(Direct Newsline) U.S. Internet service providers and e-mail service providers are doing a better job of getting opt-in e-mail to the inbox than they were three months ago—with two notable exceptions. That’s the finding of the latest ISP Deliverability Report Card for Q3 2005 from Lyris Technologies, an e-mail platform provider.
The report, which examined the delivery outcomes of more than 45,000 permission-based e-mail messages to accounts at 41 ISPs in the U.S. and Europe, found that U.S. delivery rates for opt-in e-mail rose in the third quarter to 89%, up from 85% in the previous quarter.
But combining both the U.S. and European results, the Lyris study found an overall quarterly decline in both gross deliverability rates (delivery either to an in-box or a bulk folder) and in-box deliverability. Total gross deliverability rates fell to 87% from 90% in Q2, while total in-box deliverability declined slightly to 86% for the quarter. Lyris attributed the declines to a rise in e-mail blocking among European providers.
False positives — permission-based e-mail messages picked up as spam and shunted to bulk folders by the delivering ISPs — declined overall to 1.2% in Q3 from 1.4% in the previous quarter, and the U.S. only figure held steady at 2.1% of all communications. While five U.S. domains showed evidence to suggest that they have substantial false-positive issues, only two of those — MSN Hotmail and Google’s Gmail service — displayed higher rates of inappropriate categorization in Q3 than in the previous quarter.
According to Lyris, Hotmail’s false positive rate was 9.4%, up from 5.6% in Q2, while Gmail’s 7.2% rate was substantially higher than the 4.1% it posted for the earlier three months. In Hotmail’s case, the Lyris report speculates that its imposition of new Sender ID requirements during the quarter may have contributed to the increase in false positives.
“While the average rate of e-mail delivery remains high, the report also shows that performance among individual ISPs can vary greatly,” Lyris vice president Robb Wilson said in a release accompanying the report. “Companies with large in-house e-mail lists should really be doing deliverability audits of the e-mail campaigns at the ISP level. This can be particularly worthwhile with the larger providers such as Yahoo! and Hotmail.”
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Some of the most eye-opening statistics about the bottom-line costs of bad data for direct marketers large or small comes from Bud Walker, a data quality product manager at Melissa Data Corp. Close to 20% of data captured by teleservices representatives is flawed when saved, he claimed in a recent article in Multichannel Merchant. While it cost only $1 to verify the information at the time the data is entered, it costs $10 per record to correct after the data has been saved. The cost of doing nothing to correct the record, even after the fact, tops $100.
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(Direct) More than half of customers exiting consumer electronics stores said their purchases were influenced by Internet research, according to a stop-and-survey study.
Among those that used the Web, product and/or company sites were the most influential, followed by search engine recommendations and retailer Web sites. Banner ads, chat room suggestions and user group sites lagged far behind these influences.
Asked about the single-most-influential medium, shoppers said that newspapers and in-store associates held the most sway, followed by a three-way tie between the Internet, friends and family and “other.”
Among those that conducted online research, pricing was far and away the most influential factor, followed by the knowledge of in-store sales staff, brand reputation, quality of product, and the ability to compare other products.
The study was conducted among 322 post-purchase shoppers at 28 consumer electronic outlets. The research was sponsored by The CMO Council, in partnership with the ConsumerEdge Research Group.