The comments below are from: Matt Blumberg, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Return Path; Jeanne Jennings, freelance consultant, columnist and publisher; and David Daniels, VP and Research Director for JupiterResearch's CRM, Retail, Site Operations and Marketing Operations practice areas.

Regarding email deliverability & authentication...

Overall, 2006 saw continued focus on email delivery, with an expansion of efforts past basic filters and into authentication and reputation. Here's what our colleagues had to say:

Matt Blumberg: "Both reputation and accreditation have exploded in importance. Marketers started to see that authentication was only the first step to inbox reach. With more than 80 percent of filtering centering on reputation, marketers are realizing that they need to be on top of building and maintaining a solid email reputation."

Jeanne Jennings: "While it's still a hot topic, there were bright spots on the deliverability front this year. It's still a good idea to monitor blacklists, ask your recipients to white list you by including your from address in their address books and publish your SPF record, but deliverability is not the obstacle it used to be."

Regarding email statistics & ROI...

As more marketers started to delve into their email metrics this year, they realized there are many more opportunities for analysis that can lead to more insight and success:

Jeanne: "Statistics provide a goal to shoot for, but aren't a good measure of success or failure. Not enough companies are testing and actively looking for ways to improve their email marketing metrics, and their ROI. Because in the end, if your emails aren't meeting your business goals it doesn't matter what your metrics are."

David Daniels: "Improving email marketing revolves around measurement and marketers' ability to adjust their tactics based on performance of their mailings. However, 28 percent of marketers said they do not focus on any common email marketing key performance indicators. Overall, marketers focus on metrics that determine the health of lists, instead of those supporting benefits or business goals. Only 13 percent of marketers report they are measuring revenue per mailing."

Regarding email creative...

Throughout 2006, marketers learned that they must focus on creative aspects of their email campaigns to continue success. Creative efforts must go into many areas of the email experience, as our colleagues note:

Jeanne: "With Gmail and other email clients blocking images it's more important than ever to pay attention to your creative. Don't just revert to text; do make sure that the message will get through even if the images are blocked. This means making use of alt text behind images and making headlines and other key pieces of your creative rich text instead of images."

David: "Marketers must carefully implement best practices to optimize performance of their mailings, including: use testing to determine creative concepts that resonate; leverage direct marketing print concepts, but realize that not all of them transfer online; work above the fold and emphasize call to action; and understand rendering challenges of specific email clients."

Regarding opt-in practices...

Marketers learned in 2006 that it's more important than ever to have a clearly defined opt-in process and the first message after an opt-in is extremely important in setting expectations and delivering on them:

Matt: "We are finding that opt-in is more critical than ever, and confirmed or double opt-in is still preferred. However, we're also seeing that the level of opt-in does not matter as much as the level of engagement you have with those customers post-registration. If they don't want what you're sending, even double opt-in can't save you from the 'this is spam' button."

Jeanne J: "Still the only way to build a quality e-mail list. The fierce debates about opt-in vs. opt-out have died down, but I don't think that means more organizations are using opt-in. That said, my experience still shows that opt-in lists perform much, much better. That's held true whether my clients were Fortune 100 household names or small start-ups."

Regarding email list segmentation...

2006 saw great success as marketers started to segment email campaigns and delivered more relevant messages. There is still much work to be done, however:

Jeanne: "Still underutilized by large and small email marketers. Relevance and list segmentation go hand in hand; the more you can segment by meaningful data, the more targeted and relevant you can make your messages."

David D: "JupiterResearch has documented that marketers using behavioral measures to target their mailings are much more successful than are marketers simply blasting their lists week after week in a measurement void."

As the year comes to a close, SubscriberMail would like to wish you a safe and happy holiday season.

About the writers:

Matt Blumberg, CEO and Chairman of Return Path, founded the company in 1999. Matt is passionate about making the online relationship between end users and marketers/market researchers better for both sides of the equation. Return Path is a 100-plus person company with market leading brands, innovative products, multiple patents, and renowned industry experts.

Jeanne S. Jennings helps companies become more effective and more profitable online. As a freelance consultant she's worked with top companies to help them improve their email and Web sites. She's a regular columnist for ClickZ.com, publisher of The Jennings Report, and her first book, The E-mail Marketing Kit, will be published in early 2007.

David Daniels, VP and Research Director for JupiterResearch's CRM, Retail, Site Operations and Marketing Operations practice areas, is intimately involved with covering email marketing and operations. With over 15 years of experience in direct-to-consumer marketing, Daniels is recognized as a thought leader in his domain and is frequently quoted in major media outlets. Daniels' quotes from JupiterResearch reports E-mail Marketing Metrics 2006 and E-mail Marketing Content Best Practices 2006.

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