Forgiveness is Good, but Permission is Divine

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Is it better to get permission up front for your email marketing program, or just beg for forgiveness later? This was a central question we discussed during my deliverability panel at the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit with fellow panelists Dennis Dayman of Eloqua (@ddayman) and Jared Hanson of Hewlett Packard (@hpnews).

The short answer is YES, of course it's better to get permission. It's always better to get permission. Permission is the first step toward setting expectations, creating relationships and keeping data clean. However, it's only a first step. Permission does not give marketers a license to just send whatever and whenever - permission must be re-earned with every message. Lots of subscribers who gave permission also complain (click on the Report Spam button), which depresses inbox placement for all subscribers. They also unsubscribe or just ignore/delete.

What really matters is not that permission was granted, but that it is earned, every time a message is sent. If we adopt this attitude, then we'd make decisions like:

Categories: Response

Who Will the Phishers Spoof Next? Could Be You.

by Neil Schwartzman & J.D. Falk

Banking online is awesome. The ease, the convenience, the flexibility - what an improvement over bankers' hours and drive-up pneumatic tubes! And you know it's trustworthy the same way you find your bank building: look for the logo. Right?

Nope. This is the internet. Anyone can steal anybody else's logo, set up a web site, and fool millions of people.

What a bummer.

Phishing and related crime is quickly eroding all of confidence in the safety of our personal and financial information online; things are getting worse in this area by the day. And they're not just getting worse for the banks. Recently, a bank held a corporate customer responsible for financial losses they incurred after being attacked.. Banks don't like to lose money, so this may become a more frequent story as losses continue to mount.

Dr. Larry Ponemon, president of the Poneman Institute, was recently quoted as saying that data breaches were up 600% in the last year. He said the average cost per record lost is $204. Think of how many records you've got in your customer database, just one file on one server. It adds up fast.

Nobody's more aware of these issues than the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an organization consisting of technologists, bankers, researchers, law enforcement, and other interested parties (we recently became a member, as well.) Their latest report was recently released, and from their perspective as well, things simply don't look good for businesses on the net. More brands -- their names, logos, domains, everything -- are being misused in phishing, and the numbers of unique attacks and payload websites have increased to all-time highs.

Categories:

Deliverability Benchmarks: A Spotlight on Europe - and the 15% of Email that Doesn't Get Delivered

By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting

The recently released Return Path Deliverability Benchmark report revealed that email deliverability problems plague marketers across the globe. European marketers, with an 85% inbox rate (messages delivered to subscribers' inboxes) are slightly better off than their colleagues in North America who only make it to the inbox 80% of the time. Europeans are a bit worse off than their counter-parts in Asia-Pacific who get delivered 86% of the time.

Here are some key findings from major markets in Europe:

+ In the United Kingdom, 89% of email made to the inbox. France did almost as well with an 88% inbox rate while Germany was in line with the European average at 85%.

+ For email being sent to the "spam" or "bulk" folder, the United Kingdom had the lowest rate at just 3% while Germany had the highest with 11%. France was right in the middle with nearly 5% of email sent to the "junk" or "bulk" folder.
+ A significant percentage of email was categorized as "missing" or not delivered at all. In both the United Kingdom and France 7% of email went missing. Germany did slightly better with just 3% in this category.

The report also looked at non-delivered rates (messages routed to junk/bulk folders or blocked all together) by Internet Service Provider (ISP) in France, Germany and the UK. Inbox placement rates varied significantly from ISP to ISP. In the UK, toughest inboxes to get into were Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!. In France, it was SFR, AOL, LaPoste, Yahoo!, and Orange and in Germany, it was Web.de, AOL, Yahoo!, Freenet, and GMX.

Categories: Email Deliverability | News | Response

One in Seven Marketing Emails Undelivered in Europe

Anti-Spam Measures Hurt Legitimate Commercial Emailers, Says New Report
BT, Orange & Yahoo! Are Most Difficult Inboxes For UK Marketers To Reach

More than one in seven legitimate marketing emails sent in Europe are not being delivered to consumer inboxes, a new study today reveals. In the second half of 2009, 15 per cent of European permission-based commercial email either went straight to recipients' spam folders, or weren't delivered at all.

The findings come from Return Path's Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, which measured inbox placement rates across North America and Europe. Return Path collected data on the success of more than half a million email campaigns between July and December 2009 to gain the most comprehensive picture of true "delivered" rates.

The report also found that inbox placement rates varied significantly between Internet Service Providers (ISPs). For ISPs in the UK, the proportion of messages successfully delivered to the inbox ranged from a high of 98.25 per cent, to barely 75 per cent for the most marketer-unfriendly ISP.

Categories: Email Deliverability | News | Press Releases