According to recent figures released by comScore, career services and development Web sites saw their audience grow 10 percent in June compared to the same month last year.
Here is the original:
Career Sites Grow in Recession
Google was both the top parent company and the top Web brand in June, according to Nielsen Online.
Read the original here:
Mobile, Online Video Ads to Buck the Downward Trend in 2009
Email marketing is very much an exercise in human psychology, at least effective email marketing.
Read more here:
The Psychology of Mailing
Google was both the top parent company and the top Web brand in June, according to Nielsen Online.
See the original post:
Google is Top Parent Company, Web Brand
According to a recent report released by Epsilon, 94.1 percent of marketing e-mails were delivered in Q1 2009. Additionally, the quarter saw an open rate of 22.1 percent and a click-through rate of 6.1 percent.
Excerpt from:
22% of Marketing E-Mails are Opened, 6 percent Are Clicked
When you are working in the online marketing world it is important to understand your traffic completely. So many online marketers get busy and forget to really dig in and get to know the traffic they are marketing to.
Continued here:
Getting to know your Traffic
It’s rather amazing how much confusion there is between the bounce rate and the inbox deliverability rate. I’ve been on the road much of May and June speaking at online marketing conferences — and while every marketer understands that if they don’t reach the inbox, they don’t earn a response, there is a sense of complacency around inbox deliverability that is not grounded in the right data. Marketers think they know their inbox deliverability rate, but in fact are either misinformed or just do not have access to that information.
Perhaps I should not be so surprised at the level of confusion. Most marketers are just going with the reports they are being given.Most email broadcast systems report something called “delivered.” It’s usually a pretty high number — like 95% or 98.8%. That’s because it’s probably only telling you how many messages bounced, and nothing about how likely messages are to actually reach the inbox. Bounces are the number of records on your file that either no longer exist (a hard bounce) or are having temporary delivery failure (a soft bounce), perhaps due to an out-of-office reply or a full mailbox or some glitch in the ISP server.
Most marketers who keep their lists clean and have good permission practices have a bounce rate of 1% to 5%. So that “delivered” metric is high, and often stays high consistently. Since it’s the only number most ESPs provide, this lulls marketers into thinking they also have inbox deliverability under control. Those deliverability challenges they keep reading about? That must happen to other people.
What’s the number marketers really need to know? Inbox deliverability: How many messages actually reached the inbox so you can try to earn a response? Let’s be honest. Very few subscribers will search for your message in their junk folder or contact you if they didn’t receive it at all.
You know about spam filters and probably know that some of your email gets lost. However, many marketers don’t know the full extent of the problem. In fact, about 20% of email marketing messages globally never reach the inbox (source: Return Path client and ISP data). And if marketers think it couldn’t possibly happen to them, they are fooling themselves.
Twenty percent is a big number. Most marketers would be very pleased with the instant revenue boost that would result if all the response metrics — opens, clicks, purchases, downloads, page views — went up by 20% this week.
The fact is irrefutable: Email must reach the inbox if it has any hope of earning a response.
The good news for marketers is that the factors that go into whether your messages reach the inbox are under their control. They can improve inbox deliverability rates by following best practices around complaints, permission, list hygiene, blacklists, frequency, relevancy and yes, bounce processing. Marketers need to pay attention to what their reports actually say. And then they must be sure that they know the inbox deliverability, and know it by campaign and by domain (e.g.: Gmail vs. Yahoo). This data should be considered an addition to whatever your ESP or MTA reports as “delivered.”
Knowing that your bounce rate is low is a good thing. But it won’t guide you on optimizing response. If you don’t see inbox deliverability data, then ask for it.
By: Stephanie Miller
Source: Email Insider
by George Bilbrey
From time to time we run into marketers who think that they have deliverability covered because they have signed up with an Email Service Provider (ESP). You’ve probably even seen some ESPs that are promoting their very high delivery rates. This is confusing and misleading, because the ESP fully controls only one of the five major drivers of deliverability failures.
Major consumer mailbox providers and business filtering applications look at five key data points to evaluate the trustworthiness of incoming messaging streams. They are:
1. Well-configured infrastructure: Since spammers typically send email from compromised machines on botnets, they don’t have the access to properly configure these machines. Therefore, badly configured mail servers look spammy and will cause the mail coming from that server to be blocked. ESPs completely control their infrastructure and typically do a fantastic job at keeping them in good working order. Look for your ESP to authenticate your mail with DKIM, SPF and Sender ID. They should also be able to provide you with a reverse DNS address that does not look dynamic. And, they can and should be able to throttle email sends to conform to the ISPs thresholds for how much mail they are willing to accept in a certain period of time. But the absolute most important thing your ESP can do for you is put you on a dedicated IP address. Ask for it and be willing to pay a little extra for it. You don’t want to inherit the reputation of those other mailers that are on your IP address.
2. Complaint rates: When one of our clients runs into a delivery problem, more often than not, it’s high complaint rate that causes the problem. End users at the ISPs are hitting the “this is spam” button at a higher rate on their email. This causes their mail to get rejected by the reputation systems at the various ISPs. The ESP does not control the factors that drive complaints: proper notice and choice at the point of opt-in, relevance of offer, frequency of mailing and sourcing of data are all in the marketer’s control. But your ESP can help you by making sure you are signed up for all available feedback loops and then processing those complaints as unsubscribes.
3. Unknown user rate: Spammers don’t tend to clean their lists of bad addresses. When ISPs see a server sending a high number of emails to unknown users it looks spammy. To avoid looking like a spammer, don’t have dead addresses on your list. Your ESP can help you, by implementing good bound processing that can tell reliably that a dead address is really dead and quickly removing it from your list. But you have control over keeping dead addresses from getting onto your list in the first place. Send a welcome message when someone signs up for your email. You can also implement list hygiene algorithms that prevent the addition of addresses that cannot be good (because they contain typos, or don’t conform to the ISP naming convention, for example).
4. Spam traps: Spam traps, also called honey pots, are email addresses maintained by ISPs or blacklist operators to catch spammers. These email addresses have either never signed up for anything or they are extremely old addresses that have been dormant (and returned a hard bounce) for some length of time. Most ISPs have spam trap feeds of their own or use a filtering technology powered by spam traps or both. How do spam traps get on the lists of legitimate senders? They most often come from mailing to an old list, mailing extremely infrequently (thus hitting those very old addresses) or from using bad data sources. There is nothing your ESP can do to keep spam traps off your list.
5. Content: There are many systems that filter based on content. While content is a less common reason for messages not being delivered than reputation, it is a factor. Systems like Symantec Brightmail, Cloudmark and others are widely used by ISPs to fingerprint messages and determine the reputation of those fingerprints. ESPs clearly don’t control the content of your messages.
Take charge, marketers! Deliverability is your responsibility. And the good news is that you have the skills to rise to this challenge. Good deliverability comes from good marketing. Maintain a good, clean list. If a data offer is too good to be true, beware. Send fun, valuable, relevant messages. And analyze deliverability metrics alongside response metrics so you can assess the true effectiveness of your efforts.