After a nearly year long dispute over their email practices, Bidz.com has been cleared by the FTC who will no longer be investigating the original claim against Bidz. Bidz.com is an online retailer who specializes in jewelry.
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When starting out your email marketing campaign, one of the first major decisions you’ll make is how to setup subscribers. There are two avenues which you can take, each with a list of pros and cons. You can decide to make your campaign opt-in (where users sign up for your newsletter), or make it opt-out (where a newsletter is signed up for when someone sets up an account on your site).
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ClickSquared, a company known for providing email marketing solutionsfully released their latest SaaS platform – Click 3G. The service automates and executes a wide variety of campaigns, most notably email. Click 3G will allow a wide variety of cross-channel marketing solutions, and supports real-time web analytics integration.
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Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable.

But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several blog posts have foolishly been written about social media “killing” email. As my friend Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (client) says: “How can social media kill email, when you have to have an email address to belong to a social media site?”

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Email marketing firm Implix has released a study of 1,652,000 emails sent from its emails marketing platform GetResponse between July and December 2009. The study offers a look at email marketing by tracking common performance indicators across 95 countries and six continents.

The study found the average open rate in North America was 10.76 percent. Europe had the best email open rate at 13 percent, more than 60 percent higher than the low score of 8.08 percent in Australia.
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I was traversing the internet, and came across an interesting article concerning email. The piece was written by Steve Johnson, of Chicago Tribune. He writes of the phenomenon known as ‘joint email accounts’, where couples (married or not) share an email account. It’s quite an amusing article, and it got me thinking about various email accounts in general – the differences in how people use them, and the different ways people view their email accounts in a broad sense.
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While the exact number of reasons is a little hard to pin down, private equity firm TA Associates provided a whole lot of them this week as it showed that it’s not time to give on the email marketing industry.  TA Associates bought a majority stake in eCircle for about 60 million (or $87 million).

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If someone were to ask you, “Is the recession over?”, how would you respond? A Silverpop survey of 300 email marketers showed that nine out of 10 respondents believe the recession is still occurring. It can be really hard to define what an actual ‘recession’ is, especially to decipher when one is improving or worsening. Sometimes perception is more important than actual truth though, and it says quite a bit that most email marketers are pessimistic about the recession.
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Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.

Of course, when you consider that 95% of the businesses in the US are considered an SMB of some shape or size it should make one think a little more about the impact this market segment has in the overall scheme of things. Unfortunately, ‘too big to fail’ bailouts don’t await the little guy. Instead the SMB needs to make due with what they have and be as smart about how they spend their marketing dollars as possible.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problem with PR email, the results of a survey on people’s attitudes to the email that PR agencies and others send them.

The survey paints a dismal picture of how email is used in the PR business.

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