Despite what many people might think – and have demonstrated – email is still sacred. And spammers who masquerade as real, honest-to-god people, are annoying. Very annoying.

Josh Bernoff on Groundswell picks out three examples of email marketing/PR that fit into this category. All three treated him like a target, not a human. "Influencers and journalists are human, too," he writes. "We get mad at this stuff.
You want us to like your products, so why do you behave like this?" 

(See one he likes – for its ingenuity and personal nature.)

Probably the best advice on how to write an email are the tips from Seth Godin. (They're not designed for email marketers and do in fact include never sending mass emails.)

Some of my faves:

• Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.
• Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything
  other than writing back. If you don't have a personal, interesting way
  to start a conversation, don't write.
• Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
• Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them.

Love it or hate it, email marketing is here to stay – even if people stop reading it.

Email open rates have been steadily falling, hitting 13.2% in the first half of 2008, compared with 16.1% in the
first half of 2007 and about 14% in the second half of the year. Click rates sunk to 2.73% from 3.18% in 1H07, according to a November study from MailerMailer (via eMarketer).

Banking/finance,
religious/spiritual, government, and telecommunications have more success than other verticals, according to the study. 

A tip to get a better open rate: Use a short subject header. A subject of less than 35 characters
yielded a higher average open rate (19.6%) and click rate (3.1%) vs. 14.8% and 1.9% for those with 35+ characters.

Still, marketers in all industries – particularly retail – tend to value email marketing over most channels in terms of driving the highest volume of sales, second only to paid search.

According to data from an eMarketer study on behavioral targeting, consumers’ favorite forms of marketing are emails
from companies people have relationships with and they say they want to
hear from.

The most hated are emails from companies they don’t want
to hear from. "People were asked,
and they said yes. That dynamic operates in all forms of marketing.
It’s one of the many reasons why paid search does well. People are
given a choice," senior analyst Dave Hellerman told Mediapost.

Well, of course that’s the difference. Nobody – and I mean nobody – likes being told what to do. What we’d prefer, I guess, is to have someone spy on us and know exactly what we want, when and where we want it…but ask politely before giving it to us.

On that note, check out this lovely chart showing incredible growth for BT ad spend, even as the FTC holds hearings on the practice.

By 2012, MarketingCharts reports, BT will constitute 24% of the display ad pie, despite representing just 8.6% of internet ad spend. What is driving much of this growth? Why, it’s online video — the new darling of the internet ad industry.

Thought getting tagged by the SF DPT was a downer? AdTeractive got slammed with a $650,000 fine by the FTC for "tricking" consumers
into signing up at third-party sites by offering
"free" goods, like laptops, iPods, flat and other merchandise. They operated under the domains of FreeGiftWorld.com and SamplePromotionsGroup.com.

One hundred (million) dollar prize goes to the person who scours the FTC’s Dot Com Disclosures for the exact clause that they used to smack down Adteractive’s activities. Note, however, that this blog does not fall under the category of "advertising" and therefore does not have to "tell the truth and not mislead consumers" nor do we have to substantiate claims. Translation: You.Don’t.Get.Any.Money.

So, add this to the FTC’s other online concerns, such as user tracking and privacy issues, web analytics, behavioral targeting, and so on. Should they regulate more? Consumerists say yay, while Microsoft, Yahoo, and those other big kids say nay.

Next question — When is the FTC going to crack down on the Free Credit Report folks?

clipped from

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Warning!!!  Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

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I just got this email from Gmail, or at least someone named deviantartstarlove.amanda@gmail.com. (Giving me ideas for a new porn name, at least.) Asking for personal information and so on, so of course a red flag went off immediately. Darn spam, I thought.

And from gmail, no less. My trusted source for many a month! I’ll have to start using Facebook messaging instead of personal email, I thought. And wiki message boards instead of work email.

Really? Has it come to that yet? Email has become outdated for some, a pain the arse for others, and just plain ugly. It’s not just phishing, spoofing, and spam anymore. It’s the inefficiencies of one-way communication – no matter how fast it purports to be – and the one-dimensional nature of the sender and recipients.

But social networking sites are starting to change all that. As a direct competitor to email, they are still struggling, but features that they offer are beginning to look mighty nice to email users. Kind of like when all the ladies suddenly sprouted red lips in Pleasantville and the men just didn’t know what to do. And now the tables are turning, and email provider’s are trying to "steal some of social networking’s thunder" by adding features, like Yahoo’s Friend Finder.

Roger Matus writes:

Well — with all the advertising revenue at stake — I am not shocked
that the big email providers, such as Yahoo, Google, AOL, and
Microsoft’s HOTmail,  plan to add social networking features.  Imagine
reading an email from a friend and being able to find out instantly if
he/she is available for an IM chat, left an "away message," has
uploaded a video, or is planning a big event.

Will this make email sexy again, asked the Wall Street Journal.      Was it ever?

What’s
so direct about direct email?

Sure,
reaching consumers through email appears to be a method to communicate your
message. As Anthony Braide put
it: "email is such an all pervasive communication tool that its use as
an extremely effective means of building customer relationships and selling
products and services remains un-dented." 
Yah, un-dented,
like a Honda Accord parked in the GM parking lot in Detroit.
The truth of the matter is, despite
our increased
tolerance for spam, there are a lot of things that can potentially damage
customer relationships and destroy your brand: think twice before you hit Send.

An
article in Marketing
Vox highlights some of the problems that people are encountering with their
email marketing campaigns. For example, confusion arises when the landing pages
don’t match the look and tone of the email, and will cause users to abandon the
site well before their 8-second average. I am wondering if these offending
marketers who don’t know how to "match" are perhaps also guilty of
combining stripes and plaid, or eating eggs and peanut butter together. Gross.

For
more data from the SilverPop study, click here.

NEWSFLASH:
People
use email to communicate. Duh. But if you’re gonna use this medium, better
do your homework first and make it as effective as possible, without offending
your constituency. Even Luke had to grow up a little before using the Force.

Consumer Reports State of the Net 2006 is out, and the verdict on Internet security is sobering:

Consumers paid as much $7.8 billion over two years to repair or replace computers that got infected with viruses and spyware.

One in four people "had a major, often costly problem" from viruses, with a total cost of $5.2 billion.

What’s more irritating than a virus that costs you a hundred bones to fix? Answer: SPAM. Not the nice pink meaty substance that comes in a can that experienced 15 minutes of fame here – which you should know is actually where the term comes from – but the millions of unwanted email messages that clog the mailboxes of annoyed Americans everywhere?

But apparently, we’re getting less bothered by it: according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project (February-March 2007) more people are getting more spam at more frequent intervals (More! More! More!) but in many cases, are
less bothered by it than before. Is this spam desensitivation?  The younger set appears to be affected: 32% them say spam is “just part of life on the Internet and is not that big of a deal." Translation: Chill the freak out, gramps. Delete, and move on.

But Deborah Fallows, author of the report, must be in the latter category of adults, concluding with the statement "Spam is beginning to undermine the integrity of email and degrade life online."

Next on the hitlist: spam’s friendly cousin, direct email.

For those who are interested, here is a good Wall Street Journal article on the maturation of the direct email industry – and its success in the fashion industry.

Two different Internet marketing categories, two different studies by two different companies reached one common conclusion: prices fell in October. (eMarketer)

Fathomonline found keyword prices dropped 6% in October, and Worldata’s "Fall 2005 List Price Index" found that email list rental prices dropped as well.

However, that same article goes on to say that a Deutche Bank/Mediapost study found that only 11% of online ad buyers found that PPC prices were lower in Q3.

Hmmm….

J.L. Halsey bought their second email company of the year – EmailLabs – for up to $26.5 million. (They bought Lyris back in May for $29.5 million.)