Category Archives: english

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

Fragmented Europe: Internet access, mobile broadband, social networking – Pt. 2

I got a little add-on to yesterday’s post. I thought, augmenting our dataset with the population of each European country in 2011, would surely be a good idea. This allows us to view not only the relative progresses (e.g. “The Finns are more advanced in mobile broadband adoption than the Frenchmen”), but also absolute market sizes (“Nevertheless, the French mobile market is still bigger than the Finnish one – I can reach much more people on mobile phones there”). Here are seven more figures: Continue reading

Fragmented Europe: 7 E-commerce stats from the Commission’s Digital Agenda Scoreboard

If you market products and services across Europe, the European Commission’s Digital Agenda Scoreboard is definitely worth a look. The latest annual scoreboard has been released last Monday. Check out the avaiblable open data for the different markets. It e.g. shows internet access via mobile devices by country, differences in online shopping behavior, and more. To provider you an easy access to the information, I made some figures for 2011’s most interesting facts: Continue reading

Where & why emails (don’t) get delivered – Sender Score benchmark data from Return Path

The email deliverability specialists from Return Path just released their new “Sender Score™ Benchmark-Report 2012”. It’s fully packed with new insights and tips, centering around global email deliverability issues and the senderscore.org reputation database.

The PDF report is an interesting read. However, being as data addicted as I am, I just had to play around with the numbers myself. Let’s look beyond the tables. Continue reading

Email marketing benchmarks by industry (in 3D)

In a discussion on emailmarketersclub.com I just stumbled over some interesting benchmarks that have been published by MailChimp a while ago. Email senders have always been keen on comparing themselves to others in order know where they stand. The reported data, although from 2010, might be a good reference for small enterprises. From a consultant perspective, it would also be interesting to know if there are industry groups that perform similarly good or bad. Well, have a look at my fancy little email marketing benchmark cube… Continue reading

Spam filtering: No, Gmail doesn’t like bit.ly links

A rather big part of my weekly newsletter goes out to Gmail accounts. Too bad, if those emails don’t make it through the spam filter to the inbox. But hey, I got my lesson learned… 😉 Continue reading

Study: Email marketing most effective and well aligned within organizations

New study from the CMO Council is out, entitled “Integrate to Accelerate Digital Marketing Value – Driving Digital Marketing Performance with the Right Platforms, People, and Processes”. It includes interviews with digital marketing leaders (e.g. Sears & Xerox) and the results of a survey among more than 200 senior corporate marketing leaders. The data shall help to understand, where and why budgets are applied. It also reveals an interesting perspective on our workhorse: email marketing. Continue reading