» Deliverability

This news release needed to be posted in the blog for numerous reasons. The biggest, of course, is the fact that an entire team of business and high tech experts, as well as numerous email industry insiders, were utilized to locate Zrinity and to ultimately choose the Zrinity email delivery and marketing systems for use within Eldorado Resorts.

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There are a few different business activities that people refer to as behavioral marketing. We discuss them all then drill down into the specific means to conduct behavioral email marketing. Zrinity coders recently added Google Analytics to their email campaign metrics, thus giving valuable information about email recipients who follow links to the Web site. This empowers email ... Read Full Story

In a recent article by Ken Takahashi, Ken says that pricing based solely on bandwidth without qualifying each and every customer is not the best way to do it. We think he is right! In fact, we, at Zrinity, have been brainstorming on this exact iss ... Read Full Story

Zrinity Email Delivery Algorithm: Millions of Decisions a Minute

There is no doubt that the email delivery algorithm producers at Zrinity are far ahead of their peers in the email industry, but it amazed me as I interview them, how FAR ahead they are. Matt Finn is one of the key coders for Zrinity's email systems and I thought it would be interesting to publish some of the conversation ... Read Full Story

Yet another example of a technology that most in the industry consider a NEW technology, but it is very similar to email. Odds are that both methods of communication will co-exist through the near future.

The author David A. Utter, a staff writer for WebProNews, started with the old song Video Killed the Radio Star,as a sort of analogy to RSS Killing the Email Star. Hmmm, does anybody question the fact that video did, in fact, not kill the radio star. In fact, radi ... Read Full Story

In 1995, when programmers first began to code database driven Web portals it was an uphill battle to convince business managers as to the benefits of a database driven sites. Especially a site driven from the corporate database. Sites driven by the main corporate DB's helped avoid much re-work by avoiding the need for additional personnel whose responsibility was to add data to the Web site which was already in the process of being added to the internal database. The same old technology had ... Read Full Story

According to a new study the return on email campaigns was $15.50 which was 17% higher than direct marketing campaigns.

The amazing thing here is that despite the fact that most systems, especially the over 80% that are outsourced are handling their email marketing campaigns in an "Ugly" fashion, according to industry insiders. Imagine if we could take it from "ugly" to "Pretty" how much higher we could make that ROI! I predict that "Pretty" would bring over 100% more revenue per do ... Read Full Story

Read the full marketing trends post ... Read Full Story

Rob's Most Recent Post at New Millennium Minds explores a disturbing trend in the SEO industry and chellenges legitimate SEO's to answer his Eight Simple Rules...

Choosing Search Engine Optimization Experts

Are They All Scam Artists?

Researchers at the Sociable Media Group, in the MIT Media Lab have a project going to visualize email archives as a growing mountain:

Mountain visualizes a person's email archive in terms of all the people with whom this person has been in touch over the years. Each layer in the Mountain represents a different person. Layers are order ... Read Full Story

Chip thinks so, and so do we. DKIM is Yahoo, and Cisco's joint effort to create a sender authentication standard. Here's what chip has to say:

DKIM has a good chance of becoming an industry standard, because it is being released as open-source code, but also because of the size of the community that supports it, including Yahoo, GMail, and likely Earthlink. Plus, the DKI ... Read Full Story

Remember the last Apprentice season? Apprentice is the Donald Trump show that inadvertantly helped the business email industry. One of the teams hired a local NYC email marketing company and produced over twelve times the amount of revenue as the opposing team. The point that really is amazing is that they used a rented list to produce the phenominal results. If they had used a home grown list they would have at least doubled these results.

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I recently wondered how long email deliverability has been a recognized concern. I combined Google and other search results and found what I think is the oldest reference regarding concerns and email deliverability issues. It was published on July 7th, 2003 by Jessica Albon via WebProNews. It was an interview with then President and CEO of Habeas, Inc. The folks at the Radiant Marketing blog have been posting about email marketing and deliverability issues since January, 2004.

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There is a new movement under way in the email industry. The movement is likely to accomplish some lofty goals. Newer business class email servers are evolving and marketers and IT managers alike are now paying for what they were use to getting for free. Here’s the goals we think these newer enterprise level servers will accomplish.

• A severe reduction in spam email.
• A higher degree of email security. Almost a 100% reduction in phishing attacks.
• More r ... Read Full Story

This case study shows that small businesses strapped for cash can use email marketing to generate revenue in very short time. With local email list management experts they increased list membership by two hundred fifty percent, open rates went up by fifty percent and click through rates up thirty four percent. Management saw a quick return on investment and hired a permanent employee to manage the newsletter.

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Email marketers need to rethink the process of email campaigns for more effectiveness and to defeat spammers. In the article listed below we propose a new way to think of the process, perils involved regarding email deliverability and tools used to positively affect email deliverability rates.

Email Deliverability Article

Just as AOL stated years ago, “Nobody from AOL will not contact you to ask for your credit card number.” If somebody emails, calls or otherwise contacts you claiming to be a company you do business with and asks for personal information, directs you to a Web page to submit personal information, or otherwise attempts to draw personal information from you, STOP! Don’t do it. They are fishing for information. Of course, to be newsworthy, it has to be spelled differently in the new millenni ... Read Full Story

Yahoo! and Cisco plan to roll up their existing email sender authentication packages DomainKeys, and Internet Identified Mail (IIM) respectivly into one standard called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). DKIM "will be offered royalty-free to the industry-at-large."

"Yahoo! is receiving more than 350 million messages signed by DomainKeys per day. By collaborating with key industry players like Cisco and technology visionaries like Eric Allman of S ... Read Full Story

c|net has published an article about a recent study on email usage. The study found that:

• people check their mail about five times a day
• 25% can't go without email for more than 3 days
• 41% check email first thing in the morning, before coffee
• 60% check email on vacation
• 47% check personal email at work
• Nearly 32 percent admitted ... Read Full Story

Fred Wilson - of A VC Blog talks about the importance of getting the [e]mail through:

Last summer Coldwater Creek realized that only 70% of its mail to its customers was getting through.

And because their online sales are highly c ... Read Full Story

Rich Brooks explores the question: when is it OK to take email addresses you've collected and add them to your email marketing campaign?. In his blog entry he explores several definitions of spam, and comes to some conclusions:

• There's a difference between an email newsletter and email blasts...just don't ask me why.
• Selling someone something is not the same as implied ... Read Full Story

A bounce or delivery status notification is the medium used by mail servers to communicate delivery problems to humans. Unfortunately, the only humans who understand the messages, known as bounces, are people who eat, sleep and breathe email communications. Your typical email server manager will not likely be an expert in this field. Bounces don't follow a consistent format. In fact, there are over one thousand seven hundred different formats recognized today by those who ... Read Full Story

After reading MarketingSherpa's latest article called: RSS in Reality: Not a Replacement for Email - Metrics & Best Practices it is pretty clear that they do not understand RSS.

RSS is a content medium just like email is - RSS even supports attachments, these are called enclosures in RSS. RSS is consumed by a client - the clients can be web ba ... Read Full Story

Here's a good article by internet retailer about personalization in email.

Among [the trends] is the use of dynamic content and special customer appreciation offers. "Email offers an incredible opportunity to build a dynamic conversation and unique user experience, but only if you leverage the data, intelligence and expressed preference of your customers,"

This is one of the things that ... Read Full Story

B2B online, has an article called: What can I do to re-engage inactive subscribers on my e-mail list?

The article suggests the following:

• Pull inactive subscribers into a seperate list
• Pull your data together and look for patterns in inactive subscribers
• Develop new email offerings
• Change subject lines
• Change from address (but not the domain)

... Read Full Story

Hi Folks, Welcome to the ActivSoftware blog (blog.activsoftware.com). This blog will give ASW employees a chance to post their thoughts on various technologies. This blog will mostly focus on email, but we're game for anything.

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-pete