(Direct Newsline) Professional and personal e-mail activities are beginning to merge and users are showing a declining concern with spam, according to the sixth annual DoubleClick Consumer E-Mail study. According to the study, 57% of respondents view their work e-mail at work during the day at least occasionally, while almost as many view work e-mails from home in the evening (55%) and on weekends (54%). In addition, 48% of respondents check their personal e-mails at least occasionally at work during the day, with 21% doing so all the time, casting doubt on the notion of the “best time of day” to run e-mail campaigns, according to DoubleClick. Nearly half of all respondents reported owning at least three e-mail accounts. While 95% considered one of their addresses their primary account, 72% of respondents reported using a single address for making online purchases. The study, conducted by ROI Research and the Greenfield Online, polled 1,000 e-mail users via e-mail during May and June.

Business-to-business marketers rate telemarketing as their most important lead generation source by a tight margin, according to a survey by Sales Lead Report. Of those surveyed, slightly more than 27% listed it as their top channel, compared with just under 27% who cited e-mail. Direct mail was named by 22%. This was followed by search engine optimization (12%); print direct response advertising (5%); and pay-per-click advertising (4%). Bringing up the rear were online advertising on outside Web sites (2%) and direct response broadcast (less than 1%). Sales Lead Report surveyed its e-mail subscribers.

(Direct Newsline) Shoppers will spend more cautiously-and potentially less as a result of their fears about having their personal identity or credit card information compromised, according to a survey of consumers sponsored by IBM. The research found that 14% of all consumers have had their personal information stolen, with one in ten of those thefts occurring during the holiday season. One third of all cardholders said they might spend less while shopping online or via a catalog, and 29% indicated they might spend less in retail stores. Overall, 61% are concerned about the safety of their personal or credit card information, and half of those believe their personal information is jeopardized, while 46% fear for their credit card numbers.

(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.

Direct marketing in the United States will generate $1.85 trillion in 2005, 7%of the country’s $26 trillion total sales, according to a new study released by the Direct Marketing Association. The DMA’s “U.S. Direct Marketing Today: Economic Impact 2005” study notes that DM expenditures will top $161.3 billion this year, and that DM will account for 10.3% of the U.S. gross domestic product. Sales driven by DM are forecast to increase by 6.4% through 2009, compared to 5.3% growth in the 1999 to 2004 period. Overall U.S. sales are growing more slowly, according to the forecast: 4.8% for 2005-2009, versus 4.5% for 1999-2004. Telemarketing topped the list of DM ad expenditures by medium for 2005, at $47 billion, followed by non-catalog direct mail ($31 billion), DRTV ($21.5 billion), catalogs ($18.8 billion) and Internet marketing ($12.6 billion).

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Telemarketing delivers the highest return on investment for ordered products or services. The medium scored an ROI index of 18.2 in a new report from the Direct Marketing Association. What’s an ROI index? The DMA defines it as revenue per contact divided by promotional cost. Following telemarketing was e-mail with an ROI index of 16, dimensional mail (15.3), and direct mail (14.9). Telemarketing also generated the highest response rates for direct orders with 5.78%. Next came dimensional mail with 2.3% and catalogs with 2.18% response rates, respectively. This report is based on data from 573 direct and interactive marketing campaigns and contains research from 21 different industry categories.

What’s the hot new medium for marketers? Direct mail. Spending on the old workhorse will grow by 7.5% this year, according to a white paper released by Winterberry Group. The reason? The fact that it’s measurable, but that’s not all. For many firms, mail is an increasingly important of their multi-channel efforts. In addition, paper and printing prices have stabilized, and the U.S. Postal Service is stressing worksharing discounts (despite rising rates). And increases in CRM adoption have led to more targeted campaigns. “The looming postal rate increases, regulatory constraints on marketers, the rise of the Internet and other challenges to direct mail production have been relegated to back-of-mind status as marketers continue to both expand advertising budgets and shift spending to direct, measurable media like direct mail,” says Bruce A. Biegel, Winterberry Group’s senior managing director.

(Direct) A shortage of skilled labor in India may result in a spike in identity theft at Indian call centers, technology research firm Gartner warned in a recent report. The Indian government estimates the need for trained and qualified employees in call centers will reach 1 million by 2009 with an expected shortfall of 260,000 workers, according to Gartner. As a result, Indian call centers will begin to experience high staff attrition rates as employees switch companies looking for higher salaries and advancements in their careers, Gartner predicts. Also, as costs go up for Indian call centers, India’s competitive advantage in the area of labor costs will begin to dwindle, Gartner said.

Online IT buyers place heavy value on objective Web content when making their buying decisions, according to a survey from the CMO Council and KnowledgeStorm. Almost 90% said that online content has a moderate to major impact on their vendor preference and selection. As for the various kinds of B-to-B content available on the Web, 58% said they read vendor white papers and shared them with their peers. Going down the scale, 54% said they read product reviews and 52% read analysts’ research reports. Asked what they valued least about online technology content, respondents cited “hype and puffery of offering” as the leading complaint (53%), followed by “poor communication of business value proposition” (46%) and “too few proof points that evidence return on investment (45%). The survey queried nearly 1400 respondents from a wide range of industries.

How do shoppers get to Web sites? E-mail outscores catalogs as the primary motivation, according to a survey by Decision Direct Research, the online research arm of direct marketing service provider Millard Group. For the quarter ended August 31, 81% of survey respondents reported that they were likely to visit a direct retailer’s Web site after receiving an e-mail, compared to 78% who said they were likely to surf there after getting a catalog in the mail. That discrepancy marks the first time in the quarterly survey’s three-year history that e-mail from a marketer outranked print books as a Web traffic driver. Meanwhile, overall satisfaction with Web shopping grew slightly from the same quarter, with 52% of the respondents saying the sites offered “unique items not found elsewhere” compared with 44% last year. Decision Direct polled Internet shoppers from 37 multi-channel merchants and incorporated data from 47,000 completed customer surveys.

*(DirectTips) This time it’s personal — or should be: Four out of five consumers say they’d like personalized content from Web sites, and three in five say they’d be willing to spend up to two minutes answering questions that would push that content to them. Those results from the second annual personalization survey conducted by Choicestream, which offers platforms for online personalization, track roughly with last year’s findings. But respondents this year showed a growing unwillingness to share personal information in order to get that highly targeted content: Only 46% said they would release demographic data, compared to 57% last year, and 59% were willing to share their preferences against 65% who were willing to do so in 2004. The kind of personalization customers said they would like broke out according to age. Among the 18-to-24 set, 47% said they’d like more personalized recommendations for music, followed by 27% who wanted more tailored recommendations for TV and movie content. Respondents over 50 were most interested in getting personalized news (28%), Web search (26%) and book recommendations (22%). Why should retailers care? Because 37% of respondents in all groups said they would have bought more movies or DVDs on the Web if they’d found more of what they liked — as would 34% of music buyers.

*(Direct Newsline) Sales of hosted customer relationship management systems grew by 105% during 2004, to $4.4 billion, according to a report from AMR Research. Hosted applications are those housed off-site, at service vendor locations, as opposed to those installed on the marketers’ premises. The industry spent $400 million on these applications last year, up from $200 million a year earlier. That said, installed applications continue to dominate the market, generating $4 billion in sales during 2004. As a whole the CRM platform market grew by 10% during 2004. “The hosted model has reinvigorated a market that failed to grow over the past several years,” says Rob Bois, senior research analyst at AMR Research in a statement. “The hosted category has changed the whole perception of customer management with faster implementations, and easy customization.

If ever anyone wanted a follow-up, it would be an industrial buyer who goes to a Web site to search for products, right? Wrong. A new survey by ThomasNet. shows that 90% of all industrial executives and engineers do go online. But 77% have a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” philosophy, and 56% don’t want to be called until they have made the initial contact. And 21% don’t want to be contacted at all, a tenfold increase over the past three years. In addition, 89% of respondents prefer anonymity and 95% want information sent only when they request it. Going further, 81% indicated they would be unlikely to return to a Web site that reveals their identities to suppliers. How many people does this affect? Of the 805 purchasers surveyed by ThomasNet, 31% reported that a visit to a Web site for information resulted in unsolicited calls from salespeople. And telemarketing is not the only medium they detest: Almost 90% don’t want unsolicited e-mails or Internet promotions from vendors identified during a search.

(Searchline) Banner years ahead for search marketing: A new projection for online ad spending forecasts double-digit growth for search marketing budgets over the next five years and says search will overtake conventional Web display ad dollars by 2010. The 2005 Online Advertising Forecast from JupiterResearch predicts that annual search ad spending will hit $18.9 billion in 2010, more than twice the $9.3 billion spent in 2004. Search marketing is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 12% over the next five years, while spending on display Internet ads will see only 7% annual growth. But even search won’t compete with the expected increase in spending on other forms of online advertising that capitalize on the wide diffusion of high-speed Web connections: rich media spending will grow by 25% annually until 2010 to $3.5 billion, and streaming media will see 30% growth to $943 million.

(Searchline) We’re searching longer and harder before shopping online: A new report by comScore takes a broad overview of e-commerce and online customer behavior. One key finding is that heavy searchers also tend to be heavy shoppers. The report, titled “The Ascent of the precision shopping Machine”, found that the 16% of the Internet population that use search most intensively accounted for 35% of total online spending in 2004. The 34% of Web users that comScore termed “medium searcher” also spent bigger than their numbers, booking 34% of Internet sales. In an average month, one in three Web shoppers uses a comparison shopping engine to find products. Comparison shopping reaches epic proportions in some categories such as electronics, where 95% of shoppers reported visiting a comparison site in the first quarter of 2005. Consumers are also visiting more sites before making a purchase, comScore reports. Apparel shoppers now visit 25% more sites before buying than they did in 2002; electronics buyers go to 23% more sites than they did three years ago. Overall use of search engines grew 45% from March 2004 to March 2005.

*No wonder mailboxes are jammed. Credit card marketers sent out a record 1.4 billion direct mail offers during the first quarter, 11% more than last year, according to market research firm Synovate. But response rates reached a record low of 0.4%. The result is that consumers are getting “a wide range of reward and rebate programs at very attractive prices,” says Brian Stratford, vice president of competitive tracking services at Synovate. Proprietary reward and rebate offers made up 27% of all bank-card mailings, up from 16% in 2004.

*Are you giving multi-channel customers what they want online? Maybe not, according to a survey of consumers by Decision Direct Research, a division of Millard Group. Of the 50,000 people surveyed, only 63% rated companies as “excellent” in terms of providing e-mail verification of an order. And yet, 79% said that this service is important to them. And even fewer respondents rated other Web site attributes as excellent. A sampler:

Item received matched online description (50%).

Products described accurate online (45%).

Inventory status readily available online (45%).

Ability to find the desired product quickly (40%).

The ratings were of companies that the consumer had purchased from within the last three months.

*Young people prefer instant messaging to e-mail when communicating with each other, according to a survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of the 1,100 teenagers surveyed, 75% use instant messaging, compared with 42% for adults. Nearly half use it daily. And while 90% use e-mail, teens said they prefer instant messaging.

Senior marketers executives may want accountability in their advertising. But they don’t feel that they know how to get it. Those are among the findings of a new survey by Marketing Management Analytics, the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research. Of the 135 senior-level marketers surveyed in April, 60% said that defining, measuring and taking action on ROI is important. But only 20% said they were satisfied with their ability to do so. And 73% said they doubted their ability to understand the sales impact of a marketing campaign. The full survey findings will be presented at the ANA’s 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum on July 20 in the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York.

Are you an out-of-work database marketer? You may be in luck. More than a fourth of all respondents to a recent Direct magazine survey added personnel to their database and relationship management departments during the first half of this year. That’s up from a fifth last year. And far fewer firms have reduced their staffs. Most were either holding steady or adding workers. Leading the pack on hiring were B-to-B companies. Firms with less than $10 million in annual revenue were the second most likely to have staffed up, trailing only firms grossing more than $100 million a year.

(Searchline ) They’re aware of adware: Consumers are growing more educated about spyware and adware, but they’re still hazy on distinctions between the two. That’s according to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which found that nine out of 10 respondents have changed their online behavior in some way to avoid either spyware or adware. Eight in 10 said they know what spyware is; but only five in 10 said the same about adware. Eight in 10 respondents said consumers should get more notice about the possibility of downloading adware files; among those who reported finding adware on their computers, that number climbed to nine in 10. as for their online behavior, 81% said they don’t open e-mail attachments that might be unsafe; 48% avoid sites that might put unwanted programs on their hard drives. One quarter has stopped downloading music or video for peer-to-peer networks, and 18% have changed Web browsers to avoid intrusive software.

Phishing attacks, which grew at a rate of 28% last year, are eroding consumer confidence in e-mail. A new Gartner survey found that more than 80% of online consumers distrust e-mail from companies they don’t know. And of these, more than 85% delete suspect e-mail without opening it. The result: Gartner expects those and other breaches to inhibit three-year e-commerce growth rates by 1% to 3% in the U.S. And there may be an even worse threat. Only 27% of the respondents said they are “extremely concerned” about phishing. But 50% feel that way about unauthorized access to credit reports and other data. In addition, 40% are worried about malicious software. Gartner surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers.

B-to-B companies better think twice about the incentives they offer. Social programs—i.e., meals, entertainment and other perks—are more profitable than discounts. And they help cement customer bonds, whereas discounts often attract companies searching only for the cheapest deal. According to MarketingNPV, those are among the findings in a paper by Robert Palmatier of Northwestern University and Srinath Gopalakrishna of the University of Missouri. Also profitable—when done well—are structural programs, through which sellers develop solutions or products exclusively for a single customer. But it only works when the customer interacts frequently with the seller, according to MarketingNPV.

(DirectTips) Broadband access reached 32 million U.S. households in 2004, just a bit less than half of all American homes online, according to a new report by JupiterResearch. And that high-speed population should hit 88 million households, or 78% of the wired U.S., by 2010. The majority of those — 65 million — will have high-speed Web access both at home and in the office. At the same time, a report from Goldman Sachs on the spread of broadband suggested that the spending gap between high-speed and dial-up shoppers was narrowing. In 2005, broadband users spend 17% more online than their narrowband brethren; last year, that differential was 26%.