What does this mean? Well, probably not too much if you are above the age of 100 and don’t know what a computer does, or if you just hate giving gifts. But, if you are like the rest of us and usually find yourself in a shopping time crunch during the holidays, let it be known that sales in movies, jewelry/luxury goods, flowers, greetings and gifts grew substantially within one month and we are reminded of the simple joys our home can offer during the hectic holiday season.

This also could mean something for companies without a strong online presence. Of the top 50 web properties with a focus on advertising, The Google Ad Network came in first place, engaging 93% of Americans. Also, more than 6.6 million people visited a tax site to make sure their books were in tact for the upcoming year.

If you haven’t jumped on the online shopping, advertising or researching train, I would go ahead and take that leap; you won’t be disappointed.

In addition to tracking the market share of handset manufactures and operating systems, it also reports on how people used their phones. The report compared data from August 2010 to November 2010 and there was really only one statistic that stood out.

Google’s Android operating system increased its market share by 6.8% at the expense of RIM (Blackberry) and to a lesser extend Microsoft.

Nonetheless, RIM retained its lead as the top mobile operating system with 33.5% of the market. Yet it should be noted that in the report period, Android – with 26% share – has officially leapfrogged Apple which stands a 25% share.

Read the entire comScore Reports November 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share report here.

Emails are obviously content driven. And although the quality and integrity of your content is a main ingredient to getting your message past those filters, your email’s life cycle is still dependent
on — the actual delivery of that content. So aside from how clean your content is or the quality of recipients on your targeted list, the goal is one in the same; which is to obtain the highest amount of success possible!

For instance, internal success like recipients delivered and better inbox placement or maybe a client’s success, such as advocacy turnout. Whatever metric you wish to improve, basic Deliverability Resource Management (DRM) has to be applied before, during and after all email campaigns.  Proper steps need to be taken in order to ensure that the bulk of your list recipients actually receive the message, regardless if it goes into their Bulk file folder or not. Certain practices can better position your available resources so that proper deliverability is present for your email blasts. Practices that would include setting up Feedback Loops (FBLs), monitoring and maintaining sender reputation scores, and consolidating a reliable set of black list filter detection and removal tools. Here are three things that anyone sending, or who is looking to send bulk email should know:

FBLs

Managing user complaints is a pivotal part to sending bulk email. There’s many reasons why an email recipient might hit that dreadful ‘Report Spam’ button at the top of their inbox. Maybe you’re sending them too many messages, maybe they’ve had a change of heart and no longer wish to receive your message, or maybe just by accident. Any number of reasons can exist why a user might be complaining about your content. This is why we require an inter-organizational system known as FBLs. After you set up your IP’s DomainKeys and publish your SPF records, you can then start registering with popular ISP’s and effectively manage user complaints through FBLs. This enables you to form a queue internally and start analyzing complaints and perhaps compare them with your business’s preferred expectations. How often you decide to remove those users who complain is totally up to you. However, please remember that washing your list of recipients who complain will enable you to avoid the probability of those same people sending additional complaints in the future. FBLs allow you to practice good list hygiene, and keep those complaints to a minimal. All of this formulates into a more organized and stable reputation for your IP’s. Keeping your complaint ratios low will enable your resources to successfully send more messages to the inbox, and avoid those pressing rate-limit schedules.

SenderScore

Your IP’s have a reputation to maintain! So be sure you keep them in the good graces of the ISP’s. Your sender reputation is just another way for you to develop and grow positive rapport with ISP’s and those filters that are looking for any reason to hinder your delivery. Your IP’s reputation is effected by conditions and factors in an equation that involves CANN-SPAM compliance, FBLs and white listing, complaint ratios, management of unsubs, mail frequency, and the quality average of recipients being delivered. Return Path is the industry baseline for identifying an IP’s reputation. It scores on a sliding scale, 1-100. And just like when you aced that 5^th grade spelling test, a score of 100 is the best!

I happen to believe that deliverability weighs heavily on sender reputation, more so than the actual content in the message itself. And that reputation will effect your delivery success in general, and not necessarily whether or not your message will be placed in the Inbox or Spam folder. Return Path is a good place to register at, as it provides simple reporting features and a free black list look up tool. However, the blacklist feature is nothing I would recommend for the ‘say all/be all’ in detecting blocked IPs, but it’s something else to throw in your toolbox. — So pay attention to your reputations! Doing so will result in better overall delivery to your lists!

Avoid the Black list

New filters are being installed as you read this. So format, test, and always review your results. Nearly 90% of emails today are considered spam(1), and in order to ‘attempt’ not to fall victim to this classification you will need to avoid the black list! Being the internet, there are many different resources available to check the status of your IPs. Among others, one of the lookup tools I like is MX Toolbox. It allows you to scan your IP’s over a vast array of filters being used by most of the prominent ISP’s today and also helps point you in the right direction for removing any triggered blocks that are detected.

You should consolidate any reliable sources for blacklist removal and tailor your bookmark manager accordingly for easy reference when the time is right. I would  also recommend at a minimal, doing an across the board sweep of your IP’s; checking each of them on more of a weekly basis, rather than every now and again or whenever you get around to it. I like to do this towards the end of the week, or sometimes more often if I know we are sending a heavier than normal volume of email. Simple methods like this need to be applied in order to help intercept messages lost in translation with ISP’s and perhaps combat those bounce back messages with those wacky codes denying your attempts at delivery due to being blacklisted.

Citation:

(1)    Barracuda Central Networks, “Spam Data”, 21 December 2010.

http://www.barracudacentral.org

Measures of success obviously can vary from project to project, but they can also vary within a project. In most cases there exist three levels of measures, for our purposes we’ll call them primary, secondary and tertiary.

Usually primary measures of success relate to an offline activity. Although some people may spend more time in front of a computer than away from it, there is still a real world out there – a world that revolves around exchanging money, voting, construction and other human activities. Thus some examples would include making a donation on a mobile phone, getting people to vote for a particular candidate, or winning approval for a new hospital. One or more of these are usually the “problems” a client will have when looking to partner with another firm. These are easily the most important measures of success.

Secondary measures have to do with the activities that lead to one of the primary objectives mentioned above. Since primary measures involve a serious commitment on the part of the end-user, a gradual process of building up to the ultimate goal is required. These nodes of engagement could include participating in an online poll or survey, posting a message on a Facebook Wall, or forwarding an email.

The way to judge the likelihood that the secondary actions will be taken by supporters remains the hard data of the tertiary measures. These indexes – like pageviews, open rates or Twitter followers – are the things successful managers follow on a daily basis; and their analysis will uncover trends among your audiences.  This will in turn allow you to optimize campaigns to drive up the response rates measured in the primary and secondary goals.

Taking a step back we have seen that measures of success directly correlate to a campaign goal.  Measuring those goals can be done on a variety of levels in this case primary, secondary, or tertiary.  These levels could also be called Offline, Engagement, and Indicators, respectively.

The goal of this post was to pass on some knowledge for the offline world, I hope it is measured as a success.

So when you need to manipulate data using a fine point rather than the broad brush of database scripts, Microsoft Excel is a natural solution.  However it has its limitations in terms of sync-ing multiple lists.  Thankfully, DigDB is a useful Excel plug-in that allows you to do much of your data manipulation yourself.  Its website also features step-by-step instructions for common tasks like de-duping lists.  Check it out, it’s pretty cool and extremely useful.