Digital + Social

Welcome to the first issue of Direct

By now it

Two new studies released on Wednesday suggest that consumers are generally more satisfied using e-mail than making telephone calls to customer contact centers.

Silverpop has become the first major e-mail marketing service provider to jump into the RSS communication channel. The company announced a new service, RSSDirect, that will let marketers talk to their prospects via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.

With all the talk about the numerous sender authentication protocols, it’s easy to overlook some basic actions that can help improve your e-mail deliverability. A new white paper from e-mail services provider Silverpop, “Deliverability: What the Pros Already Know,” calls attention to some of these basics

Total Internet domain name registrations reached an all-time high of 82.9 million for the second quarter, up 28% from last year and 8% over the past quarter according to VeriSign Inc.

Flexible mailing frequencies and event-driven messaging were among the e-mail trends Chris Baggott, chief marketing officer of e-mail marketing solutions provider ExactTarget, singled out as important for the coming year. Now that the year is more than halfway over, Baggott has refined some of his predictions regarding trends.

For those e-mailers who go out of their way to do everything right—getting permissions, using double opt-ins, employing an e-mail service provider, applying SPF authentication and generally treating the Can-Spam Act as the e-mail equivalent of the Bill of Rights—here’s some disturbing news:

When it comes to e-mail campaigns, little things like personalized greetings mean a lot, and big things — like original photography and strong subject lines — mean a whole lot.

Bill Nussey is president/CEO of Atlanta-based Silverpop, a provider of e-mail marketing services. CHIEF MARKETER caught up with him last week at the Annual Catalog Conference in Orlando, FL. Here are selected words of wisdom from our conversation