed when I opened yesterday’s Email on Acid newsletter. The company’s email marketing blog rocks, and it seems their new feature Mozify is just as great. Take a look at my screenshots from their email below and you’ll know what I mean – the left one is captured with image blocking enabled (!), the right one with images loaded: Continue reading

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