An ongoing discussion in the industry regards whether or not email marketing can be a conversation. The notion that it should be a conversation has quickly evolved into what almost amounts to a philosophy for some. You will hear some very smart people evangelize this way of doing things.
Social Email Marketing

Leave the philosophy to people with more time. Your decision is about resources, image and marketing priorities

Resources: If you only have resources to do something very badly, then better not do it at all. This is a corollary of “do one thing well”. So if you’re very understaffed, don’t try to handle email replies.

Image: People don’t like “no-reply” email addresses, or statements like “please do not reply to this address as it is not monitored”. These are rather offensive and not even true, because all commercial email addresses should be monitored for some types of replies such as bounces. If you have to block most email replies, e.g. because of spam problems, then turn it into a positive by providing a reply form or public forum. If you don’t, then people will use unofficial channels such as Twitter.

A major advantage is that you stay in control of your image. There is (almost) no way of censoring tweets, or Facebook posts. But emails are already private. And if people are posting complaints in *your* forum on your site, then you can stop Google from indexing it (details) so the complaints get less exposure. We know of one very large company who set up a private complaints forum for exactly this reason.

Marketing Priorities: If you want to keep your customers engaged, and are emphasizing social marketing, then handling email replies is an essential part of the mix. If not, e.g. because people don’t make regular purchases of your type of product, then do the bare minimum.

If you found this post informative please do head across to the original site or find marketingXD on twitter.

‘Twas the month before Christmas, when all through the land,

marketers were scheming to hit year-end plans.

Their e-mails were designed in great detail and care,
in hopes that all of their customers soon would be there.

Mail the entire list. Mail them all!
Mail away! Mail away! Mail away all!”

The executives were nestled all snug in their beds,
with visions of Q4 revenue dancing in their heads.

When back in the office arose such a clatter,
that delivery support ran to see what was the matter?

Away to their reporting tools they flew like a flash,
investigating each client’s mailing to look for the trash.

The data before them on the newly sent mail
gave all indications of why they did fail.

When what to their wondering eyes should appear,
but a slew of bounce codes that no one would endear.

Unknown User! Inactive Account! Mailbox Doesn’t Exist!
Blocks from the ISPs were hard to resist.

If only they’d listened and segmented their data.
Their mailing would have been delivered, staying off of the ISP’s radar.

Relevance, hygiene, permission and more,
ultimately gets the campaign safely out the door.

Reach out to your clients now and give them a shout.
Make sure they understand what this is all about.

Eliminate unknown users, non-responders, and hard bounces alike,
and watch delivery and response rates soar and spike.

It is important to take heed of this trustworthy advice,
because the ISPs know if you’re naughty or nice.

During this important mailing season we must get it right.
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good-night!

In terms of sample size, statscounter.com have circa 16.3 billion web hits each month which they analyse and segment by country.

What I found interesting on the site was their mobile vs desktop graph which shows that 12 months ago 98.85% of all web hits within the sample came from desktop computers where as now its only 96.19%, what fills the gap? Mobile. Mobile usage is growing (1.15% of hits 12 months ago, now 3.81% of all web traffic sampled) and no doubt you will have seen countless blog articles about how important mobile is likely to be in your future marketing mix. Some of this trend will doubtlessly be due to the rise in social networking which is already fully integrated to mobiles devices like iPhone, iPad, Andriod, blackberry etc. but consumers email usage patterns are also changing. At least 5% of all email received is now read on mobile devices (Source: Gauge April 2010).

This got me thinking, what’s the trend within mobile itself? Which devices are growing?, which are fizzling out? and what is the future of mobile likely to be? Conveniently statscounter also had the answer.

Figure 1. All mobile platform usage over period 2009-10 to 2010-10

So what does figure one show? It shows traditional mobile operating systems like symbian (Nokia), Sony Ericsson and Samsung OS are on the decline whilst the new generation BlackBerry (RIM), Android and iPhone unsurprisingly are rapidly being adopted. So which of these are growing the fastest?

Figure 2. New Generation smartphone adoption over 12 months.

A week ago thenextweb.com posted an article on the US sales figures of these three big players for the 3rd quarter of this year. Their findings were that some 43.6% of smartphones sold in the US in the third quarter of 2010 were Android devices. Apple sold only 26.2% of the total US smartphones for the three month period. In terms of units thats 9.1 million Android units were sold vs 5.5 million Apple smartphones, whilst Microsoft managed to sell 3% of the overall market with their phone 7 offering.

This tallys quite well to the actual web traffic figures that statscounter.com publish, in the last 12 months blackberry has gone from 9% to 18% of traffic, a doubling in web traffic market share. Apple however has shrunk in its presence from 30% to 23%. Although more iPhone units are being adopted each day, iPhone adoption as a percentage is dropping. Losing out to blackberry and massively to Android which according to thenextweb.com is selling nearly double the number of phones in the US and whos smartphone web usage has shot up from 2.5% to 10.5% in 12 months, that’s an increase of over 400%.

Don’t expect this to slow either, as more handset manufacturers see the power that Android offers both their consumers and them as manufacturers more are and will continue to adopt android. Infact some of the lower end phones are now coming with Android OS installed.

What does this mean for marketers?

• Develop your mobile marketing apps across the three main platforms.

If you are thinking about creating a new app to promote your brand, make sure you develop it across all three platforms, and especially consider developing for Andoid, the smartphone marketplace is no longer a 1 horse race consisting of iPhones and as time goes on less of your potential customers will have access to your app if you don’t go multi platform.

• Test your emails on mobile

You likely already test your marketing emails on various webmail clients, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. You should start testing on mobile devices too, how does your email look to the 5% and growing people who are opening your email on their phones?

• Consider investing in mobile marketing.There are many geosocial applications out on the market place now like facebook places, foursquare, geomium. which allow you to target people based on their location, if they are near one of your shops, let them know why they should visit. More and more potential customers going forward will have the capability to receive this form of advertisement as smartphones continue to be adopted in large numbers.

Further update: March 2011 figures briefly reviewed.

The UK based Spamhaus did not defend the case which was brought to the courts on the basis of loss of earnings and the ruling was made in their absence. Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation’s blocklist listing, and post a notice stating that it was inaccurate and wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending spam.

Spamhaus ignored the ruling and e360 insight responded by calling on the court to order the domain registrars Tucows or ICANN to suspend the spamhaus domains which would have taken the whole blocklist offline however the court denied this request.

e360 claim that 3 billion out of the 6.6 billion emails it sent on behalf of clients were blocked as a direct result of the listing as such a large percentage of mail administrators use the spamhaus blocklist as a method of determining whether a particular email is spam or not.

In mid June 2010, the appeals court slashed the $11.7m ruling to just $27,002 after it said e360 insight had been unable to substantiate its claims for loss of earnings and that the method used to calculate the loss of earnings was unscientific and not backed up by expert opinion.

The $27k was made up of $27000 compensation for loss of one e360 client which works out to be one months additional work that e360 would have had if it were not for the blocklisting and for the loss of two further clients $1 per client was awarded.

The judge also turned down e360 insight’s request of an injunction preventing spamhaus from being able to list e360 again in the future.

Google have updated the Gmail website to detect iPad’s and to hide the inbox messages on the side and make more of the compose screen which is now visible immediately.

Below: The iPad showing the new Gmail compose window.

To try out Gmail on the iPad, just go to gmail.com in Safari. Please note that the new interface is only available in US English at the moment and google have not confirmed plans to roll this out in other languages.

Target audience

Lets think for a moment about the iPad’s target audience, business or home user?

Without a doubt the iPad’s target market is predominately the home user. Likewise their mac’s, mac books and iPhones are aimed at home users. Yes sure there are business users, but predominantly the target market and where Apple excel most is the home user.

What does this mean for email marketers?

The iPad is designed to be mobile, this allows home users to use it sitting comfortably on the sofa browsing or whilst commuting and enables them to email and use apps whilst relaxed. It is not designed to be used at a desk, for answering email after email and therefore the user is likely to be more relaxed and have more time to absorb your brand message. If a user opens their email they are less likely to be short of time and more likely to engage with the content provided its relevant and targeted to them. Arguably mobile devices offer the same and for sure mobile use of email is increasing month on month but the iPad offers an unparaelled experience where the web is not compromised by smaller screens, incompatible webpages and emails and consequently we expect to see higher engagement on the iPad than the current mobile devices.

HTML 5 Standards Support including video in email

The iPad uses the standard apple webkit to render emails, this means that if you currently test your emails on Apple Mac’s or iPhones your email is likely to display identically in the iPad as it uses the same rendering engine.

In addition to supporting modern web standards the iPad offers images on be default as soon as an email is opened, and even in the preview pane. For email marketers this means opens are tracked from the moment the email is displayed within the large preview screen without having to have the user click or enable images for your email.

The apple webkit also has HTML 5 support, which along with being able to render images on the fly has native video support. Yes, this means video in email without using third party products such as goodmail certified video or having to use a streaming server and relaying on third party components being installed remotely on the device displaying the webpage or email.

Size of the market

Within 12 months of the iPhone launch the market penetration grew to be over 4% of people using email. Most of these people combine their use with another device but if your email didnt look interesting to start with on the iPhone the chances are it got deleted and never reached the PC/Mac which traditionally you may well have been designing for.

If iPad usage grows in a similar fashion we may well find that close to 10% of all emails we send will either be opened by an iPad or other mobile device users. The Email Manual advise is that you start testing your emails on mobile devices as this is becoming a huge proportion of your potential customer base and if your emails don’t work properly on these sorts of clients you are likely to find the subscriber emotionally unsubscribing from your emails. Emotional unsubscribes result in more spam complaints, less converted prospects and ultimately less revenue from your email marketing campaigns.

Do you have an Apple iPad already? Would love to hear your feedback specifically around how it handles email.

We are only expecting on the move access to rise as a result of the iPad introduction outside of the US at the end of this month and consequently as a result of the 3.8% mobile use on our site we have made some optimisations to the look, feel and usability of the site using mobile browsers.

You will no longer see the normal website as displayed if you visit the blog via a PC or Mac but instead you will see a specific mobile version of the site which is designed to look and feel like a native iPhone application.

If for any reason you prefer to see the site as if it were displayed within a standard browser there is a toggle button available at the bottom of the mobile version of the site which you can use to toggle the feature on and off.

We hope you will enjoy the easier, more flexible site from your mobiles and look forward to your feedback.

The court awarded the ISP damages of $865,340, but went on to triple the amount, to 2.596m, because, they said, the Find a Quote spammers, including defendant Edward Heckerson, had employed automatic scripts to send their messages.

For more information and the full story please see ‘the register’ article.

The new hotmail makes major advancements by integrating with Microsofts cloud based skydrive (allowing people to send upto 10gb attachments) to share videos, images etc as well as competing with googlemail by allowing users to modify their powerpoint and office documents online.

Other new features include:

• Social email highlights: Hotmail identifies and categorises emails from social networks like facebook in your inbox, making it easier to sort through your emails.
• One click filters: Filter your entire inbox to only show messages from specific contacts or companies.
• Sweep functionality: A virtual brush that allows people to easily remove or file emails from a specific sender in their inbox into folders. Auto-sweep can archive any future emails from that sender so they do not appear as clutter in the inbox automatically.
• Optional conversation view: Hotmail gives people the option to view messages by threaded conversation to view an entire conversation series in one go.
• Advanced search and automated search suggestions. Hotmail has added an advanced search pane and made advanced search easy with inbox search auto-complete.  People can type a single letter into the search box and Hotmail automatically suggests a number of searches to help people find the email they are looking for.
• Enhanced support for mobile users. Mobile browsing is optimised for the latest round of smartphones like the iPhone allowing seemless browsing as if you were on your computer.

In addition there is the new “Microsoft active view” which enables you to view specific content directly within the email body such as YouTube videos, Flickr photo albums, and Linkedin notifications.

The new hotmail will first be released to Austrialian users within a few months and will then be spread to the rest of the globe.

A preview of the new hotmail features is available below:

Thuerk wanted to send all 600 ARPAnet members on the West Coast of the US an e-mail invitation. He decided it was too much work to send everyone a single e-mail, which was the standard practice at the time, so he decided to send one e-mail to everyone. The reaction from the net community was fiercely negative and earned DEC a stern reprimand from Major Raymond Czahor – chief administrator of Arpanet, but Thuerk’s spam did generate some sales.

Thuerk’s innovation earned him the dubious honor of being added to the Guinness World Records when the term “spam” didn’t exist yet.

Following the first spam message a long chain of discussion between APRAnet users who were concerned about censorship on Apranet occured which can be viewed here.

On spams 32nd birthday despite many ideas, we still have not managed to resolve the spam problem, willl domain based reputation be the answer?

Sources:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Thuerk

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/18084/spam-turning-30-this-month-no-gifts-please/