Monitoring Email Marketing

The Netflix top 100 list is often criticized as self-perpetuating and too long term.  Indeed, if you take a look at the Netflix Top 100 list, you will be surprised by what is still on there.  At the top of the list is Crash.  It has been at the top of the list since 2007...And if you look at the top ten movies on the list they are all movies that were released on DVD between 2005 and 2008.  The implication is that it takes a couple of years to make it on to the Top 100 list which should perhaps be renamed the Top 100 All Time Rental List.



To get a much more recent view of which DVDs are most popular, being watched at home within the last week, we took a look at emails sent by Netflix confirming DVD returns.  Using the associated email panel reach data, we can get an up to date view of the most recently watched DVDs by Netflix members. Here is a list of which DVD's have just been returned by Netflix members from March 30 to April 11, ranked by popularity:

1.  Twilight Saga: New Moon
2.  The Men Who Stare at Goats
3.  The Way We Were (can anyone help explain this one?)
4.  The Box
5.  The Time Traveler's Wife
6.  The Boondock Saints II
7.  2012
8.  Shrink
9.  Julia & Julia
10.  Michael Jackson's This Is It
11.  Blood: The Last Vampire
12.  Precious
13.  Up In The Air
14.  The Informant

One of the potential uses of data from the new Email Data Source Panel is to derive sales statistics for major internet retailers.

Following up on our iPad theme, we tool a look at what percentage of our email panalists received an email from Apple with the subject line "Thank you for Purchasing your iPad". 

From April 3rd to April 10th we record that .03% of our panelists received this email.  Half of those recipients received the email on the 4th or 5th of April. 

Based on our internal estimates, an EDS panel reach of .03% corresponds to roughly 350,000 people.  In other words, we estimate that 350,000 people have received an email thanking them for their iPad Purchase.

Apple claimed 300,000 units sold on its first day, but this included the wholesale units supplied to Best Buy.  Our estimate indicates 350,000 units sold to people who gave Apple permission to email them during the first few days of iPad sales, assuming some lag from moment of sale to follow up email being sent.

Email Data Source today announced the top email campaigns of March, 2010.  Email Data Source uses panel based reach data combined with its unique email monitoring and measuring capabilities to identify the largest email senders and analyze their email campaigns.

First Place: Apple - iPad is Coming.

At the top of the list was Apple's campaign of March 12, announcing that the iPad was available for pre-order with an April 3 delivery date.  The campaign reached 14% of the Email Data Source panel of 300,000 AOL, Gmail and Yahoo users.  Given the enormous installed base of itunes and the number of mac, iphone and ipod users, it is no surprise that Apple has managed to assemble an enormous email list.  EDS estimates the iPad pre-order campaign reached 4.3 times the number of recipients of the second largest campaign for March (featured below).  Sample seed accounts show that the campaign was sent to users who had opted-in to receiving emails through the Apple Store, iphone and Mac Pro users, as well as business accounts.

The iPad campaign was sent from at least 10 dedicated IP addresses (indeed Apple seems to control the entire IP block starting with 17.254...) and these IP addresss have an excellent reputation according to Returnpath.net's Sender Score.  The campaign also made use of the PVIQ system to maximize deliverability. 

The result was an inbox placement rate of 94% according to the Email Data Source panel, compared to an average inbox placement rate of 90% for all campaigns measured by the Email Data Source panel.  The inbox placement rate was also notably high for a campaign of this size.  Typically larger "blast" campaigns from a sender have a slightly lower inbox placement rate than segmented campaigns.  The average inbox placement for campaigns from insideapple.apple.com was 95.3% in March for all campaigns, ranging from 65% for some Asian and European campaigns to 100% for more segmented US oriented campaigns.  The inbox placement for the iPad campaign ranged from 90% for AOL users to 97% for Gmail users. 

Second Place: JC Penney

The second largest email campaign for March, as recorded by Email Data source, was from JC Penney.  Sent on March 7, the campaign featured the subject line "Check Out Spring Styles + Online Exclusive Savings and reached 3.3% of the Email Data Source panel. 

The campaign had an inbox placement rate of 93%, ranging from 89% with AOl to 95% with Gmail users.

Third Place: Astrology.com

The third place campaign was not so much a campaign as it was a daily blast.  Astrology.com Daily Horoscope regularly reaches 2.9% of Email Data Source's panelists with an inbox placement rate of 93%

Fourth Place: Kohl's

In Fourth Place was Koh's promotion of a three day Easter Sale.  With a creative "Hop on In" subject line, the campaign reached 2.3% of EDS panelists and had an average inbox placement of 89.4%.  The "Hop" theme was also used by Picturepeople.com, CVS, Piperlime and Neiman Marcus.  The lower than average inbox placement is a suprise given the top sender score of Kohl's ip address, but it is something that Kohl's should track and investigate.

Fifth Place:  TripAdvisor

In Fifth Place for March was the TripAdvisor member update (with the not so catchy title "TripAdvisor Update" featuring Spring sales.  With a significant reach of 2.1%, the campaign had below average inbox placement of 83%.

In all forms of media, online and off, there independent providers of audience measurement.  Up to now, the exception has been email.  But with Email Data Source's new panel data, media buyers can now evaluate the reach of email newsletters before they choose to become advertisers or sponsors.  Here is a quick rundown of the reach of some TV media outlets and the comparative reach of their email newsletters, ranked in order from highest email reach to lowest email reach:


Rank     Sender                    Percentage of Panel Reached
1.          Oprah                     0.49%
2.          ComedyCentral       0.13%
3.          ShopNBC                 0.12%
4.          ABCNews                 0.05%
5.          CBSNews                 0.03%
6.          HollywoodReporter  0.01%

New information from our panel shows the reach of AAdvantage email campaigns and what they are doing with their partners.  Aadvantage started the year with a campaign urging members to ask their friends for spare miles.  The email contained a link to "Tell a friend you need miles!" This campaign was received by 1.28% percent of our email panelists starting on January 6.  This compares with a reach of 1.50% for the AAdvantage monthly statement.  This indicates that AAdvantage likely sent the campaign to a large percentage of its members. 

The campaign had good inbox placement with Yahoo, getting in to the inbox vs. the spam folder for 98% of recipients.  For AOL and Gmail, however, the inbox placement percentage was lower at 89% and 88% respectively.

AAdvantage's second major email campaign of the year was with Lifelock.  The campaign offered 4,500 upon enrolling in Lifelock's identity protection.

This campaign was received by 0.34% of our email panelists starting on January 20, 2010.  Compared to the 1.50% of panelists who received mileage statements by email, and the ShareAA Miles campaign recipient percentage of 1.28%, this might indicate that the campaign was sent to a smaller user base.

The AAdvantage - Lifelock campaign had similar inbox placement characteristics as the Share AA Miles email campaign, with 98% inbox placement for Yahoo!, 94% inbox placement for Gmail and 88% inbox placement for AOL recipients.

AAdvantage finished the month with two campaigns in partnership with the Citibank AAdvantege credit cards.  These campaigns offered either 25,000 miles and a companion certificate or 30,000 miles with no companion certificate.  The 25,000 offer was received by 0.53% of our email panelists, and the 30,000 miles offer was received by 0.13% of our panelists indicating some form of segmentation of AAdvantage's list.  Both email campaigns started on January 27.  Inbox placement for the 25,000 miles campaign was 97% for Yahoo, 97% for Gmail and 88% for AOL.  Inbox placement results were similar for the 30,000 miles campaign.

Data from our new panel of 285,000 Yahoo, Gmail and AOL inboxes shows that spammers (email senders who pretend to be somebody else) successfully spoofed the New York Times, and that the major ISP's allowed delivery of these spoofed emails to recipients.  But, whereas AOL and Gmail sent 100% of these spoofed emails to the junk mail folder where they belong, Yahoo consistently let them through to the inbox for 2% to 6% of recipients.

The spoofing attempts, which were sent to an estimated 600,000 Yahoo users during the month of January and early February, mimicked the New York Times in the email from title, but had subject lines such as "News Alert: FuckBook is Open" and "News Alert: Medz for The Whole Family".  The table below shows the spoofing attempts and the % of Yahoo recipients that received the spoof emails in the inbox vs. the spam folder.

The launch of the new Email Campaign Reach and Inbox Deliverability service last week has been a big success.  We will have case studies coming out soon.  In the meantime here are some screen shots of the email panel data in Email Analyst. 

This first screen shot shows a bar chart, plotting the reach of a sender's email campaigns across our panel of 250,000 email users.  The charts can be adjusted to see a daily, weekly or monthly view of email campaign activity and reach.  Charts are also available providing email campaign stats on the reach of email campaigns per ISP. 

Variations in reach are due to email list segmentation but can also indicate ISP deliverability issues.

For each of the hundreds of sending domains covered, we provide a snapshot of average email campaign reach, broken down by ISP.  We also provide inbox deliverability statistics overall and by ISP.  This is a great way for email marketers to get a quick read on potential distribution partners.  For the first time, email marketers have an independent way of determing the reach of their email distribution partners, and whether the email campaigns of their potential partners make it to the inbox or end up in the spam folder.  We also provide contact information for potential partners.



The graphs are helpful for identifying trends for your email marketing analysis, but when you want to get in to the details, you can simply view all the email campaigns from a particular sender, along with the subject line, reach and inbox deliverability.  The examples at left cover campaigns sent by JCrew over a twelve day period.  As you eyeball the email campaign reach statistics,  you can clearly see that some campaigns are being sent to a larger portion of JCrew's email list than others.  This gives great insight into their segmentation strategies.  For more in depth analysis, all the campaigns can be exported to excel, along with the accompanying email campaign reach and inbox deliverability, broken out by ISP.  Click on the links pulls up the email creative.

Interested in finding out more?  Click here to sign up for a demo.

If you have seen our home page over the last few days then you know that we will soon be releasing a new service providing EDS customers with panel data on the reach and inbox deliverability of email campaigns.  This new service will provide a new and unprecedented depth of competitive intelligence information for email marketers. 

Our first foray into this area was a report we published in September of 2009, where we used sample panel data to compare the reach and inbox deliverability of Staples, Office Depot and Officemax.  We got great reactions from that report, and it was downloaded hundreds of times.

Since then, we have been fine tuning the service, and working on incorporating the data into Email Analyst.  Our panel has also grown in size to be greater than 250,000 email users.  

Many of our current clients have previewed the data, and the feedback has been very encouraging.  It has confirmed that there is still a real lack of transparency into email marketing, especially compared to other forms of online media.  Whereas everyone from compete.com to alexa and comscore to Nielsen report in depth on website traffic, there is virtually no equivalent for email.  With this new service, we are making this type of information available for the first time.

Here are a few comments we have received from clients who have previewed the service:

"A core business proposition for Email Service Providers is improving deliverability.  Having an independent source for deliverability data on specific campaigns and major email marketers will show the importance of working with a top notch ESP" - ESP client

"This is a great move for EDS, this is data we need.  Thanks guys" - ESP client

"We've previously gotten information on deliverability at the ISP level, but getting sufficient data for inbox vs. spam folder deliverability has been a challenge.  I'm looking forward to receiving this information regularly" - Major Internet Retailer

"Being able to go in depth on segmentation strategies and see the comparative reach of segmented campaigns vs. 'blasts' will be very helpful" - Agency client

"This a great idea, and the ability to benchmark against competitors will be a great help.  Thanks for tackling this." - Major Internet Retailer

More news, screen shots and examples of data will be appearing in our blog posts over the coming days, and expect our press release soon.  In the meantime, if you would like to pre-register for a demo, please contact us. 

Take a look at the spike in traffic
Jetblue received when they Tweeted about a three hour sample sale.  Their tweet was picked up and retweeted by a fair number of followers, achieving a reach of 1.5 million twitter accounts. 

Jetblue does a great job of tailoring their marketing offers for Twitter.  Importantly, they dedicate special landing pages to the effort, and give their Twitter marketing deals a special name: "Cheeps".  See the landing page screenshot we captured in our system below:

Interesting to see how our new Twitter analytics capability isolates key influencers by market sector.  I took a look at the Apparel & Fashion sector and there are certainly people that stand out as the most influential.  While just in its infancy, our new Twitter Analytics capability shows we have recorded 575 tweets and 715 retweets of offers with links to brands in this sector during the last two weeks since we launched our Twitter Analytics capability.  It is also interesting to see that the Twitter activity closely mimics the email marketing activity in the sector (see graph).  During these two weeks, we have picked up on 530 Twitter Influencers specific to the Apparel & Fashion industry.  These are people who have re-tweeted offers that link to brands in this market sector.

When I click on the link next to Twitter Influencers, I can see a list (here to the left) of who those Influencers are.  Again, these are folks who have re-tweeted offers from brands in this sector.  At the top you have a Twitter account with more than a million followers.  Now that is someone you want re-tweeting your offers.  Farther down at the bottom I see Lucky Magazine and I can see they just re-tweeted a Calvin Klein offer for sweaters to 20,000+ people.  This is a big help to Calvin Klein, which only has 9,000 followers on Twitter. 

 
When I zero in on Calvin Klein I can see a graph overlaying email, twitter and web traffic activity for calvinklein.com.  There is a spike on November 3, showign that a number of people re-tweeted that sweater offer, just like Lucky Magazine did.  On the right are links to show all the emails and tweets that contain links to calvinklein.com.  I can also take a look at who the Influencers are specifically for this brand by again clicking on the "Twitter Influencers" link.  Doing that reveals that there are other influencers for Calvin Klein besides Lucky Magazine.  I am shown a full list of the influencers, the number of followers they have, how many times they have retweeted CK offers, and the most recent offer they retweeted.  Amont those that retweeted the sweater offer were Lucky Magazine, "thesalerack", NYThread, Virginianam and Marinela.  These are people Calvin Klein should pay attention to and which CK's competitors should court!  You can get a real sense of what offers are being aided my social media by looking at this.  Lastly, I also see that another offer for 50% off all men's and women's hats and gloves, etc. was also a popular re-tweet.  This is an offer that Calvin Klein put out by email on November 8th and November 15th and also on Twitter.  How do we know?  Well this is still Email Data Source after all...

Mike Shields posted on MediaFreak that  Kanye West and Serena Williams were in a close tie for worst behavior of the week, based on how many times their outbursts had been been watched on youtube and mtv.com.  As of 9/14 Serena had 2 million views, and Kanye had 1.3 million views.  Meanwhile Joe Wilson's outburst was trailing way behind at only 400,000 views.  

In email marketing by contrast, Joe Wilson, has been mentioned far more frequently.  We took a look at mentions of Kanye, Serena and Joe in email newsletters and here are the results for the week: Serena Williams mentioned in 94 newsletters, Kanye in 95 and Joe Wilson in...245!!!

Digging a little deeper explains the difference:  while all three of Joe, Serena and Kanye were mentioned in the standard daily and weekly newsletters of major publications such as ABC, USAToday, WashingtonPost, etc, mentions of Joe Wilson skyrocketed as part of a email blitz by politically conservative organizations such as Ameripac, Redstate.com and conservativeactionalerts defending Joe Wilson and attacking Obama and the Democrats in email blasts using lists obtained from organizations such as newt.org and the Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign Committee.

Clearly Serena and Kanye win the popular vote!

The second javascript widget is now available through our API.  The "Domain" Widget allows for tracking of email campaigns by sending domain, meaning you can see all email campaigns in our database sent from a particular domain.  You can also use the Domain widget to find any instance of a website being linked to in an email campaign.

It is very easy to integrate these widgets into a dashboard.  Simply register for an API key, and copy and paste the javascript code into your website once you have an agreement in place with us.

In the example shown here, I used the sending domain search to find all campaigns sent from the sending domain "e.jcrew.com" over the last two weeks:




The search results give me the emails sent from JCrew's sending domain, along with a thumbnail image and the subject line.  I can click on the thumbnail to get a full size image.  There were 10 campaigns for the last two weeks from JCrew.  A sample search result:



Alternatively, I can do a search for all email campaigns that link to jcrew.com.  This will show campaigns from JCrew as well as campaigns from many other sources. 



The search results show email campaigns from sheshe me as well as an article from Style.com that links back to JCrew.  The site domain search is a great way to monitor activity by partners as well as where your competitors are embedding their links in third party emails.



If you are interested in implementing the domain widget, please contact us.

If you are an email service provider or agency interested in providing email competitive intelligence information directly to your clients, please take a moment to check out the first of our javascript widgets that are supported by our API. 

We developed these widgets with the hope that agencies and ESP's will integrate them in to their client dashboards, enabling email marketers to research best practices and get insights into competitor's email campaigns as they go through the process of building their own campaigns.  We believe that integrating this information into the workflow will help email marketers improve their email campaigns.

We also made it very easy for partners to integrate these widgets.  The only steps required are to a) have an agreement with us, b) register for an API key, c) copy and paste the javascript code on to their own client facing website.

The first javascript widget allows users to search our entire database of email campaigns by keyword.  You can search the subject line, body text or both.  This is a great way to research good subject lines and also monitor mentions of your company or brand in email marketing.  In the screenshot below, I did a subject search for: 40% off and free shipping

The search returned 60+ email campaigns with that phrase in the subject line during the last two weeks. 


 
To the left is a sample search result showing an email campaign from Steve Madden, with the sending domain and subject line.  Clicking on the thumbnail gives you the full email creative.

Coming soon: the domain search widget will allow you to search our database of email campaigns by sending domain or destination domain.

Zrinity, Inc. will become the first email service provider to integrate data from Email Data Source into its user interface via the Email Data Source API.  This will enable Zrinity to provide competive intelligence for its clients as they plan and execute their email marketing campaigns.  Zrinity will take advantage of the javascript widget EDS makes available to its API partners, allowing end users to search 18 MM email campaigns by subject line or keyword.  Both Email Data Source and Zrinity are dedicated to helping their clients develop and deply effective email campaigns, making for an excellent partnership.

We're happy to announce that Bronto Software, a valued Email Data Source client, has joined our partner program. 

Bronto Software is an industry-leading mid-tier email marketing service provider, focused on improving email marketing success for online retailers and marketers around the world. Bronto is extremely client service focused, and recently won a Stevie award for customer service.

Under the partner program, Bronto and Email Data Source will mutually refer qualified email marketers for each others services. 

And, if you've never heard a Bronto roar, dial +1-919-595-2500 and select option #3

We are ecstatic to announce that Andy Jacobson has joined us as SVP of Sales.  Andy has led the sales teams of some of the most powerful and well known Internet media businesses in New York, including Media Whiz, ContextWeb, Google, ValueClick and DoubleClick.  Andy shares our team's vision of making Email Data Source the standard for email campaign monitoring and the lead source of competitive intelligence for email marketing.  Not only has Andy grown sales operations to $70MM +, he also has a tremendous background in performance based email marketing and online advertising in general.  Welcome aboard Andy!

A recent comScore report measued the effectiveness of online campaigns at driving offline sales.  As a proxy for offline sales activity, the study looked at the spike in traffic to online store locators associated with specific online campaigns.

Using Email Analyst, we took a look at how and when email marketers incorporate links to online store locators as part of their email campaign strategy.

What we found is that top online retailers with a brick and mortar presence almost universally include a store locator link prominently placed at the top of their emails.  For example, in the office supplies category Officemax, Staples and Office Depot, all with online sales above $ 3 billion, each include store locator links in the upper right hand corner of all of their emails (see screen shots below). 


As we began to look at second tier online retailers, even those with a significant brick and mortar presence, the consistency of inclusion and placement of the store locator link fell apart.  For example, Macy's follows the practice of placing a store locator in the upper right corner, whereas Saks had no links to its store locator.  Yankee candle puts a store locator link at the top whereas Colonial Candle has no such link in its emails (see screen shots below).



Given the potential for driving offline sales from email marketing efforts and the fact that almost all the major retailers have adopted the strategy of placing store locators in their email marketing campaigns, it would seem that all companies with a significant brick and mortar presence should take advantage of this effective email marketing strategy.