by Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald
ClickZ E-mail Delivery column

Gmail's coming! Gmail's coming! Google's free e-mail service is creating reactions among e-mail marketers that range from apathy to serious concern.

Still in beta, Gmail will likely be available to the masses sometime in the next few months (no official timeline has been announced by Google). We believe there's no time like the present to begin preparing for Gmail's onslaught. Read the full article to find out why...

Say your last message produced a 40 percent open rate and 12 percent click-through rate. But what happens to these rates if you look under the hood a little more deeply? By running "filter" reports, you can get a more accurate picture of your message performance and potentially identify problems or opportunities.Here are a few examples of ways to slice and dice your message reports:

• By top domain. Look at results by the most popular domains in your list - such as AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail if you are a B2C marketer. Dramatically different results across domains (generally the rule) might suggest delivery issues, inactive accounts and format problems or simply the result of different demographics of users of those email service providers. For B2B marketers, significantly lower metrics at a major corporation domain might suggest specific spam filtering issues or Lotus Notes challenges.
• By HTML vs Text. Because open rates aren't directly trackable for text messages, running separate reports for HTML vs Text messages provides a more accurate measure of your HTML open rates. Comparing click-through rates across the two formats may provide insight into layout issues that are either hurting or hindering reader action.
• By demographic. If you have demographic information, you might uncover significant differences in performance based on gender, age, location, whether they are a customer or not, product interest, etc. Significant differences across certain demographics might suggest the need for different versions of your messages for certain segments.
• By source of subscription. If you are a retailer, for example, perhaps subscribers signed up in various ways - in a physical store, upon check out in your online store, during interaction with your call center or via a general Web site opt-in form. Understanding which subscription source is driving the highest click-through and purchase rates will help you where to focus your list building efforts.

Emarketer Releases Its E-mail Marketing Report

Emarketer, the aggregator of online marketing statisitics, recently released its latest E-Mail Marketing report. Here are a few highlights:

• Email volume in the United States is projected to nearly double from 1.5 trillion in 2003, to 2.7 trillion in 2007.
  
• The compounded annual growth rate for email is 14.6 percent from 2002 through 2007, but after factoring in year-to-year increases in volume, the data shows that growth hit its peak in the early 2000's and has slowed slightly since.
  
• Email penetration is at an all-time high of 91 percent among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64. Search has the second highest penetration among Internet users.
  
• In the US alone, 88% of adult Internet users have personal e-mail accounts. Further, 46% of them have e-mail access at work. Added together, eMarketer estimates that 147 million people across the country use e-mail, almost every day.
  
• A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 91% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read e-mail, and an even higher number of users ages 65 or older do the same. The only other activity to even approach e-mail's popularity is using a search engine to find information.

June 2004