Did Hotmail unblock images?

Posted on July 2, 2012 by | 6 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on June 22, 2012 by | 4 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on June 21, 2012 by | 3 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on June 19, 2012 by | 11 Comments

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 →

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Email marketing benchmarks by industry (in 3D)

Posted on June 8, 2012 by | 4 Comments

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 →

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

Posted on June 5, 2012 by | 2 Comments

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 →

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Study: Email marketing most effective and well aligned within organizations

Posted on June 4, 2012 by | 2 Comments

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 →

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Study: Email engagement rates for popular top-level domains

Posted on May 15, 2012 by | 9 Comments

As you might know, Return Path acquired OtherInbox some months ago. One result out of this merger is… a new dataset for us, 🙂 which contains some really interesting international email performance measures. It has been published yesterday. Return Path said, they

“analyzed over 3 million email campaigns sent to users of OtherInbox and calculated an engagement score for the most popular TLDs”.

I just had some quick fun playing around with it. Let’s have a look. Continue reading →

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Determining statistical significance for email split tests, pt. 2: sample sizes

Posted on May 14, 2012 by | 3 Comments

In one of the last posts, we addressed the chi-squared test for independence. With this test, we wanted to calculate, if e.g. two subject lines have a significantly different impact on the absolute number of email opens. I provided you with a “flexible” solution. “Flexible” means, it can now easily be extended to your needs. One extension would be to determine the required sample size for each of your test cells a priori. There’s no question that a split A/B test, which only incorporates 2 x 100 recipients delivers a different reliability than one, which includes 2 x 1500 recipients. So here’s a solution for choosing the right sample size — again using the R package.
Continue reading →

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Double opt-in in Germany – is it legally mandated?

Posted on May 11, 2012 by | 14 Comments

I noticed some buzz around the German opt-in legislation lately, or more precisely: concerning the use of double opt-in. (See for example the “Drowning in data” panel recording from the last Email Insider Summit at 38:11, or this tweet.) So… is double opt-in, where subscribers have to activate their subscription by clicking a confirmation link, required in Germany? Here are the most important things for you to know: Continue reading →

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