We've all seen interactive marketing statistics in one form or another, but The New York Times has just published a good article on click fraud that condenses these stats nicely (Marketers Demanding Better Count of Clicks, Oct. 30). Among them:

• Internet marketing has grown 30 percent a year for the last few years.
• Of the $267 billion spent by advertisers in 2005, only 4.7 percent or $12.5 billion went to interactive ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
• The top 50 advertisers spent just 3.8 percent of their budgets on online ads--excluding search--in the first half of 2006, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.
• Proctor & Gamble, the nation’s biggest advertiser last year, spent less than 1 percent of its $4.6 billion ad budget on online ads in 2005. And General Motors, the second-biggest advertiser, spent just 2.5 percent of its $4.35 billion budget online, according to TNS, which does not include search ads in its figures.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember the Gevalia Coffee issue back in April 2005, when Kraft Foods was sued by a small California ISP for allegedly spamming its Gevalia coffee brand in violation of CAN-SPAM? I blogged about it at the time, feeling what I imagined to be Kraft's pain over a hard lesson learned.

Well, apparently Kraft hasn't learned its lesson. I received an email from Gevalia this week. It was sent to an address I have never provided for any list or opt-in (although the top of the email says that I opted in through one of the sender's sites). It had all the necessary language at the bottom, but guess what? The opt-out link failed. Despite several tries, I couldn't opt out. The least I can say is that the link was reported to be working later the next day.

C'mon guys, get with the program. You are undermining the credibility of this industry and doing yourself more damage than you realize.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The U.S. judge overseeing the lawsuit against the anti-spam group Spamhaus has thrown out a proposed order that would have directed the group charged with assigning Internet domain names to suspend the Spamhaus domain. This is great news, as such an action could have seriously fractured the current Internet structure. (See my previous entry on this subject.) You can read more about the case, and the judge's latest actions, here.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

During one of my presentations at DMA06 in San Francisco last week, an altogether common question was raised: Can words like "free" cause email messages to be unduly filtered as spam?

In my experience, content filters don't affect deliverability as much as they used to.

In the early days of spam filtering, increasingly intelligent content filters were used to look for patterns that could predict whether email messages were spam. Words like "free" or "spam" or "XXX" would flag a message and block its delivery. And, while this is still true today, the content part of spam filtering has taken a back seat to the more accurate and relevant reputation metrics.

Why? Because no matter how smart programmers made their content filters, human spammers could always find a way around them. This cat-and-mouse game shifted the focus toward IP-based reputation systems. This meant that ISPs and spam filters started paying far more attention to users' "spam button" complaints, thus pushing the spam filter function back onto humans rather than computers. And, over the years, this approach has proven effective. The problem of spam in the inbox has been alleviated, and users' perception of spam has softened somewhat.

My view on this was bolstered by a recent study released by ReturnPath that placed a specific metric on the weight of reputation vs. content. The figure ReturnPath came up with was 83 percent. You can read more about it in this article.

Even if content filters today only account for 17 percent of a spam score, they still matter, and can't be ignored. That's why companies like mine include built-in content checking systems that you can use to test your messages before they go out into the real world.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As my regular readers know, I avoid using my blog as an advertising tool and only to talk about things that interest me. So I hope you all will forgive me if this entry happens to do both.

You've seen a few blogs from me recently about individually timed email messages and just how powerfully they can affect responses rates. Well, it happens to be an area we've been talking about a lot over the last few months here at Silverpop.

The big news is that the newest release of our email application, Silverpop Marketer, contains an individually timed sending system -- messages in a single mailing can be sent individually over the course of a week based on each recipient's past behavior. For example, Recipient A opened a message at 11:37 a.m. on a Wednesday and Recipient B opened the same message at 6:32 p.m. on a Friday. Accordingly, Recipient A's next message would be sent Wednesday at 11:37 a.m. and Recipient B's next message would be sent Friday at 6:32 p.m. And, of course, you can also create your own timing and ask the system to send based on some external calculations you've done.

Have a one-day sale and don't want to wait a week for delivery? You can tell the system to ignore day of week and just send at the best time of day over a 24-hour period.

And, did I mention that the system will automatically update things like timing of last click if you want it to?

This is some seriously cool technology and I am excited to see what kind of lift in response rates our clients will be seeing as they roll this out.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spamhaus, a volunteer anti-spam organization based in the United Kingdom, is known in the email community as one of the toughest but most widely recognized spam fighters in the world. In a nutshell, it provides a daily list of IP addresses it believes belong to spammers. This list is downloaded by thousands of spam filter programs (including tools by companies like Microsoft) and, according to the Spamhaus site, protects 625 million email users against billions of spam emails a day.

The organization is unique for several reasons. First, you generally have to be a very bad emailer (e.g. spammer) to get on its block list. But, because the block list is so widely used, being listed can be devastating to an emailer's deliverability.

Second, the organization is based outside the United States and has been able to avoid a lot of lawsuits by U.S.-based emailers -- until now.

Earlier this year, one of the emailers on Spamhaus' block list filed a suit in Illinois claiming that Spamhaus unfairly blocked its emails. The court case escalated, and a judgment was entered against Spamhaus for $11.7 million. Claiming that the U.S. court had no jurisdiction over its activities, Spamhaus said it wouldn't pay. I thought this was the end of it, but the U.S. judge decided to take it a step further. The judge reportedly is now considering whether to issue an order for ICANN, the U.S.-based group charged with assigning domain names (e.g. www.spamhaus.org) to turn off Spamhaus' URL.

In the long run, the anti-spam implications of this aren't too significant. It would be easy enough for spam filters to simply download the block lists using IP addresses and avoid the need for a domain name. The larger issue at stake here is the ever-sensitive issue of whether the U.S controls the worldwide Internet traffic system. If this fact ends up allowing a U.S. judge to "punish" a company based outside the U.S., we could see some serious fracturing of the current Internet structure as non U.S.-based companies attempt to move their Internet management outside U.S. control.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous entry, I shared one of my favorite case studies from my book. The online retailer eBags experimented with sending messages at a unique time targeted to each recipient. The results were amazing: the company was able to increase some of its metrics by almost 200 percent.

The technical complexity of timing messages individually required the eBags team to pick just one method for determining each recipient's timing. Team members ended up choosing opt-in date. So, for example, if a customer opted-in at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, they used the same time of day and day of week to send their campaigns. They reasoned that if someone had a specific time available to opt-in, they would have that same time available later to respond. Their results certainly confirmed this method.

eBags only got to try one method, but it hasn't stopped a lot of discussion in the years since. For example, would the timing of the last click-through or last open be more appropriate? And, how do you get around the problem of a static time? It's almost inevitable that someone's best timing in the summer will change in the fall. Schedules are going to shift. Obviously, the ideal approach would be constantly tune the correct time of day based on recent response data.

It's exciting to think about the response rate improvements marketers could drive if they had access to the open-minded technical team that eBags did. It's even more exciting to think about all of this operating at the press of a button -- no more work than scheduling a traditional mailing, except that the email system takes care of each recipient's individual time and constantly fine tunes it.

It would be nice...

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the most commonly studied topics in our space is the best time of day, or best day of the week to send an email. Clearly, if you can increase response rates simply by changing the timing of your campaign, then doing so becomes a no-brainer. (Silverpop's clients, for example, tend to send more on Tuesday morning than any other time of the week.) Figuring out the best time for your product and your list can only come about with testing, but that doesn't stop the industry from continuing to speak in generalities.

The problem with sending all your messages at the same time is that it's a one-size-fits-all strategy. Like a restaurant that only serves one dish, it will do fine as long as every other restaurant serves only one dish. But one day, somebody is going to invent a menu.

A few years ago, eBags did just that. Rather than finding the best time to send to its list, the company found the best time to send to each individual recipient. I wrote a case study about it in my book, and the results were stunning. Using past mailings as a baseline, eBags found that with individually-timed messages:

• Click-through rates grew 20 percent.
• Conversion rates grew 65 percent.
• Average value per order grew 45 percent.
• Overall average revenue per receipient GREW 187 percent.

I've shared this case study many times, and it's remarkable how excited marketers get over the idea. With no more effort than any other blast mailing, they can generate lifts in response of 20-200 percent.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent blog by ZDNet's David Berlind (http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3697) raised an ominous question for email marketers. Could Web beacons, those invisible 1X1-pixel images we use to detect opens, become illegal?

Let me step back and explain.

If you've been reading the business news these days, you've heard all about Hewlett Packard's spying scandal. If you missed it, the short version is that HP's board went a little overboard trying to track down the source of leaks to the media. One of the tools they used was a trackable email system called ReadNotify. This tool is nothing more than an interpersonal email product (like Outlook), except that it adds in Web beacons to track whether someone opens a message. In this case, they sent a faked leak to a reporter and hoped that the reporter would forward it to the suspect board member for confirmation. Berlind has humorously named this technique PattyMail after the embattled ex-chairperson of HP's board, Patricia Dunn.

As lawmakers and the media have a field day with HP's over-the-top attempts to catch their leak, the idea of trackable email is being portrayed as spyware and personally invasive. Obviously, if used for the reasons and in the manner of HP's board, then I'd agree with this view. However, the technology itself is likely to be thrown under the bus as a result of this misuse. And, if the lawmakers get involved, we could see this technology becoming legislated or even outlawed.

Even if the worst case happens, I don't think email marketing will be hit too hard. Image suppression has already taken a bite out of the effectiveness of Web beacons, so I think marketers will survive if it gets harder to use them in the future.

Nonetheless, the HP scandal is an excellent example of how any technology can be abused. I hope the marketing world can continue to be a good example of how to use this technology and show legislators that any technology, whether it's guns or Web beacons, isn't bad in and of itself -- it depends entirely on how it is used.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, the leaders of the RSS marketing world are getting together to take on the latest and toughest issues (not to mention, eating some great food). Silverpop is co-sponsoring a RSS Roundtable Dinner with the folks at Pheedo and SimpleFeed Oct. 17 in San Francisco. The dinner, held in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference, will focus on using RSS as a direct marketing tool. There are still some open slots, so if you're interested in attending, send an email to Pheedo's Bill Flitter, bill AT pheedo.com, with your name, email, telephone and company.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Amidst a near frenzy of investment and optimism about content and marketing on mobile devices, ESPN quietly announced it is canceling its widely hyped, privately branded mobile phone service.

I applaud ESPN for making such a progressive move by launching the service, and even more for its willingness to accept that it didn't work out.

The moral of the story: not everything mobile will be a huge hit, but you'll never find the huge hits if you don't try new things.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)