Medicare DM Volume to Rise: Mintel Comperemedia
Medicare direct-mail volume for the fourth quarter of this year will top last year’s volume by 20%, forecasts Mintel Comperemedia. Mintel reported earlier this week it expects insurers to send approximately 350 million direct mail pieces to non-customers from October to December 2009. Typically, insurance companies send the most Medicare mailings of the year from October to December, when they’re allowed to market Medicare Part D plan information to consumers, according to Mintel. ...
Q3 E-mail Click, Open Rates Rise: Epsilon
E-mail marketers’ average click and open rates in the third quarter of this year edged up over the same period in 2008, according to a recent study by marketing services provider Epsilon. Average open rates—an “open” is recorded when the receiving computer calls for graphics from the sending machine—in the study of more than 6 billion e-mails sent by about 200 clients during the third quarter of 2009 were 21.9% compared to 19.8% during the same period in 2008, according to Epsilon. ...
E-mail File Sizes, Volume Up; Opens, Clicks Steady: Silverpop
Online marketers’ e-mail lists are significantly larger and their mail volume is higher this Christmas-shopping season over last, while open and click rates have held relatively steady, according to a just released study by e-mail service provider Silverpop....
Stupid Pitch Watch: That's Not PR, It's Me-R
The first time I heard of the WIIFM principle was in an interview with permission marketing guru Seth Godin. “Everybody’s favorite radio station is WIIFM: What’s in it for me,” he said. I’ve since learned it’s a very old concept. It’s also a concept a lot of PR folks and their clients/employers should learn. I am forever receiving pitches that fail to take into account why anyone would be interested in them. ...
Let's Play the E-mail Blame Game!
OK readers, time for a pop quiz: It’s the middle of the fourth-quarter Christmas-shopping season and suddenly you’re experiencing deliverability troubles with your outbound commercial e-mail. This being a business issue, rather than simply tackle the problem, we must assign blame first. The blame for your e-mail troubles primarily should be placed on: A) Your e-mail service provider (After all, they said their delivery rates were among the highest in the industry. Liars. Pants on fire.) B) The e-mail inbox providers who are bouncing your mail (You’re Can-Spam compliant, so they should be delivering your messages no questions asked, right? Let’s sue the bastards.) C) Anti-spam zealots who run blocklists, such as Spamhaus (Who appointed those holier-than-thou weenies to police the online world, anyway? Let’s sue the bastards.) D) The real spammers (Yeah, they ruin everything, don’t they?) E) You (Who, me?) F) Your boss (I told that barnyard idiot we shouldn’t be mailing 18-month-old names. Now I’ve got to make some phone calls and clean up after his/her sorry ass.)...
Stupid Political Watch: Waaay Behind the Curve
One of the great ironies of e-mail marketing is how vilified for-profit businesses have been in the spam debate over the years when non-profits and politicians are some of the worst offenders. Case in point: a dummy address I set up during the presidential primaries last year and registered for e-mail communications from every single viable candidate. As reported here before, the address is getting a lot of unsolicited political e-mail representing the full spectrum of American political ideology. What’s arguably just as troubling, though, is the profound ignorance of best practices in other aspects of their mailings. ...
Stupid Activist Watch: Another Thankful 'Buy-Nothing-Day' Flop
Another Christmas-shopping season, another call from the Adbusters Media Foundation to “Buy Nothing” that has been thankfully, utterly ignored. Reportedly launched 18 years ago, Buy Nothing Day is an annual attack on capitalism—held on Black Friday—by anti-consumerists who oppose the consumption that takes place the day after Thanksgiving. Let’s face it, they oppose consumption, period. This year, Adbusters called on Buy-Nothing activists to take their protests up a notch. ...
Engagement Train is Coming Straight at You
AOL made an announcement last week about its enhanced whitelist—an internal list of squeaky-clean mailers whose messages get delivered with graphics and links intact—that, in and of itself, has little effect on most marketers who use e-mail. The note has vast implications, however, on where ISP’s spam-filtering techniques are headed and what marketers had better start doing if they want their e-mail lists to continue to perform. ...
Busting My Chops Watch: FakeKenMagill is on Twitter!
I am happy to report that some wise guy or guys (or gal/s) have created a Twitter account under the name FakeKenMagill chiding me for an article I wrote a while back headlined: "Why I Don’t Tweet." Thankfully, whoever did this chose the more flattering photo of me that resides on Direct.com as opposed to the one taken from below that begs the exclamation: “Whoa! Look at the chins on that guy!” That anyone would take the time to bust my chops this way is truly an honor. Thank you whoever you are. I am flattered and humbled. But in any case, let’s say I do change my mind one day. What would the real Ken Magill’s tweets be like? ...
Uh Oh, There’s that Pesky 'You-Can-Spam' Act Again
Whoa! Now lookee what we have here. Another courtroom victory for the Can Spam Act: you know, that anti-spam law that’s supposed to suck. Alan Ralksy—possibly the most infamous spammer right behind Sanford Wallace—was sentenced yesterday to more than four years in prison, or 51 months to be exact. Let’s go to the press release announcing the sentencing of Ralsky and others to see if we can spot a pattern. ...
Goodmail Partners with Epostmarks, USPS
One of the most irritating printed communications—irritating to me, at least—sent by banks and other financial-services firms are privacy notices. Every time I get one, I think of the millions of privacy notices banks are forced by law to send every year—letters that only the most privacy-paranoid shut-in would read and that must cost these firms millions of dollars to send. Correction: Those letters don’t cost the financial institutions a dime. We pay for them. That’s why I find them so irritating. However, Goodmail Systems and Epostmarks today announced what looks to be a solution to this national privacy policy overkill, along with the expense of it and other official communications. ...
What the Cox.net Snafu Means to You
In a move that, for now at least, threatens e-mail marketers’ ability to communicate with a significant portion of their files during one of the most crucial Christmas shopping seasons in recent memory, someone at Cox over the weekend apparently mistakenly added the Cox.net domain to the Federal Communications Commission’s wireless domain list—essentially, the equivalent of a do-not-call-without-express-permission list for mobile domains....
EmailAppenders Owner Possibly a Fugitive
The man behind India-based Data Champions/Sloan Marketing—the company that seemingly operates or has operated under EmailAppenders and dozens of other aliases—may be wanted by U.S. authorities on 10-year-old immigration charges. According to anti-spam blocklisting site Spamhaus, the owner of Data Champions/Sloan Marketing is a man named Subhakar “Sam” Surapaneni. “Data Champions owner Subhakar ‘Sam’ Surapaneni appears to reside in the physical jurisdiction of India, probably Bangalore,” according to Spamhaus.org In 1999, the Detroit News reported that Surapaneni was ordered to pay a $450,000 fine under a plea agreement after federal investigators found he had brought in dozens of immigrants from India under false claims and housed some in squalid conditions. ...
Christmas Shoppers Paying with Cash, Debit: NRF
Cash and debit cards are apparently in and credit cards are out this Christmas season. One quarter of Christmas shoppers will pay for gifts this year with cash, a 9.1% increase from last year’s 22.8%, according to a National Retail Federation survey conducted by BIGresearch. ...
More Evidence E-mail’s Not Dead
Someone forgot to tell small-business owners e-mail is dead. According to a just-released survey done by Hurwitz & Associates on behalf of e-mail service provider Campaigner, 46% of businesses with 20 employees or fewer use e-mail marketing today and of those who don’t, 36% plan to begin doing so in the coming year. ...
Stupid Political Correctness Watch: The What Holiday!?
This week, we received the most irritating letter from my son’s grade school we have ever received. It was well-intended enough, just irritating beyond belief. The letter was aimed at getting donations of gift cards, household products and personal care items for needy families during the—get this—“Winter Holiday Season,” and yes, the idiots capitalized it. Winter Holiday Season? Wow. That’s funny. I looked at my son’s school calendar and this so-called Winter Holiday Season coincidentally happens to occur during Christmas and New Years. What a bunch of politically correct garbage. I will give to needy families this year, but not through some program whose weenie administrators can’t even bring themselves to print the word “Christmas.” What does this have to do with marketing? Well, it leads me to an announcement: ...
Email Data Source Launches Twitter Tool
Email Data Source, a company that sells intelligence on the e-mail activities of thousands of companies and brands, recently launched a service that it claims enables marketers to measure the effectiveness of their Twitter messages....
Financial Services, Telecomms Tops in Engagement: Pivotal Veracity
Financial services and telecommunications firms were best at engaging their customers with e-mail in the first three quarters of 2009 while retail, travel and hospitality marketers fared worst, according to a just-released study by e-mail consultancy Pivotal Veracity....
New EmailAppenders-Related Firm Surfaces
Yet another e-mail list-sales firm has surfaced that appears to be related to the same India-based outfit that operated EmailAppenders, a company that has been accused by multiple marketers of ripping them off. This new firm is going by the name Optin Consulting. ...
Yesmail Debuts Mobile, SMS Features
E-mail service provider Yesmail recently announced it has developed a mobile and short-message-service campaign-management tool....
Lunchtime a No-E-mail Zone: Pure360
Contrary to what some marketers assume, people generally don’t open commercial e-mail at work during their lunch hours, according to a new study by U.K.-based e-mail service provider Pure360....
E-mail Not Dead Yet: Study
Amid all the talk that social media will kill e-mail comes a survey saying people apparently aren’t quite ready to let it die just yet. Sixty two percent of respondents to a recent survey commission by marketing software firm smartFOCUS reportedly said e-mail was their preferred channel for receiving marketing messages. ...
‘You Can Spam’ Strikes Again
One of the most asinine arguments advanced by anti-spammers and echoed by an infuriatingly obtuse and incurious press is that the U.S. Can Spam Act was crafted to be too pro business—translation, weak—and, therefore, has done nothing to combat spam. This is nonsense on stilts. As has been pointed out here before, though the Can Spam Act doesn’t outlaw unsolicited e-mail—and, as a result, is derisively referred to as the “You Can Spam Act”—it is by far the most leveraged anti-spam law in the world. Just last week, for example, a judge ordered Sanford Wallace—the original, and as far as I’m concerned only, spam king—to pay $711 million to social-networking site Facebook in a lawsuit over spam sent to its members. The suit accused Wallace of sending messages through Facebook computers to Facebook users with materially misleading headers. The accusation was made claiming Wallace violated … Anyone? Anyone? Why yes, the Can Spam Act. ...
