Pivotal Veracity

Email Marketers Can Target and Track Email to iPad

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:07:32 +0000

This week Unica Corporation announced that tracking capability for the highly anticipated iPad is now incorporated into Pivotal Veracity’s customer-level deliverability tracking solution, MailboxIQ. The company says this support comes ahead of the iPad’s commercial release to allow email marketers to identify its early adopters—to craft and target email communications specifically optimized for the new device—and to seamlessly track the deliverability and reputation of those messages at the customer level.

MailboxIQ provides customer-level tracking of email deliverability, rendering and reputation across mobile, social, search, and traditional Web and software-based email platforms—from Android to the Blackberry to the iPhone among others. The goal is to offer mailers the tools to improve the relevancy and ROI of their campaigns through multi-channel customer-level intelligence on when and how their customers engage with their email communications.

“With MailboxIQ, marketers can easily identify which of their customers use the iPad, and optimize and target messages specifically designed to take advantage of its many rich email capabilities; they can then track the success of those messages in terms of inbox deliverability and engagement—all at the customer level,” says Michelle Eichner, vice president, Email Products, at Pivotal Veracity.

Spam Filters On High Alert

Stephanie Jordan — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:36:00 +0000

All of those email offers promising shipping in time for Christmas made for the worst deliverability of email marketing pitches the week before the holiday, reports Pivotal Veracity. As marketers crammed inboxes with last minute pitches, ISP spam filters blocked a daily average of 11.26 percent of messages during the week of December 13th.

According to the company, marketers sent more email to customers this holiday season than ever before, but deliverability became increasingly difficult as the holiday approached.

“The best days for deliverability were earlier in the month and on weekends—save for the last weekend before Christmas, which saw abnormally high email volume relative to most weekends,” observed Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity.

The company also noted that:

• Instances of blocking grew each week during the first three weeks leading up to Christmas.

• The worst day to send email during the month was December 17th, when 13.8 percent of email was blocked and just 78.8 percent of email was routed to recipient inboxes (with the remaining 7.5 percent found in spam or junk folders).

• Blocking began to subside when most retailers could no longer fulfill before-Christmas shipping: 12.2 percent of email was blocked on December 22nd— by the next day, the number dropped precipitously to just 6.4 percent.

• Blocks spiked again during the final days of 2009 as retailers pushed year-end clearance offers and post-holiday sales. December 28th – 30th saw blocking rates of 11.8 percent, 13.3 percent and 11.5 percent.

‘Tis the Season to be Online

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:00:30 +0000

Email marketers had their work cut out for them on both Black Friday (Nov. 27) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 30). Both days hit all-time email volume highs, however, nearly one in four email marketing messages were not delivered to recipients’ inboxes on Cyber Monday, reveals new deliverability data released last week by Pivotal Veracity.

“Cyber Monday has become a veritable trench warfare of offers, specials and hype in consumers’ email inboxes,” comments Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “As delivery queues get packed with messages, ISP spam filters go on high alert and many marketers end up with lower inbox delivery rates.”

According to Akamai Technologies and the National Retail Federation, global Web traffic peaked at more than 7.9 million visitors per minute to retail sites on Cyber Monday.

“The temptation to mail every Tom, Dick and Harry on your list can be hard for marketers to resist — especially with the holiday shopping season now in full swing,” adds Baird. “But sending out a last minute offer to someone who hasn’t purchased anything from you in the last 12 months is going to shoot you in the foot, and could even have longer term consequences for your reputation in an environment where ISPs are increasingly looking for signs of positive user engagement in deciding whether or not to deliver your mail.”

Responsys reports that on Black Friday, 69 percent of major online retailers sent at least one promotional email, up from 59 percent in 2008, as tracked by the Retail Email Blog. On Cyber Monday, 71 percent sent at least one promotional email, making it both the most popular retail email day of this year and also the most popular of all-time.

Because Cyber Monday has become so important, retailers trying to get ahead of competitors are increasingly targeting the Sunday prior. This year 45 percent of major online retailers sent at least one email on Nov. 29, making it the busiest Sunday ever for retail email marketing.

“Among Responsys clients, we saw even more dramatic increases on Cyber Sunday,” confirms Don Smith, Responsys’ chief information officer. “The email volume on Sunday was nearly three times the usual amount because of retailers trying to get the jump on Cyber Monday.”

This increase in Sunday activity, Responsys reports, makes the Cyber Monday messaging statistics all the more remarkable.