Email Marketing

95% of U.S. email users had joined email lists to receive discounts.  What that suggests is that consumers are perfectly willing to share personal information with retailers, in exchange for lower prices.

Building up an email marketing contact list is not an exclusively online activity

Writing strong subject lines appear to be the best ways to ensure email opens, according to March 2012 survey results

The remaining roughly 1 in 4 emails that did not reach the inbox wound up either in a spam/junk folder (8.7%) or were blocked by ISP-level filtering (15.1%). Regionally, Europe had the highest rate of commercial emails reaching the inbox (85%), followed by North America (79%), Central and Latin America (72%), and Asia-Pacific (67%).

Morning emails saw an average open rate of 39.2%, ahead of those sent at midday (33.9%), in the late afternoon (32.1%), and at night (32%). However, emails sent in the morning had the lowest click rate (16.5%), behind ones sent at night (18.6%), at midday (19.7%), and in the late afternoon (21%).

According to The State of Email Marketing in SMBs, by GetResponse, most small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) have mastered the basics of organic email list-building, making use of Web-based sign-up forms and even offering incentives to encourage subscriptions, but fewer than half use any type of email-to-social collaboration, limiting the potential of cross-channel marketing.

There are ten words most likely to trigger a spam filter, All Spammed Up reports.  These are...

Although roughly 3 in 4 SMBs use email marketing tactics such as organic list growth and web-based sign-up forms to generate leads, just 41% include a sign-up form on their Facebook fan pages, according to a survey released in February 2012 by GetResponse. And while a majority optimize their newsletters with clear, recognizable, branded from field names and addresses, less than half include social sharing icons in their newsletters.

If you want your email to be memorable, possibly even to go viral, AWeber suggests a simple trick: use a cute animal as part of the art. "But you can’t just slap a random picture of a kitty in your design," the post advises. "It looks out of place, and a little desperate. The key is to use images that work with the flow of your email."

Emails that include social sharing buttons have a click-through rate 115% higher than those do not (5.6% vs. 2.6%)