A recent article in the widely-read UK interactive publication, The Register, calls out a growing concern of the EU government -- that the Web beacons used to track email opens may violate the privacy of EU citizens.

The EU government is currently focusing on the impact of the "Did They Read It?" service from Florida-based firm Rampell Software, but the implications are clear for email marketers. The EU Working Party on Data Protection -- a very influential group in driving EU law -- has ruled that measuring opens without the express consent of recipients violates their privacy. For the time being, this ruling is directional and can't be enforced. However, we all need to keep a close eye on this.

If this ruling becomes law, I hope the remedy will be as straightforward as including language around tracking opens in your opt-in policy. If not, image suppression may no longer be the largest challenge to tracking opens in Europe.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My colleagues here at Silverpop have begun working with the beta version of MS Office 2007. We are particularly interested in Outlook 2007 for obvious reasons <grin>.

We've been pleasantly surprised by the new email client's great support for RSS. As you can see by clicking to enlarge the image below, not only does Outlook 2007 support RSS, it completely folds it into the user interface -- RSS sits right alongside standard email, making for a seamless view of both kinds of messages.

Additionally, unlike RSS solutions by Firefox or Yahoo!, Outlook actually tags RSS messages as new and read. This feature enables users to easily know when they have new messages, just like an inbox.

As marketers, you have the choice of delivering your messages via RSS or via email. The good news for users of Outlook 2007 (and Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) is that they will be able to seamlessly consume either one. Outlook 2007 is just one more step -- albeit an important one -- in the convergence of the RSS and email worlds into one overall message management experience.

A preview of RSS in Outlook 2007:

Posted by Bill Nussey at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jupiter recently released another study on RSS entitled, "RSS Comes of Age" - it really caught my attention.

While it sounds like self-reported usage of RSS users is fairly low (below 5%), the rate at which sites are adopting RSS is occuring at an astonishing rate.

They polled several hundred popular sites to find out their plans for RSS. Sixty-three percent (63%) of large companies plan to introduce RSS within 2006! Seventy-one percent (71%) of those plan on spending over $50,000 and 23% plan on spending over $1 million.

These numbers are amazing and even if they are double the actual 2006 deployments, there's no question that RSS content will soon be flooding the internet. To be clear, the study doesn't differentiate between RSS publishing, marketing, service, etc. However, the fact remains that RSS content will be available from a majority of well trafficed web site in a year or less.

RSS is exploding onto the landcape - readers are appearing everywhere from Google Mail and My Yahoo to Microsoft Vista and the next version of Outlook. And, from Jupiter's report, the content world is embracing RSS just as quickly.

There is a brand new internet channel being born. Even if only a fraction of the users know the name of RSS, they will all be using it before you know it.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The news is full of stories about customers leaving AOL's service, but the folks at Return Path decided to ask, "Where are they going?" Using data from their ECOA (Email Change of Address) service, they found that nearly half are going to Yahoo! Mail. Notably, less than 3 percent are going to Gmail. You can get the full stats from this blog post by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From an email thread the other day on the issues associated with video email ...

A marketer who has not done video in email wanted to know: Since presumably no one would embed a video file in an email message (would they?), and since it therefore arrives externally through a recipient's Internet connection, does video content in email affect spam filters?

This is a great question. Basically, most solutions deliver video from an external source/url (often the Akamai network) into the email when it's opened. But in order to render the video, recipients require a plug-in application -- such as Windows Media or Macromedia Flash -- which email clients like Microsoft Outlook increasingly disable by default.

Both Silverpop and a company we acquired, Avalon, have extensive experience with video email. Our view is that the playability of video email continues to decline overall, although some of the Web-based email clients have gotten somewhat better at rendering it. Whether it works for you really depends on whether the members of your particular list (B2B, B2C, etc.) can or will play it.

I've seen implementations of video email that actually embed the video into a MIME body. Believe it or not, these seem to play very widely. But they suffer from huge file sizes, and thus, huge outbound pipe requirements.

From a marketing perspective, video is a unique medium that can tell a story like no other. However the production costs and playability have turned most early adopters away. The problem is compounded for prospecting emails. The very people with the strongest aversion to promotional email are also those who leave Outlook on its default settings, which prevent video email from working. In order to view the video, a user must click through to a browser. You can imagine what that does to email response rates.

However, all that being said, we do have a few clients who make regular use of video email in their relationship marketing and enjoy consistently high response rates. Their customers want their messages and are willing to set their security settings so that they work.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, now that I've gotten your attention, let me be clear that I am using the words of someone else. Bill McCloskey, a long-time interactive marketing pundit, has decided to draw some fire by boldly proclaiming that RSS is much ado about nothing. He makes some interesting points worth reading in his recent article for MediaPost's Email Insider. Not surprisingly, however, I respectfully disagree. A lot.

Bill suggests that RSS is all the rage because it offers improved deliverability over email and not much more. I haven't seen Bill at Syndicate or the other RSS conferences I've attended, but I can tell you that deliverability doesn't rank in the top five benefits of RSS in any of the discussions I've participated in. When the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, was asked why he robbed banks, he is said to have replied, "Because that's where the money is." RSS advocates believe that RSS is where the consumers are, with more arriving every day. Marketers and publishers want to invest in RSS because well-known brands like The New York Times are seeing amazing success with the channel.

Bill also suggests that RSS is only a phenomenon to the extent that people actively are using desktop apps to knowingly consume RSS content (consuming RSS content from a Web portal doesn't count, he says). I wonder if Bill would be willing to remove all the Yahoo!, HotMail and MSN recipients from his clients' email lists because they are not using a desktop email program like Outlook.

I recommend that Bill send out a poll to a broad set of email users asking how many use SMTP. I strongly suspect that only a tiny percentage will have any idea what SMTP is. By Bill's argument, those who aren't aware of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol have no value to marketers.

The value of RSS to consumers and to marketers has nothing to do with whether it is consumed on the desktop, cell phone, or Web portal. And regardless of whether an RSS user is aware of the term, he or she can receive the content and find it valuable.

RSS continues to penetrate the consumer landscape at a staggering rate. Consumers like it for several reasons that have nothing to do with desktop applications. First, it is easy. Subscribing to an RSS feed requires only a single click. Second, consumers control their permission. They don't have to opt-out and hope that a marketer will quit emailing them. They simply remove the feed from their reader and the relationship is severed. Third, consumers can be anonymous. They don't have to read the privacy policy and trust that their email address won't be shared with unnamed partners.

The only real problem a marketer could have with RSS is that you can't build lists of RSS subscribers to give to partners to prospect with. In my view, that's a great problem to have.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

eMarketer recently caught my attention with some startling data on how quickly Internet mobile phone usage is growing. Citing an A.T. Kearney report, eMarketer said the percentage of multi-media phone users in North America who have browsed the Internet and/or checked their email at least once a month on an Internet-enabled phone has more than doubled from 28 percent in 2004 to 60 percent in 2005.

eMarketer also cited an Ipsos Insight study showing that mobile phone ownership is on the rise worldwide and positing that the devices are poised to become the dominant Internet platform outside the home. The Ipsos study did find however, that growth in Internet browsing on mobile phones was flattening in the U.S. and Canada, where wireless Internet access via notebook PCs appears to be emerging as the stronger out-of-home Internet platform.

You can check out the full article here.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A great new site, www.blognoggle.com, is tackling a problem so many of us are beginning to encounter -- there are so many blogs to read that we are starting to get overwhelmed with RSS feeds. Jerry Bowles, the site's manager, has put together a simple but effective feed aggregation approach that brings together the best and most appropriate feeds into one condensed location. The site breaks out various business topics like marketing and human resources and lets the reader jump easily between areas.

In some ways, this is a lot like what Yahoo! and Google are doing on their home pages. However, Jerry takes it one big step further by actually selecting the very best blogs to include (and presumably constantly changing and updating the list).

And, of course, it's very flattering to be included in his top list. Thanks, Jerry.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)