Industry Delivery Benchmarks are Meaningless

By Stefan Pollard

Whenever I talk with a client about metrics, the conversation often turns to benchmarks: "We're doing great because our average open rate is 5 percent higher than the industry benchmark."

Problem is, general industry benchmarks don't accurately reflect your program's performance. If your email program doesn't match the benchmarked population, the numbers are useless for anything more than a passing comparison. Learn how to drill down for meaningful statistics in my ClickZ column: Click to Continue

Users Redefine Even Permission Email as Spam

A new study by Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa shows email users no longer think of spam email as just unsolicited messages:

• 56%: "Just not interesting to me"
• 50%: "Too frequent emails from companies I know"
• 31%: "Emails that were once useful but aren't relevant anymore"

The study also asked respondents how they used the report-spam button:

• 48%: "Did not sign up for the email"
• 41%: "Email was not of interest to me"
• 25%: "I get too much email from the sender."
• 20%: "I get too much email from all senders."

Source: "Spam Complainers Survey," March 2008

How to Show URLs?

Question: What's the best way to show a URL in the text of an email message? Does it vary from HTML to text?

Answer: Always remember that the URL is basically computer code, and it's always a good idea to show as little code as possible in your email message, no matter which format you're using.

With HTML messages, you shouldn't show the whole URL unless you have a specific reason to do so. For example: http://www.This-Is-a-URL.com/subscribe/ doesn’t provide much value to the reader.  Click to Continue

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Introducing the new LyrisHQ.com marketing portal

Some of the content you have been accustomed to finding at EmailLabs.com is now located at our new marketing resource portal, LyrisHQ.com.

Our new site continues to provide practical, useful content on email-marketing best practices – and it also offers expert advice on other facets of online marketing. The site features daily marketing blog posts, as well as articles on Web analytics and site optimization.

In honor of LyrisHQ.com becoming the new home of The Intevation Report, we've rebranded our newsletter and will be making some additional behind-the-scenes changes as we move more of our content over from EmailLabs.com to our new site.

As always, we value your feedback – and not just on our newsletter. Feel free to share any likes or not-so-likes about our new resource area.

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