» Email

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

Email continues to grow in importance and use in business communications today, despite the headaches caused by spam and viruses. The two most common types of business email are transaction and marketing. Transaction email is email sent to a customer during and after a business transaction. These emails typically guide the customer through a purchasing process and then advise them of the progress of their order. Marketing email is simply any email sent to a customer or prospective customer to ... Read Full Story

Email Delivery: Inactive Email Recipients

If your sign up on Microsoft's Smart Network Data Services you may have noticed recently your getting more spam trap hit's. Many clients never use to get spam trap hit's they were very careful, but now all the sudden they are. What has happened? It seems as though Microsoft has begun to use old email accounts as spam trap addresses. Keep in mind these canceled addresses never return as bounces so you have no opportunity to remove them for that ... Read Full Story

Understanding the Email Service Provider "Relationships"

I recently read a blog post titled “Selecting An ESP With Good ISP Relationships” the title may lead some to be mis-lead by what the author truely meant. From the title it sounds like a select few email service providers and marketers have a magic “bat phone” line through which they simply call recipient email services(ISP's)such as Hotmail or YAHOO to solve delivery ... Read Full Story

It is time for email to evolve and we intend to force that issue. Email was built for geeks, like us, to share files across distances. It was not meant to use for business communications, nor should it be used for that without the right systems in place. Whether you are an outsourced email provider or using email as a business tool in-house for order notices, etc, you need to GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER! Here's what the article covers…

• Existing email servers were meant to send a few ... Read Full Story

In 1997 two brothers set out to change the corporate world. They used their Web site to collect over 100,000 emails to date, generate millions in sales and a click rates in the 60% to 80% range. Justin Sewell and his brother founded Despair, Inc. and used humor to build an empire.

Here's an example of one of their funny copyright, their privacy policy to be exact:

"Despair, Inc.® does not rent or sell personal information about you with other people or non-af ... Read Full Story

A recent article in Clickz by Al DiGuido was very well written explaining a major problem in the email industry. He covered the speed of delivery, but missed one critical component. The speed of "sending" is not always the speed of "delivery." In fact, attempted very fast sending can lead to reduced delivery quickly. Read on…

Key Quotes From the Article:

"Several retailers that send millions of messages at a time say their mailings move at 10,000 to 30,000 ... 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

Industry insiders call the behind the scenes of the ESP's "Ugly." Industry sales people try to steer customers away from sending large lists no matter how many customers they have, due to limitations with email servers being used. Marketing Sherpa provides a list of items customers want from their ESP's and frankly here at Zrinity, we're perplexed by the very simple requests that seem so complicated. It is comforting, though, as we learn the severe limitations of what most would con ... Read Full Story

Our most recent news release covers how high tech tools will revolutionize the way we use email communications to increase ROI from Email campaigns. For decades business and technical minds alike understood the benefit of more carefully storing information in a hierarchy to better retrieve the data at a later date. This form of data storage is also known as a database. And yet, since we've been using email to communicate with large groups of customers even the savviest business managers will ... 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?

A recent article in eMarketer tries to determine the best day of the week to send email campaigns. They attempt to determine best opens, best clicks, etc. The fact is that the assumed 'best day' will be the most occupied day, thus the most competition, thus no longer the best day. Maybe the most expensive day, for sure.

If you provide good information, to the right people at the right time, even low clicks produce high sales. The funny thing is that it is still the same old rules ap ... Read Full Story

Almost a year ago in the New Millennium Minds blog we determined that the Can Spam law might a well not exist without rigorous enforcement of the act. Well, there seems to be more movement on getting serious about the law. At least the marketing of the act seems to have been stepped up a notch through a cartoon campaign. Well, ... Read Full Story

The email delivery industry just evolved again to become one level smarter. ActivSoftware announced today XM Mail Server's newest feature. It is driven by a new algorithm, developed at ActivSoftware, and is called 'slow start outbound connection ramping.'

It begins with a very low number of simultaneous connections to any one ESP for any one IP address. It monitors delivery failure to success ratios and slowly ramps up the number of connections to that ESP from that particular IP. < ... Read Full Story

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

We recently analyzed 200,000 tokens, or words, in the bayesian spam filter on our mail server. We analyzed many factors within this data. The most compelling was the spam to ham (legitimate email) ratios. We compiled a list of over 50 words with the highest spam to ham ratio.

Words like click and here don't show up as high, since they ... Read Full Story

A team of researchers from IBM, and Cornell University have developed a new algorithm for detecting spam in emails, called SMTP Path Analysis. The algorithm works by examining the path information (probably by looking at the Received headers), and detects patterns that are likely to be the route of a spammer.

the algorithm is not meticulous enough to efficiently catch spam on its own, but works well in combination with content filtering tools. "And it ... 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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Email security is an ever-growing concern, especially amongst financial institutions. Phishing and spoofing are as old as email. The occurrences will continue to grow without the industry coming together to fix the problem.

Until recently, many people hadn't even heard of any type of sender authentication such as YAHOO DomainKeys. These sender identification protocols are a vital step to ensure email is an effective business tool. They help reduce many email security threats including ... 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

This publication is very helpful for marketing personnel seeking an email broadcast firm and for those competing in the industry. I use it as a sales tool to pick out the weaknesses of competitors and further highlight the strengths of our email broadcast firm. It is also a great reference for business managers to gather information that is pertinent to the features that should be added to existing email broadcast firms’ tools and services. The comparative chart of features is very helpful, ... Read Full Story

Although the CAN-SPAM law clearly defines the very basic elements required in any email correspondences, spam persists and very few even have a functional method to opt out of future mailings. The test showed conclusively that the CAN-SPAM law has resulted in very little, if any, net effect on spam. The problem exists that until there are high-level prosecutions of spammers, then the law is a hollow, albeit well-intended, failure. Unless the jail terms, or penalty fees, start to get utilized ... 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

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

Microsoft Research social computing team has some thoughts on blogs vs email:

The underestimated strength of blogs is the chronological ordering. The single voice, the public visibility that leads to more care in most blog construction, the feedback are all significant too, but they are remarked upon. Human beings have a tremendous ability to reason instantly and unconsciously about informati ... 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

On a daily basis I talk with people that send out email campaigns either on their clients behalf or as a part of their internal operations. Most, if not all, have no idea the impact of the aspects affecting email delivery. Gone are the days of just blasting out email and it’s all delivered to intended recipients. The following four factors are critical to email delivery and should be a high priority to anybody concerned about email delivery:

1. Static IP addresses are critical. ... 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

A pair of deliverability studies produce some stats on deliverability of legitimate email.

Data from Lyris states that 11.5% of legitimate email is not delivered.

Return Path's 2004 data indicate on average 22% of legitimate opt-in e-mail wasn't delivered to user inboxes. That's a 3.3 percentage point increase over the second half of 2003, when Return Path reported 18. ... Read Full Story

A recent phishing study shows that over 90% of web users would fall for phishing attacks.

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.

Thanks for joining us, and don't forget to subscribe to our rss feed.

-pete