Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Email marketing is becoming more difficult at the same time as email is becoming more powerful, as Simon van Wyk writes.

Have you ever stopped and thought about when you receive most of your email newsletters, and when you are more or less likely to read them? According to the first major report on email delivery trends, produced by EmailLabs, a US-based email marketing software company, Tuesday is “E” day - the most popular day for companies to send emails, with Wednesday the top day for recipients to open emails.

The most popular send time is 9 a.m., while the most popular open time is 11 a.m. Not surprisingly, the most popular click-through day (where people not only open an email but click on a link to visit the sender’s website) is Wednesday and the most popular click-through time is 11 a.m.

After Tuesday (25.4%), Wednesday is the second most popular day to send email (23.3%), followed by Thursday (18.3%). Saturday and Sunday bring up the rear at 0.9% and 1.4%, respectively. This is in line with conventional thinking about consumer behaviour, that people tend to trash emails that come in across the weekend when they get in on a Monday, and are then too busy to read new ones that day, while on Friday they’re too busy getting ready for the weekend.

Another interesting finding from that report was that email recipients are tending not to unsubscribe from emails, with a steady month-on-month decline in unsubscribe rates over the year. People are now more likely to just delete unwanted emails rather than unsubscribe. As a result, many email marketers are now eliminating names of subscribers who don’t open a specified number of emails in a row, or are asking those subscribers to re-opt in.

Meanwhile, global spam levels continue to rocket, according to email security company MessageLabs. More than two-thirds of the 840 million emails scanned for its 8,500 customers in May were intercepted as spam. Another anti-spam company, Brightmail, estimates that despite filtering, 40% of emails that get through to inboxes are spam. When you compare that with the fact that only 20% of commercial broadcasting content is advertising, that means your inbox is twice as cluttered as your favourite radio station or TV show.

Australia has emerged as one of the top five ‘hot spots’ for spam globally. Email traffic sent to the US, Australia, UK, Germany, and Hong Kong represents more than 98% of the global spam volumes being filtered by MessageLabs. A massive 83% of total traffic in the US was identified as spam. This fell to 52% in the UK, 41% in Germany, 32% in Australia and 27% in Hong Kong.

Filtering has its downsides

Note above that MessageLabs reported that two-thirds of the emails it scanned were “intercepted” as spam. That means much of the spam that has clogged our inboxes over the years is now being stopped. But while the good news is that some great battles are being won in the war on spam, the bad news is that legitimate email marketers are suffering collateral damage in the fight.

Because I spend a lot of time registering and posting on various sites using my work email account (it’s an occupational hazard), I’ve ended up on thousands of mailing lists, with the result that I receive plenty of spam that evades our corporate firewall and clogs up my inbox.

Over the past few months, however, the river of spam has slowed (though by no means stopped). At the same time, the junk mail filters on my Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts finally seem to be working. As someone who hates spam (and who doesn’t?), that’s a great development.

But I’m now finding that an increasing number of friends and clients are ringing me and saying, “Why didn’t you reply to my email the other day?” It’s not that I’m bad at correspondence (though maybe my mother thinks so!); the problem is that I never saw the email in the first place. Their emails to me aren’t getting through these beefed-up spam filters, even though they’re not a bulk send-out and I actually want to receive these emails. What’s worse, these emails aren’t being bounced back to the sender; they just disappear somewhere out in cyberspace.

Meanwhile, more and more of my clients are complaining that their email newsletters aren’t getting through to some of their customers, despite the fact that their customers have opted in to receive these newsletters. Bouncebacks and blacklisted emails have been increasing dramatically for marketers who have permission to send messages to their customers - whose customers, in fact, are counting on receiving messages from them.

The price of efficiency

The problems associated with getting emails through to targets are growing. On the ClickZ Internet marketing website, the most popular topic area is now email marketing. One of the site’s columnists, Ben Isaacson, wrote recently that “In the offline world, the USPS (the US equivalent of Australia Post) offers bulk mailers a special discount for their continued support. In the e-mail world, the more you send, the more difficult it is to get delivered.

“In the offline world, a mail house gets credit for having multiple large clients and the ability to deploy large quantities of various products quickly and easily. With email, ESPs that mail for multiple clients with various products on a shared IP network are often penalized by ISPs for a lack of consistency across their networks.”

Isaacson predicts that “One day, e-mail will be analogous to expedited shipping: You may have to invest extra time and resources into getting it there, but you’ll sleep better at night knowing it’s going to get there.”

As Tom Barnes from MarketingProfs.com writes: “Email is still a great way to communicate with customers, but it is now - officially - a horrible way to prospect.”

He adds, “Before you launch any email program make sure it’s about customer retention and not about acquisition. And even then, don’t assume it’s working until you can verify that with metrics other than open and opt-out rates.”

Does that mean you should abandon email as a marketing technique? Absolutely not. But it does mean that, like any other technique you use, you need to put the work in to do it properly. Simply sending emails from your corporate server doesn’t cut it any more. You need to get professional help to implement an email marketing system, analyse your results carefully and put a plan in place to improve your results.