Monitoring Email Marketing

If you're a late holiday shopper and are still wondering what to get friends and family members for Christmas or Hanukah this year, take a cue from what key online retailers Wal-Mart, Amazon and iTunes are selling most of this season. By analyzing purchase receipts received by email, eDataSource estimates show that while many of the year's hottest gifts are predictable, falling in the electronics, toys, books and video game categories, there are some that err on the more practical side.

We have introduced a new, easy to use search criteria in the EDS Analyst interface that allows you to easily search for email campaigns sent through specific Email Service Providers.  Using a simple drop-down you can choose to see all the senders who are working with each email provider, organized by market sector.  This search criteria uses the underlying data eDataSource gathers from its automated spidering of email campaigns.  For a demo of this new search feature, please contact us, and become one of our many satisfied Email Service Provider clients.

The security breach at Epsilon is creating headlines, but it is still not clear what the scope of the breach has been.  Have all Epsilon's customers been affected?  For each of those customers, did the hacker get access to all the email addresses or just some?  I am sure we will be finding out soon, but in the meantime, it is clear that companies like HSN and New York and Co. are notifying ALL of their customers. 

Based on the reach information provided by our email panel, we are seeing that warning notifications are going out "en masse" to the entire customer base of major retailers.  The below is an example form HSN which was sent to an estimated 10 million people on April 2nd and 3rd.

Competition is heating up between Groupon and LivingSocial in the "Deals in your City" space, and between Gilt, RueLaLa and others in the "Flash Sale" space.  eDataSource will soon be publishing an in depth report on each of these competitors.  If you would like to get a copy of this report when it comes available, please contact us.

As part of our research we took a close look at the impact that national campaigns are having for these sites, in particular LivingSocial's 50% off at Amazon sale that took place on January 19.  Full details will be available in the report, but here is a snippet:

For LivingSocial, there was a big spike in web traffic (represented by red line) on January 19.  The graph from EDS Analyst also shows high Twitter (light blue) and Facebook (green line) volume for that day.  While there is only one email campaign related to the Amazon campaign that day(dark blue line), the campaign went to an estimated 22.8 million people.

Is there something that soft drink email marketers are doing to run afoul of gmail?  Or do gmail users not like soft drinks?  Maybe it is just a coincidence, but in an analysis of email senders in the beverage industry, Coke, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper all have low inbox placement rates with gmail, while their inbox placement rates at AOL and Yahoo are just fine. 

Below is a screenshot of the inbox placement rate by ISP for iCoke over the last 30 days.  The inbox placement rate averaged 86% for the sending domain email-icoke.com, but for gmail the inbox placement rate was only 55%. 


The inbox placement issue for gmail seems to have centered around campaigns late in December 2010 and in early January.  An analysis of campaign by campaign data shows that an email campaign delivered to an estimated 4.7 million people on December 30, advertising that My Coke Rewards Mobile had serious inbox placement issues with gmail users, ending up in the spam folder for 51% of users.  Below is a screenshot of the campaign.




Next up is Pepsi.  Below is a screenshot of the inbox placement rate by ISP for Pepsiworld over the last 30 days.  The inbox placement rate averaged 74% for the sending domain pw.pepsiworld.com.  For gmail the inbox placement rate was only 35%, and the chart shows a consistently low inbox placement rate over the thirty day period.  The inbox placement rate for yahoo mail users is also below industry averages at 78%.

Pepsiworld has had numerous campaigns with low inbox placement over the last 30 days, but the largest campaign (estimated 2.8 million recipients) with the lowest inbox placement (46% overall and 34% inbox placement for gmail users) was sent on December 21 advertising "Shop Pepsi and Get Great Gifts for Everyone on Your List".

Dr. Pepper, with average inbox placement of 85% seems to have faired only a little better with Gmail, with an average inbox placement of 66%.  

Nobody is sure just what to call it yet...I've heard "digital messaging", "digital CRM" or even "social, the new wom", but whatever you call the convergence of email, social media and mobile marketing, it is happening.  ESP's are expanding to provide management of Twitter, Facebook, and SMS as well as email.  Agencies are bringing their email and social efforts under the same roof, and we also have been expanding our services.  In November of 2009 we added analytics for Twitter, and we have just announced our launch of Facebook analytics, both accompanying email within EDS Analyst, the most powerful competitive intelligence tool for competitive analysis in "digital messaging". 

For this reason, Email Data Source is changing to eDataSource, to more accurately reflect our breadth of coverage.  Our platform, originally built to collect, analyze and categorize email marketing messages has proved itself perfect for expanding to new forms of digital messaging, and you will be hearing about more service extensions during 2011!

We are pleased to announce that we have now incorporated competitive intelligence for Facebook into EDS Analyst. 

eDataSource’s approach to Facebook is to focus on the marketing messages that achieve the highest level of reach and user interaction.  In addition, EDS indexes landing page and clickstream data.  This unique approach gives brands a complete picture of their competitors’ effectiveness on Facebook, including which messages are working best, full details of the offer via the landing page, and an understanding of partnerships through the clickstream data.  EDS Analyst organizes all the data by brand and market sector, and makes the data searchable by keyword and domain.

How it Works:

1.     eDataSource “likes” thousands of fan pages of major brands on Facebook.  This allows EDS Analyst to collect and analyze the full stream of status updates from these pages in an automated fashion.

2.  Each status update is reviewed to determine if there is a link to a web page.  Updates without links are discovered.  This allows EDS analyst users to cut through the clutter and focus on marketing offers.  

3.  EDS Analyst “spiders” the links in the status updates, parsing and indexing the clickstream data.  This allows EDS Analyst users to “see through” shortened urls to see where the status updates are sending traffic.  The presence of affiliate links and tracking codes is also revealed. 

4.  EDS Analyst records the landing page of each marketing message.  All the text on the landing page is indexed and the landing page is imaged and preserved in EDS Analyst.

5.  For each marketing message an interaction score is produced, based on the number of times the message is “liked” or commented on by a user, and weighted by the number of fans the page has.

 6.     All marketing messages are organized by brand, company and market sector in EDS Analyst.  Additionally, the text of the status updates and landing pages are fully searchable, as is the clickstream data.

 Examples of eDataSource’s unique approach to Facebook measurement and analysis:

 

·         Quickly find which brands in your market sector are using Facebook effectively

·         See Facebook activity juxtaposed with Email and Twitter campaigns, and compare activity to web traffic.

·         Access landing pages from prior campaigns that may no longer be online.

·         See what third parties are promoting competitors’ brands

·         Isolate advertising and affiliate network activity on Facebook (Example: show me all status updates where Commission Junction is present in the clickstream).

 

Sites like Gilt Groupe, Ruelala and Groupon are raising lots of money and acquiring members quickly.  It is a real land grab to see who will own the social commerce/flash marketing/private sales market space.  Since these sites are mostly member based and communicate their offers by email to their members, the EDS panel is ideally suited to tracking which of these players is gaining momentum.  The following is a run down of some of the main players, their comparative reach / membership base (based on the number of unique EDS panelists reached each overly the last thirty days) and some of their strategies and techniques when it comes to engaging customers via email.

1.  Gilt Groupe:  The luxury brand flash sale site reached an estimated 2.65 million uniques during the 30 days ended July 15.  Each day Gilt sent out an email blast for its main sales event that starts at noon.  As many as seven different subject lines are used for each blast, usually with a different ordering of the brands that are on sale.  Additionally an "after hours" sale takes place every few days, and Gilt sends out a blast to its entire membership base promoting this event.  The Jetsetter travel offshoot of Gilt reached an estimated 400,000 uniques during the same 30 day period.

2.  Ruelala:  Over the last 30 days Ruelala reached an estimated 1.47 million uniques.  This is a fairly low number, given that as of two months ago EDS logged Ruelala as reaching 2.0 million uniques.  It could be that the site is experiencing ISP delivery issues or (less likely) a drop off in membership.

3.  Groupon: I guess it can't hurt to get a $135 million investment to grow your membership base.  Groupon, the city by city "deal of the day" site that gets deep discounts for members based on the number of people who sign up for the offer, reached a whopping 11.1 million unique users by email during the last 30 days, according to EDS estimates.  Where is Groupon's membership the largest?  Atlanta, surprisingly, is at the top of the list.

4.  Shopittome: Shopittome, started well before the rest of the gang, and using a different approach, seems to be reaching an impressively large audience.  Our recent estimate is that they are reaching 5.6 million users, which is significant given that Techcrunch reported their membership as 3 million in April.  A major site re-design launched May 31 could be a contributing factor.  Unlike the others in this group, which send a few offers to a large number of people, Shop It To Me allows users to specify specific brands that they want to see offers on.  Offers are then collected from multiple sources and sent in an email digest.

We will check back in a month to report on which of these sites has gained or lost email market share. 

Internet Retailer's June Issue had an
interesting article about "Recession-Busters", meaning those internet retailers that significantly grew web sales from 2008-2009 despite the tough economy.  The article pointed to diapers.com as a succes story and mentioned that their growth was aided by key partnerships such as that with BabyCenter.com (a unit of Johnson & Johnson). 

When it comes to email marketing, a quick look at Email Analyst shows that Diapers.com is indeed making the most of its partnership with BabyCenter.  The June 9, 2010 campaign shown here for from "BabyCenter Partners" for Diapers.com went to an estimated 2.6 million BabyCenter subscribers, and dedicated blasts such as these from BabyCenter Partners featuring Diapers.com have been going out approximately once per week since June of 2008.  Diapers.com has also been promoted in the "My Toddler This Week" and "Pregnancy Bulletin newsletters from BabyCenter.com since May of 2008. 

Email Data Source estimates the monthly unique user reach of the combined BabyCenter email newsletters to be 10.4 million, making the relationship a strong distribution source  for Diapers.com

The June 2010 edition of Internet Retailer shows who the top gainers and losers were in terms of web sales among internet retailers.  We took a look at their list of the biggest winners and the biggest losers and pulled data from Email Analyst to get a sense of how their email marketing efforts corresponded to their web sales performance.  The results are tabulated below, and there's no doubt that the two went hand in hand.

The retailers with the largest growth in email marketing efforts (as measured by the growth in the number of email campaigns, including their own campaigns and third party campaigns that link back to the retailer's website) were Crocs.com, Express and Meijer.com. 

Retailer	2009 Email Campaigns	2008 Email Campaigns	Email Campaign Growth	Web Sales Growth
Crocs.com	222	27	722%	104%
Express.com	385	94	310%	238%
Meijer.com	254	128	98%	116%
The North Face	103	52	98%	63%
Golfsmith	313	213	47%	-26%
Diapers.com	177	129	37%	104%
Green Mountain Coffee	444	345	29%	50%
Design Within Reach	152	123	24%	-29%
iRobot.com	121	105	15%	-23%
DSW.com	203	201	1%	87%
Boston Apparel Group	687	736	-7%	-23%
Ann Taylor	557	601	-7%	-20%
Scholastic.com	195	391	-50%	-23%
Bidz.com	1,911	4,897	-61%	-47%
Nascar.com Superstore	44	157	-72%	-32%

Following up on our last blog post about Apple's email reach, we took a look at the buzz being generated by media outlets talking about the iPhone 4.  Specifically we looked at the email news alerts they have sent out in the last week.  Of the 50 news alerts from major publications that contained "iPhone 4" in the subject line, only 5 had actual links to apple.com in the body of the email.  The rest discussed the iPhone 4 but contained no links to apple.com

What does this mean for Apple?  It means that these email news alerts added an estimated 12 million unique users reached by email with news of the iPhone 4 release, but that only 500,000 or so of these unique users had a direct link to apple.com in the email news alert they received.



 

As Email Data Source has blogged about previously, Apple has tremendous reach through its email lists, derived from Mac owners, itunes users, and iphone and ipad buyers.  Apple's big news at the moment is the introduction of iPhone 4.  Their email campaign introducing the iPhone 4 went out to an estimated 80 million unique users yesterday, June 8. 

Interestingly, the campaign was sent to fewer people than the "iPad is Coming" campaign sent to an estimated 104 million unique users on March 12, 2010.  We would have expected that Apple would blast the iPhone 4 announcement out to its entire user base.  In particular, it is worth noting that the 80 million unique users includes various versions of the campaign sent out internationally as well as to subscribers to the main Apple News list.  Email Data Source logged versions of the iPhone 4 campaign in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, across Asia, and in Europe in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish.   

Recently we began tracking phishing schemes targeting US financial institutions in greater depth.  Here is a quick run down of the larger phishing schemes targeting Bank of America during the last two weeks:

The first sample phishing scheme spoofed the email address "online@bankofamerica.com" and had the subject line "Alert Message".  The attack reached 5.65% of our AOL email panelists.  AOL delivered the email to the inbox instead of the spam folder for 82.6% of recipients.  After this one send, the same attack was not repeated through May 24.

The second sample phishing scheme spoofed the email address "service@bankofamerica.com".  Starting May 15 we recorded repeated attacks each day through May 24.  The attack was focused on gmail users and reached as many as 0.3% of our gmail panelists on May 15.  Over the course of the next week the phishing scam continued to be received, reaching 0.27% of gmail panel users on the 16th, 0.21% of panel users on the 17th, and continuing to decline.  Gmail successfully placed 100% of the emails in the spam folder and none in the inbox.

The third sample phishing scheme spoofed the email address "security-alerts@bankofamerica.com" with the subject line "Important Security Update".  This phishing attach was detected on May then again on May 23, and it targeted AOL, Gmail and Yahoo users.  On May 20th it reached 0.71% of our AOL email panelists and AOL successfully placed the emails in the spam folder for 94% of recipients.  On the same day it reached .02% of our Gmail panelists and gmail successfully put in spam folder for 100% of recipients.  0.13% of our Yahoo panelists received the email, and Yahoo correctly placed the email in the spam folder for 98% of recipients.

Overall Email Data Source recorded 46 email phishing scams spoofing email addresses ending with @bankofamerica.com during the May 15 to May 24 period.  Indeed the majority of email traffic from this sending domain was phishing attempts.  Other Bank of America sending domains, such as emails ending with @ealerts.bankofamerica.com also saw phishing scams, but at a far lower rate.

Email Panel Now Shows Unique User Reach of Major Email Marketers and Trends in Ecommerce Activity of Major Internet Retailers.

New York, NY - May 24, 2010 -- Email Data Source , the leading provider of competitive intelligence for email and social media, announced today that it has doubled the size of its active inbox email panel to more than 600,000 members. The EDS email panel is the first time a Comscore or Nielsen style panel has been put together to measure email reach and inbox placement.

Email Data Source also announced new analytics capabilities which allow the company to track and report on the unique user reach of major email marketers by day, week and month.    

 

This is information that the major ratings agencies should be providing their clients but don’t because they lack the capability

“We are excited to bring this new data to the marketplace. This is information that the major ratings agencies should be providing their clients but don’t because they lack the capability,” said Bill McCloskey, Founder and Chairman of Email Data Source.

An example of the unprecedented insights gained through the EDS panel: Email Data Source reports that for the four day period ended May 7, United Airlines reached an estimated 11.2 million unique users through email. This compares with an email reach of the recently acquired Continental airlines of 7.0 million for the same four day period.

Email Data Source can now also provide data showing trends in ecommerce activity using data collected from its panel. As an example, Email Data Source tracks the number of recipients from the email address auto-confirm@amazon.com and the number of recipients from the email address customerservice@zappos.com with the subject line: Your Order Confirmation. By tallying the number of receipts delivered each day to Email Data Source panelists, the company can identify trends in ecommerce activity.

“Virtually every online sale is confirmed by an email. By tracking the number of email purchase confirmations received by our panelists, we have a great indicator of the number of people purchasing products from major online ecommerce players each day”, said Carter Nicholas, CEO of Email Data Source.

Following the Amazon example, Email Data Source reports that whereas Amazon reached an estimated 14 million unique users through all its email marketing efforts on May 7, the estimated number of people who received an email from auto-confirm@amazon.com (confirming a purchase) on May 7 was 562,000. This compares to an estimated 731,000 purchasers on May 4, 592,000 on May 5, and 627,000 on May 6.

Email Data Source is now the only company able to report on the actual, real world reach of each email marketers and the true inbox placement of each campaign. This gives marketers, for the first time, precise data to benchmark their performance and list size directly against their competitors’ email marketing programs.

 

Email Data Source announced today the top 25 Twitter Brands for the month of April.  Email Data Source produces its Twitter brand rankings by analyzing all tweets that link back to a website, and measuring the reach of these tweets based on the follower base of all people that retweeted the original message.  Factors that contribute to the rankings are:

-Follower base of brand
-Number of tweets of brand
-Number of retweets
-Follower base of retweeters

This analysis provides a real indicator of the traffic driving capabilities of these brands through their Twitter marketing efforts.  The top 25 Twitter Brands for the month of April were:

Site                                         Rank
nytimes.com                              1
eonline.com                               2
abcnews.go.com                        3
stumbleupon.com                      4
cbsnews.com                             5
huffingtonpost.com                    6
twitpic.com                                 7
nfl.com                                       8
instyle.com                                9
theonion.com                            10
ustream.tv                                11
mlb.com                                    12
facebook.com                           13
newsweek.com                        14
nba.com                                   15
pitchfork.com                            16
ew.com                                    17
people.com                              18
youtube.com                            19
msnbc.msn.com                        20
tvguide.com                              21
woot.com                                 22
sportsillustrated.cnn.com         23
etsy.com                                   24
whitehouse.gov                        25

For a complete listing of top Twitter Brands and the full calculations and data behind the Twitter Brand reach calculations, contact Email Data Source for a Twitter Analytics Demo.

Leading up to a holiday such as Mother's Day, when do email marketers start their promotional campaigns?  We took a look at the email campaign stats leading up to Mother's Day and here are the results.  For the six weeks leading up to Mother's day Email Analyst recorded more than 1,700 unique Mother's Day email campaigns from 950 unique senders. 



The vast majority of campaign activity was from marketers in the Flowers & Gifts market sector, but every type of email marketer, from computer manufacturers to non-profits took part in the crescendo.  Most activity took place during the last week of April and first week of May as shown in the graph above.  But the timing of email campaigns also depended on the type of offer being promoted. 

JustFlowers.com was fairly typical of email marketers in the Flowers & Gifts market sector.  These marketers tended to the following pattern: early reminder, promotional sale in advance, a full price promotion with a date reminder, then an urgent last chance email blast.  JustFlowers campaigns came out as follows:

Early Reminder:
April 27: Mother's Day is 12 Days Away
April 29: Mother's Day Flower Sale at JustFlowers.com

Advance Promotional Sale:
April 30: JustFlowers.com Mother's Day Savings

Full Price Promotion with Date Reminder:
May 2: Mother's Day is 1 Week Away.  Send Mom Fresh Flowers
May 5: Mother's Day is in 4 Days - JustFlowers.com

Urgent Last Chance:
May 8: Last Chance for Mother's Day Flowers

Marketers in the gifts category that require more shipping lead time than flowers which benefit from local distribution followed a similar pattern a week before.  Vermont Teddy Bear is a good example:

Early Reminders:
April 19: Look for your New Mother's Day Catalog this Week
April 21: Graduation, Mother's Day & More - Great Gifts for Spring Occasions

Advance Promotional Sale:
April 26: 2 Days Only: 15% Off for Mother's Day

Full Price Promotion:
May 1: See our New Bears for Mother's Day

Urgent Last Chance:
May 4: Hurry - Mother's Day is THIS Sunday!

The first week of April saw Mother's Day Email Marketing Activity from marketers in the following segments: Jewelry, Flowers & Gifts, Photos and Travel. 

Starting April 11, marketers of Beauty Products and Footwear joined in.

By the week of April 18 marketers in Retail, Apparel, Home Furnishings, Computers and Restaurants joined the crowd, and through May 7 the level of activity had more to do with frequency of campaigns than types of marketers.

For a complete data set on email marketing activity leading up to Mother's Day, please contact your Email Data Source sales representative.

The Under Armour brand has seen a huge surge in popularity and recognition in recent years.  This is a company that has been on a fast track: founded in 1996, it went public in 2005 and has been growing at 20% per year since.  At just under $1 billion in revenues, it is still a much smaller company than its rivals Nike ($19 billion in revenues) and Adidas ($13 billion in revenues), but when you consider that Nike and Adidas revenues are from worldwide sales and include sub brands such as Umbro and Converse (in the case of Nike) and Reebok and Rockport (in the case of Adidas) the level of direct competition between these companies in the US is closer than it first appears.

If corporate histories are to be believed, Under Armour is remarkably similar to Nike and Adidas in many ways.  All companies were founded as cottage operations (Adidas by two brothers in their mother's washroom, Nike from the trunk of a car at track meets, and Under Armour by two U Maryland grads from a basement) and became known upon signing their first major athletic spokerson).  One difference is that Under Armour came of age with the advent of internet marketing. 

So, how do the marketing efforts of Under Armour compare to its larger rivals when it comes to digital messaging?  Using Email Analyst, we took a peek at Under Armour's email marketing playbook from 2008 to the present to see how they are emulating and differentiating themselves from the competition.

By all appearances, Under Armour appears to be running a fairly straightforward, almost simple email marketing program. 

Vendor and Email Quality

Under Armour has been using Responsys as an ESP since at least early 2008 when Email Data Source first started tracking Under Armour's house email lists, and since early 2008 all their email campaigns have been run from a dedicated IP address.  The email quality has been above average, though occasionally Email Analyst has recorded a jump in broken links and bad redirects.  During a three week period in March-April 2008, however, almost all their email campaigns had greater than 50% broken links / bad redirects.  The rate of inbox placement has been consistently good for all campaigns across all ISP's, averaging 96.5% since we started tracking this statistic in January of 2010 through Email Data Source's Nielsen-like email panel that analyzes data from more than 300,000 actual email recipients.

Nike's email quality appears flawless by comparison, with virtually no broken links or bad redirects.  Inbox placement was slightly lower than that of Under Armour at 92.4% based on data from January through April, primarily due to specific campaigns in January and April that had a high percentage of spam folder placement at Yahoo and Gmail.

Adidas, which uses the ESP Cheetahmail, also has few broken links and bad redirects than Under Armour with the exception of a few campaigns in December of 2009 that did have broken links.  Inbox placement for Adidas averages 95.0% and they only appear to have lower than average deliverability with AOL. 

Campaign Reach and Opt-In Sources

Under Armour's largest email blasts go out once or twice a month and reach .08% to .09% of the Email Data Source panel.  Based on Email Data Source estimates, this corresponds to roughly 1 million people.  Other email blasts are sent every 2-3 days with a lower reach ranging from .01% to .04% campaigns.  Under Armour's email blasts are sent almost exclusively to people who have signed up for email updates or registered at UnderArmour.com

Nike's larger email blasts reach .16% to
.18% of the Email Data Source panel, or over 2 million people, and are sent approximately once per week.  Two campaigns were recorded in Q1 2010 that reached .25% to .27% of the panel.  These campaigns focused on new product releases, specifically Nike's new Dynamic Support running shoes.  Nike's US email list seems to be entirely sourced from opt-ins at nike.com or subsites such as nikerunning.com.

Adidas' largest campaigns have a reach of .12%, roughly 1.5 million people.  The largest campaign of note was an end of season sale.  More common are product introduction campaigns such as this one announcing Star Wars themed sneakers (why they didn't wait until May the Fourth to launch this is beyond us).

Unlike Under Armour or Nike, Adidas sources opt-ins from partner sites such as My Coke Rewards and Body By Milk.

Segmentation

Nike does far more in the way of segmenting than either Under Armour or Adidas.  Whereas Nike sends out two to four distinct campaigns on any given sending day, Adidas and Under Armour send out at most two.

Product vs. Engagement

Virtually all of of Under Armour's email  campaigns are direct product pitches or sales announcements.  Apart from just a few holiday engagement campaigns (one before Christmas and one for Mother's Day), a single campaign to support US troops and a "Tell your Under Armour story, there have been few other engagement campaigns during the last six months.  Only since November '09 has Under Armour included Twitter and Facebook links in its emails, and indicator that they are behind the trend towards merging email and social media under one umbrella of digital messaging. 

The campaign at right is fairly typical of an Under Armour campaign and in my opinion has weak call to action and engagement.  With the subject "You saw it at Augusta.  Now get the gear" the campaign could for example link to photos from the Augusta tournament or seek engagement in other ways, yet even the social media links at the bottom are very small.  The purchase calls to action also lack prominence.


Nike, in contrast, has campaigns that are specifically engagement focused such as the example at right from Nike +.    These types of community oriented engagement campaigns tie directly into social sites bringing Nike's email and social marketing efforts together.  Nike does few if any sale specific campaigns although most emails do have a "Just Reduced" link to sales.

Adidas strikes a balance between product oriented campaigns, sales and engagement campaigns. Examples of engagement are the customizable sneaker store Mi Adidas which is featured frequently in email campaigns and campaigns that direct subscribers to special events such as the running clinic featured in a Feb 23 campaign shown below. Oddly, Adidas appears to be making little effort to integrate email with social media: most campaigns do not include links to social sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

Presence in Third Party Emails

Email Marketing efforts also include advertising in partners' newsletters.  In this arena Under Armour shows little activity, with only a few links in affiliate partner sites such as Flamingo World and KeyCode.com registered by Email Data Source during the last thirty days.  Adidas also has relatively few distribution partnerships in place, with only a few links in newsletters such as that of the WNBA.  Nike by contrast shows far greater presence, with distribution partners such as Daily Candy and Livestrong.

Twitter

Under Armour has shown very little activity using Twitter, with only 1 tweet in the last thirty days to its 8,700 followers.  The tweet was not retweeted by anybody.  NikeStore by contrast put out 75 tweets over the last thirty days to its 11,500 followers and 54 people have retweeted their tweets.  Adidas running put out two tweets to its 86,000 followers during the same period and ten people retweeted its messages.

Today I received an email campaign from Amazon, offering a chance to win a $1000 gift card if I signed up for their clothing store email list.  It made me wonder what was motivating them to grow theiir list in this way.  Could it be that Amazon lacks email firepower even while it is the top ranked Internet Retailer?  Using Email Analyst's new panel data, I took a look at the reach of email campaigns from the top Internet Retailers and re-ranked them according to their email campaign reach. 

Company      Email Reach Ranking     Internet Retailer Ranking
Apple                          1                                       5
Sears                          2                                       7
Amazon                      3                                       1
Dell                             4                                       3
Best Buy                     5                                       9
Staples                       6                                       2
OfficeDepot                7                                       4
Officemax                   8                                       6
NewEgg                     9                                       8
QVC                          10                                      10

Apple once again proves itself to be an email power house, with an enormous list built from itunes, mac and iphone users, and what is clearly a concerted effort to keep their users opted-in.  And you can see that Amazon is ranked third behind Sears.  Is Amazon making a concerted effort to get back on top?

Many advertisers, especially those who use affiliate networks, are in the dark when it comes to knowing who their email distribution partners are. 

Email Analyst provides transparency into who your email distribution partners are.  The below is a demonstration of how an advertiser can use Email Analyst identify its email distributors including those distributors who are picking up affililiate links.

We will use Best Buy as a sample advertiser.  Email Data Source's spidering of email marketing campaigns shows all email campaigns that link in any way to bestbuy.com, whether sent from Best Buy or from a third party.

A quick search therefore shows all the distribution partners for Best Buy.  Information which Best Buy may or may not be aware of.  To the right is the list of email distributors for Best Buy.  At the top of the list, with fifteen email campaigns in the last thirdy days linking to bestbuy.com is CMJ Network, a publisher that comments on new music.  Other distributors on the list include several coupon sites, CNET and the Philadelphia Eagles. 

As it turns out, many of these distribution partners are Commission Junction Affiliates, and the presence of links to Best Buy in their emails is because Best Buy participates in the Commission Junction Network.  Email Analyst determines this because it records the clickstream data of each link in an email campaign.  The clickstream data to the right shows how a link in a Shoping Guru email redirects through Commission Junction and sends traffic to BestBuy.com.  Best Buy is unlikely to know whether or not its Commission Junction affiliates are sending out emails with links to bestbuy.com.

Using Email Analyst, Best Buy can begin monitoring all email creatives that go out from its Commission Junction Affiliates.  This allows them to monitor the use of their brand in email marketing, gaining transparency into a medium that would otherwise remain opaque.