I am in London this week visiting our office here and presenting at our first ever Advanced Strategies conference. We held an all-day conference for a wide variety of email marketers yesterday which covered everything from best practices to case studies to an email 'State of the Union' here in the UK. I walked away with a bunch of great insights which I will be blogging on over the next few weeks.

To kick things off, I wanted to share some of the great statistics presented by JupiterResearch's senior emarketing analyst based here, Julian Smith. Julian presented some of their recent research including:

- 25% of European users have opted in to some form of email program. This is lower than I would have thought but represents a big opportunity for the emerging email marketing community here to meet the growing demand. More interesting is that the opt-in rate varies widely by country with Sweden having the highest at 40% and Italy having the lowest at around 15%

- broadband continues to be adopted in Europe just recently rising above half of all internet households

- mobile phones are a huge force here. As the latest 3G systems are being deployed, JupiterResearch expects their penetration to increase 10X in the next 5 years. The 3G systems provide cutting edge data and multi-media delivery and are ideal platforms for marketers to use in communicating with consumers.

It was great to see Julian again and I heard several great comments from the audience about his presentation. Thanks for coming out Julian.