The Rise of Email this Holiday Season

Kate Kaye at Protocol discusses how the impact of losing access to third-party company data has made retailers even more incentivized to acquire the email addresses of customers this holiday season. This is hardly surprising, and a logical response of retailers to deal with an impaired ability to target their ideal customer profile through paid advertising channels such as display, search and social.

One wonders whether limiting the effectiveness of marketers in one channel just drives them to others, and whether that ultimately results in a better experience for consumers.

Which is worse - being advertised to with relevant messages, or being advertised to with irrelevant messages?

A push to more email marketing from loosely related retailers may drive customers to explore options to keep their inbox clean.  Email clients have begun to emerge (see Superhuman and Hey) that create a whitelisting process which forces all new email senders to be vetted before they make it to a user's inbox.  A shift to email marketing risks spoilage of that channel in the same way we've seen the rise of ad-blocking software to target display ads.

If marketers see opt-in email as the path forward in an era where targeting through paid channels has become less effective, they need to very careful to make sure that the content they produce is at least as relevant and as targeted as their paid ads, if not more so, otherwise this channel too may cease to bear fruit.

Email Marketing in the Mobile Age

112 billions business emails are being sent everyday, 93 billion private mails. Even though it is not perceived as a very "hip" channel, after more then a decade of successful usage, email marketing still is tremendously relevant. 

With the mobile internet on the rise, sending and receiving mails brings new challenges but also opportunities. The obvious advantage is the fact that with our mobile devices we are always online and many check their mails even more frequently then on a PC. 
On the other hand, conversion rates of mails being opened on mobile devices are much worse. This is mainly because most people do not make purchasing decisions while they are on the go. Furthermore, many people have a higher feeling of trust when they are online on a home PC. Also, it is still hard to track people's interactions and purchasing behavior across multiple devices. 

If you research for the best practices of email marketing, most tips have been around for quite some time:

1. Relevant content: Here it will be exciting to see, if automized content can be increasingly contextualized to address people individually in their (mobile) environment

2. Intelligent Personalization (see 1.)

3. Holistic and integral communication across all channels

4. Modern email marketing tool-architecture that allows a data-driven and comprehensive CRM.

5. Staying creative in the way you approach customers or leads (despite automatization and data-drivenness) 

6. One last important point is the format of the mobile screen. Thorsten Blöcker, head of consulting at the marketing agency Netnomics, says in a blog post: marketeers should try to make their mobile mails as interactive and compact as an app. 

This video shows an example how mobile mails can be optimized for the channel and how content can be adapted to a small screen.

It will be exciting how email as a channel will evolve in the mobile age. If email marketeers make their content adaptive to the mobile screen and if data-driven personalization is used more and more for a creative address, its relevance could further increase. 

World's best Spammers: and the winners are...

After deleting 2751 unopened emails from my junk folder I thought about our DM class on email marketing. I was surprised by the effectiveness of this mean of communication, which works relatively well not only with "real" offers, but also with pure spam campaigns.

I became curious about those companies whose only reason of existence is sending millions of unwanted emails. Most of these will end up straight in the junk mail box, however, a small percentage will be read and an even smaller percentage will generate a lead.
I thus looked for the best in class, the Warren Buffets of the spammers: the top 10 worst spammers.

According to the Spamhouse, a website specialized in Spam (the equivalent for spam of the WSJ or the FT), among the best 10 spammers, there are 4 American, 2 Ukranian, 2 Canadian, 1 Indian and 1 Hong Kong companies or individuals.

Here is the list of the Spammers. Whether you want to add them to your spam filter list or take them as a role model, is your call.

1)  Canadian Pharmacy - Ukraine
A long time running pharmacy spam operation. They send tens of millions of spams per day using botnet techniques. Probably based in Eastern Europe, Ukraine/Russia. Host spammed web sites on botnets and on bulletproof Chinese web hosting.

2)   Yair Shalev / Kobeni Solutions - United States
High volume snowshoe spammer from Florida, (former?) partner-in-spam of ROKSO spammer Darrin Wohl. Son-in-law of ROKSO listed spammer Dan Abramovich. Sued by FTC in 2014 due to fraud.

3)  Century Infotech - India
India based spammers-for-hire. They rent an endless number of servers to host their own spam webpages and the webpages of their spam-clients, such as the infamous "Flooring" spammers.

4) Michael Lindsay / iMedia Networks - United States
Lindsay's iMedia Networks is a full-fledged spam-hosting operation serving bulletproof hosting at high premiums to well known ROKSO-listed spammers. His customers spam via botnet zombies with spam payloads hosted offshore, tunneled back to his servers. He and the gang have been hijacking (stealing) IP address space from companies for years to spam from. Illegal in the USA. 

5) Jagger Babuin / BHSI - Canada
Romanian spammer now living in Vancouver BC. Also known as the "Dr Oz" spammer.

6) Yambo Financials - Ukraine
Huge spamhaus tied into distribution and billing for child, animal, and incest-porn, pirated software, and pharmaceuticals. Run their own merchant services (credit-card "collection" sites) set up as a fake "bank."

7) Vincent Chan gang - Hong Kong
Vincent Chan and his Chinese partners have been sending spam for years. They mainly do pharmacy, and are able to send out huge amounts daily. They use vast numbers of compromised computers -- for sending, hosting and proxy hijacking. Now seem to be an "oursourced" server obtainer for other spam gangs.

8)  First Place SEO & financial fraud spam gang - United States
Seem to be either Northern New Jersey or San Diego, California based scammers. They rent endless numbers of servers and buy endless domains to then pump out "SEO", search-engine-rankings and financial fraud scam spams.
 
9)  Dante Jimenez / Aiming Invest - United States
Spamwarez, lists, "bulletproof" hosting in the finest South Florida tradition. Working with worst cybercriminal botnet spammers.

10)  Josh Henderson or Nicholson - bulletproofvps.com - Canada
Offshore Bulletproof Hosting is his thing.


More information on:
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers/

email marketing is still alive

In spite of spam and the advancement in approaches to distribute marketing information over the internet, email still remains an effective marketing tool.  Marketers have embraced Blogs, RSS, SEO and PPC as online marking tools, but email marketing has improved with the use of email safelists and opt-in email lists.

Reference:

"Do email advertising safe lists work anymore?" | by David Callan

http://www.akamarketing.com/email-advertising-safe-lists.php

In recent years there has been growing controversy over email and especially email delivery. Spam or unsolicited emails have become a very major issue. Many ISP services in their noble attempt to fight this menace have erected such powerful filters that they often keep out email that we want to receive.

This has led many online entrepreneurs to the conclusion that any promotional effort or online marketing campaign that involves email is automatically a non-starter. Actually despite all the problems and challenges that email has faced in recent years, nothing could be further from the truth.

Even as you read this, there are online publishing enterprises that have ignored SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) methods of generating traffic to their sites and have instead put all their focus on only email safelists or opt-in email lists. One company in particular that was heavily involved in direct marketing methods in its’ offline days is now approaching the staggering annual turnover of $100 million. And the only promotional method that they know, understand and use has to do with email.

Will RSS Feeds Replace Email Marketing?

The truth of the matter is that despite what folks have been saying about RSS (Really simple syndication) feeds replacing email the facts on the ground are that there is really no replacement in site for email.

There has been a lot of excitement about RSS because it delivers content right on the desktop of users all over the world. Some of the advantages that RSS enjoys is that it is not subject to ISP spam filters. Then there is the fact that consumers can customize their feeds so that they receive very specific information based on their niche area of interest. In a world where here is too much information being churned out too fast, this make plenty of sense and is bound to save people a lot of time.

However, despite its’ merits RSS feeds are different from email and there is no way that it will replace email any time soon.

Blogs Have Replaced Numerous Email Newsletters: What Does This Mean?

At the height of the spam crisis, it is true that many online entrepreneurs and publishers opted to have blogs running side by side with their email newsletters while others totally shut down their email lists in favor of blogs.

In fact this is one of the reasons why blogs shot up in popularity so quickly. The fact that there are many online marketers who have opted to stay away from email and have instead embraced blogs and RSS feeds does not change the facts on the ground.

The truth is that there are many other online entrepreneurs and marketers who totally rely on email marketing to make their money.

Opt-in Email Lists Can Hardly Be Replaced

Although folks are much more bound to subscribe information coming through an RSS feed rather than opt to receive a regular email newsletter the fact is that the latter is still one of the most valuable assets any online marketer can have. An opt-in email list is usually highly targeted and there are many online entrepreneurs who make a very good living from an opt-in email list with as little as 5000 names. These smart guys simply ensure that as they send out their valuable information, they include highly relevant ads and offers within their content. They never attempt to send out exclusively advertising messages to their opt-in email lists because people hate to be advertised to. But they do not mind relevant textual ads that are very closely linked to the area of interest being covered by the email newsletter that they have subscribed to.

Many owners of huge opt-in email lists never attempt to sell anything through their lists, they instead use them to drive repeat traffic to their sites and blogs where they predictably click on the Adsense ads adjacent to the new content. At the end of the day the site owner ends up making a substantial income from their opt-in email list without attempting to sell anything.

Email Safe Lists

In the same way people join massive advertising email lists at sites like yahoogroups.com and send out their ad messages to millions of people at a time. Despite the fact that not all recipients of such messages open all the email messages they receive, the fact of the matter is that catchy subject headings will tend to get a lot more readership. In fact there are some very respectable affiliate programs run by reputable corporations that have thrived on training their affiliates on the proper use of email safe lists.

Conclusion

So the answer to the question we started off with is a resounding “yes” despite all the problems, email safe lists and email marketing in general is still very much alive and thriving.

Do email advertising safe lists work anymore? | by David Callan

http://www.akamarketing.com/email-advertising-safe-lists.php