Today’s post is a contextual piece that provides a marketer’s overview of the state of the mobile market.  All of the statistics cited below were produced by the Nielsen Company.

Feature Phones vs. Smartphones

The mobile environment is compromised of two device classes – feature phones and smartphones. Feature phones run simple applications, such as phone service, text messaging, basic email and web access, and has little or no access to 3rd party applications.

Think of the mobile device you owned before your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Droid. Chances are it was a feature phone.

Smartphones are akin to hand-held computers. They house sophisticated operating systems that run complex applications, such as PC-like email and web access, games, video, music, and more. Perhaps the defining characteristic of smartphones is their ability to access and download 3rd party “apps” like those available in Apple’s App Store.

Feature phones are the dominate devices in the U.S. market, but that is changing. The Nielsen Company predicts that smartphones will overtake feature phones in the U.S. by the end of 2011.  Note that in Q2 2010, 25% of mobile phone subscribers owned smartphones, meaning this number will more than double in the next 1 ½ years!

Here are additional statistics that testify to the explosive growth anticipated in the smartphone market:

•  A ChangeWave Research survey reveals that nearly 20% of respondents plan on purchasing a smartphone in the next 90 days (June, 2010)

•  RBC Capital Markets reports that smartphones will exceed shipments of personal computers in 2011.

Smartphone Players in the U.S. Market

In the U.S., there are three primary smartphone players: Apple (iPhone), RIM (BlackBerry) and Google (Droid, Pulse, EVO, and others). The market share of these players  are displayed in the graph below.

While RIM’s BlackBerry owns the greatest share of the market, and Apple’s iPhone seems to command the most public attention, it’s Google’s Android OS that appears to be enjoying the fastest growth. Among new smartphone subscribers, 27% have selected Android-powered smartphones, compared to 23% for the iPhone. BlackBerry’s share of that market segment has been steadily declining.

Email is a Smartphone’s Most Popular Application

And what are smartphone subscribers using their devices for? Many things, including social networking, checking the news and weather, even to call other people! But the most popular application is email. The chart below shows that mobile subscribers are reading and sending email almost half the time they are on their mobile devices.

Conclusion: while mobile email is still in its nascent phase, marketers need to start thinking seriously about their messaging to mobile devices…particularly smartphones.  The good news is that the evolution of design best practices for mobile email could directly intersect with those for PC-based emails.  iPhones, for example, render messages at 100% of the width of the display screen.

Real Magnet’s Tools for Mobile Email release, scheduled to launch the week of September 20th, will provide you with features and functionality to better target and optimize your message for mobile consumption.  Stay tuned to the Real Insights blog for more information on the release and attend our free webinars on September 21st and 28th!

SuretyMail, a relative newcomer to the space, positions itself as a low-cost alternative to ReturnPath and Goodmail, the two dominant players in the certification space. However, SuretyMail is not a whitelist per se; rather, it certifies as many different attributes – good, bad and indifferent – of the sender’s e-mail as it can verify. For example, if a sender uses only opt-in, SuretyMail will certify that in the form of a response to an automated query by the receiving ISP. If mail from an IP is coming through a social networking service, SuretyMail will certify that, too. The idea is to provide the querying ISP with enough hard data about the mail to make its own automated delivery decisions. While SuretyMail can’t guarantee preferential delivery, it does promise significant improvement in deliverability metrics, and a money-back guarantee.

Unlike Goodmail and ReturnPath, SuretyMail doesn’t perform an advance audit (though it will do a background check of historical sending practices). SuretyMail can also monitor senders’ feedback loops to keep tabs on any changes in sending practices and reputation.

A seal of approval program called “I Don’t Spam” launched this spring, offering senders the opportunity to place the company’s Spam Free Seal on their web sites. Prospective subscribers who click on the seal will see a count of the number of verified spam violations the sender has committed, though the infractions “age off” the tally on a rolling six-month basis.

The company has done some split testing to show significant increases in the number of subscribers and conversions for seal-bearing sites versus a control group; however, they don’t mention what gains in deliverability participating senders enjoy. I think senders shouldn’t expect any, as the program is only subscriber-facing. ISPs can’t know whether mail is coming from a seal-bearing sender – and that’s probably a good thing, because the program’s definition of spam falls quite a bit short of most ISPs’ operational definition. Permission is never mentioned in the program’s participant requirements, which instead seem to focus on CAN SPAM compliance. On the other hand, costs are low, with a monthly fee that’s dependant on the number of sites on which the sender displays the seal.

Last and most recently comes an announcement from CRM-provider and ESP RatePoint, who are planning to port the venerable VeriSign Trust Seal over to their own offerings, and re-brand it as “SafeSender”. It’s the first time VeriSign has partnered with an e-mail provider to use the familiar red checkmark seal in the actual e-mail creative. But it wasn’t clear from the announcement exactly what RatePoint and VersiSign will be certifying – are they asserting some level of compliance with best practices, or merely authenticating the sender?

I put the question directly to a RatePoint pre-sales engineer on the day of the announcement, and after placing me on hold for a few minutes, I was advised that RatePoint “would not be talking about that” until product release next quarter. Since my call, though, other industry publications have written that the seal will indicate to recipients that the sender has been authenticated, and that the message has passed a VeriSign malware scan. This makes sense, since VeriSign earned it’s original fame and fortune in the SSL certificate business (which it recently sold off to Symantec).

So how do senders decide whether and which program they should participate in? Price will certainly play a big part in any decision, insofar as cost of preferred delivery offsets any gain in ROI. Seal programs seem like a cheap alternative, but they are not true deliverability solutions.

The conclusion I draw is that there’s just no shortcut around good sender practices: send the mail your customers want, and only to those who asked for it. If you can do that well enough, you may find you don’t need any of them.

Andrew Barrett is Senior Director of ISP Relations & Deliverability at Real Magnet

Today, there’s a range of certification and “seal of approval” programs available to most permission-based senders. Clients occasionally come to us looking for guidance on whether the expense associated with third party certification is worthwhile. The answer is, “it depends”. In this article, we’ll take a quick run-down of the two best-known players in the space. In Part the Second, we’ll look at three newer entrants that may be worth a gander.

In the accreditation universe, ReturnPath’s certification program is the 800-pound gorilla, because they cover an estimated 1.8-billion e-mail inboxes. ReturnPath offers two levels of whitelisting: Safe and Certified. Both require an audit of the senders’ acquisition and sending practices, as well as a vetting of senders’ e-mail infrastructure. Participants in the program must use dedicated IPs for whitelisted outbound mail, and those IPs must have and maintain good reputation scores – senders can be suspended from the program if their reputation tanks after they’ve been approved.

Senders on the Safe list typically get delivery to the inbox, but with links and graphics off; senders on the Certified list get inbox with links and graphics enabled. Because they’re so widely used by receivers, ReturnPath commands a premium for inclusion on their whitelists – and that’s certainly a consideration for senders of any volume.

Another big player in the space is the CertifiedEmail whitelist offered by Goodmail Systems. This program offers services similar to ReturnPath, but with a slightly different angle. Partner ISPs who agree to use Goodmail also agree to allow certified mail a free pass through all of the ISPs other filtering mechanisms, and to deliver it with links and graphics enabled. However, only opt-in and transactional e-mail is eligible for the program. Prospecting or acquisition mail and opt-out mail will not qualify.

Goodmail is an attractive proposition for senders, but it also comes with a big price tag – so big, in fact, that the Goodmail web site warns its prospective customers that it may not be worth their while if they’re sending to fewer than 50,000 recipients per month, and with at least 15% of that volume to recipients at Goodmail partner ISPs. The network of partner ISPs includes some very big e-mail inbox providers, like AOL, Verizon, Mail.com and it’s affiliated domains, and others, but no longer includes Yahoo! after a falling-out this past winter.

Next time, we’ll take a look at a pair of seal-of-approval programs, and a newer accreditation program that promises significant improvements in deliverability metrics or your money back.

Andrew Barrett is Senior Director of ISP Relations & Deliverability at Real Magnet.

The deliverability part of the e-mail campaign is not nearly as fun or sexy as developing the message and the creative – it can look downright boring, or even a little scary. But senders who don’t take a little extra time to look back at their metrics are missing a crucial opportunity to squeeze the last bit of deliverability – and ROI – out of each campaign. Here are four easy steps you can take right now to improve the deliverability of your next send, and each of them takes a only a minute or two:

1. Resend your soft bounces. Most e-mail bounces are of the “generic soft” variety, which is the receiving server’s way of inviting you to try sending again later. The receiving server may be having temporary issues, or it may have de-prioritized your mail. In either instance, you should take them up on that invitation.

Real Magnet will automatically attempt to resend certain types of bounces for a few hours after your messages are sent, but some problems can take longer to fix. After 24 hours, log into Real Magnet, click on the Track tab, and select a message to track. In the “Message Sent Results” report, click on the Details icon for bounced messages. You’ll see a breakdown of the bounce results, and a button for resending bounces. Check the box next to each bounce type you want to resend, and hit the Resend Bounces button. Real Magnet will take another crack at delivering the bounces. (Real Magnet will not re-send “User Not Found” or hard bounces, even if the boxes for those bounce types are checked when you hit the Resend button. These are addresses that your recipients’ ISPs have told us are dead, and continued attempts to send to them can damage a sender’s reputation score.)

2. Use “Track Deliverability”. Get an instant read on possible deliverability issues for any of your messages, all on one screen. On the Real Magnet Send tab, click on “Send Deliverability Test” in the left navigation pane. Select a message to be tested, and hit the “Send” button.

Now hop over to the Track tab, and select “Track Deliverability Testing”. Click on your message to see the results of a battery of usability, rendering and spam tests. It’s a great way to catch any potential issues early, and provides quick guidance on the most efficient use of the time you spend on your e-mail campaigns. If this option is not enabled on your account, give support a call (301.652.5074) or an e-mail (support@realmagnet.com).

3. Leverage Domain-Level Reporting. For many senders, some receiving domains are far more important than others. You can catch possible delivery problems earlier at these important domains by adding them to your personal list of domains to track and analyze.In the Tools tab, select “Account Management” in the left navigation pane. Then click on “Domain Tracking”. You’ll see a field to type in the domains to be added to your domain tracking list. Enter a domain and click the “Go” button. Now tracking information for that domain will appear on the Tracking page for all of your future messages.

Let Real Magnet know about domains with 100% deliverability but zero opens on large volumes of mail. That’s often a sign that a domain is either quietly discarding your mail after accepting it for delivery, or is no longer handling mail for any recipients. Our delivery team can find out which it is. If it’s the latter, time to prune that domain from your lists. If it’s a block, we can reach out to the domain and see what can be done to resume normal delivery to your recipients.

4. Automatically ask your recipients to whitelist you. This might be the easiest change to implement resulting in the biggest improvement in deliverability. Place a line of text above the creative in your messages asking the recipient to add your “friendly from” address to their contacts list. Place the same text next to your e-mail list sign-up form on your web site. An entry in your recipients’ contact lists can mean the difference between delivery and soft bounce, between delivery to Junk or to the Inbox, between images on or images off by default. It takes just a minute, and you’ll never have to do it again. You might even go so far as to point recipients and their ISPs to the Real Magnet Whitelisting Information page. It gives both Desktop-level instructions for recipients and Server-level instructions for e-mail administrators.

Take a few minutes to follow these four easy steps. If they help generate just a few extra conversions per send, they might be some of the most profitable extra few minutes you spend on e-mail.

Andrew Barrett is Senior Director, ISP Relations & Deliverability at Real Magnet.

For these reasons, we would all like our newsletters to be more widely read. Even if their open rates and clicks are already strong, the more people who read the organization’s official word, the easier it is to further the organization’s objectives. Here are seven ways to make this email staple work even harder:

1. Give it a name. Calling your newsletter “Newsletter” is certainly accurate, though it stops short of giving the subscription a personality. The name of the newsletter for the department of sanitation in my county is called “The Paperless Airplane.” If a newsletter about picking up trash and recycling can have a catchy moniker, so can yours.

2. Add a contextual subject line. Many newsletters are titled by date or issue with subject lines to match, such as “Association XYZ Newsletter: August 2010.” While it is true that this subject line convention relieves the author of the burden of decision-making, a subject line that telegraphs the newsletter content would likely lift open rates. Do a few issues of A/B testing with an option like “XYZ Newsletter 8/10: Annual Meeting Pics and Presentations.” Soon you will have a good sense of what types of content references in the subject line your newsletter audience finds most appealing.

3. Post your newsletter as a web version. Your newsletter subscribers (and others you would like to be your newsletter subscribers) also spend time on your website, so why not use the media there to promote a link to the web version of your newsletter? Pointing to the web version won’t require any additional layout of formatting work and allows you to still benefit from Real Magnet’s analytics. Promote the web version in a “What’s New” section on your homepage, on your blog, and through your social media channels as well to distribute your newsletter to the widest possible audience.

4. Post newsletter archives online. And now that you’re using the web version of your newsletter, why not create a simple page on your website that serves as an archive of your recent newsletters? Again, no additional publishing work for the newsletters themselves is necessary. All you need to do is include the links Real Magnet generates to the recent web versions you would like to include. Then in the newsletter itself, point your subscribers to your Newsletter Archive page so they can review previous newsletters whenever they like.

5. Add a new section. One of the advantages to newsletters is that they are easy to template. Each one can include the same categories of content, making them easy to write and predictable to your subscribers. But the downside of rigid templating is that it can fatigue over time and start to feel a little formulaic. Try interrupting your regularly scheduled newsletter with a fresh new section – one that is noticeably different from the rest of the newsletter so that it really stands out. Maybe it is a single industry-relevant data point conveyed in a brightly colored graphic. Or it is a comment or quotation from someone known within your industry. Maybe it is a photo from a recent industry event, identifying the subjects with a caption (people love to see pictures of each other and themselves). Many newsletters are all work. Think of this section as the whistle that goes along with it.

6. Launch a win-back program for the unengaged. You probably have many subscribers to your newsletter who have not opened it in the previous 6, 9 or even 12 issues. Continuing to send to them and hoping for an improvement is a scenario for disappointment. Instead, identify these subscribers through recpeient-level tracking and run a separate win-back campaign for them. The objective of the campaign is to target them separately with a message or offer that will re-engage them with the organization. If they read the message, click-through, interact with some content on the other side (such as a poll or a video or a photo gallery or a blog post), the connection between them and your organization will be rekindled, and they are more likely to see the next newsletter you send them as relevant to them. And when this happens, you’ve just earned yourself another newsletter reader.

7. Recruit more subscribers. We all know this, but we don’t always do everything we can to encourage more people to subscribe to our newsletters. Take an inventory of all the sources of your subscribers, then compare it to all the points of contact you have with people who should be your subscribers. If the lists don’t match up, you have just identified new places to add a mechanism for joining your list.

Real Magnet offers a completely embedded single sign on solution for organizations using Personify. To view a demonstration of how this integration functions, watch the video below:

This integration dramatically simplifies the email marketing work flow of customers using both Real Magnet and Personify. Specifically, the integration let’s you:

• Upload targeted lists from Personify directly into Real Magnet (no more importing or exporting).
• Automatically add Real Magnet tracking data to Personify member records (sent date, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, and bounced).
• Use Real Magnet tracking data in Personify BusinessObjects queries.
• Automatically update/flag unsubscribes in a members’ Personify Interest Areas.
• Send individual members a trackable, one-off email or fax.
• View a member’s full Real Magnet history from their Personify record.

Why Real Magnet?

With inboxes flooded, you need to be at the top of your game to get the attention of members and prospects. Real Magnet – a leading provider of email services to associations and non-profits – can help you get there.

We Know Associations

Real Magnet is the leading provider of email services to associations and non-profits – and has been since 2002. Today, more than a thousand of these organizations are using Real Magnet for their email and event marketing. In 2004, the ASAE endorsed Real Magnet as the email service provider of choice for its members.

Industry Leading Deliverability

Deliverability is a top priority. We work directly with ISPs, technology partners, filtering organizations, and customers to ensure the highest possible delivery rates. Additionally, deliverability testing tools are built right into the application. Real Magnet is CAN-SPAM compliant, Sender Score Certified, and a member of the Email Sender and Provider Coalition.

Tools For Mobile Email – Coming September 2010

As the market for mobile devices powers forward, more recipients are viewing your messages on iPhones, Blackberrys, and other gadgets. In September, Real Magnet will release a suite of tools to help you market more effectively to mobile recipients. The suite includes new features to create, preview, and track mobile messages.

Reporting and Dashboard Modules

Highly targeted campaigns are more successful than untargeted ones, period. Our Reports and Dashboard Modules give you the tools to identify and generate highly targeted lists. Choose from more than 50 pre-defined reports, or create your own. All reports, pre-defined or customized , can be populated on your personal dashboard.

Download this page as a PDF

Questions? Contact us! sales@realmagnet.com or 301-652-4025.

As an email marketer, I’m fond of case studies. I attend conferences to hear them, scour the trades to read them, and pick the brains of other email marketers to surreptitiously discover them. I feel pretty strongly that one of the best ways to get smart about email marketing and about how to use Real Magnet’s products is to learn how your contemporaries are doing it – within your industry and in others.

But the one way I know of to get even smarter about email marketing than reading case studies is to write them. The act of writing your own case study – about how and how effectively your organization uses email – brings clarity and candor to the practice and requires you to truthfully assess the discipline and strategy you bring to the practice. And the finished product – even if intended only for your internal colleagues’ eyes –  invites the constructive feedback of other stakeholders.

Why not try it? Follow these steps to create a case study of your own, and see if you don’t become your own best student in the process:

1. Define the scope of your case study. The narrower the better. As an email marketer you’d be less interested in a colleague presenting on “How we approach email marketing” than you would “A/B Testing for Open Rate Improvement” or “Mobile Subscription Channel Launch and Adoption.” Hidden in this step is the principal reason writing your own email case study is so valuable: in order to have a case study to write, you need to have initiatives within your email program worth chronicling. If the only case study topic you can come up with is “Lessons on Sending out a Lot of Emails and Hoping for the Best” then you’ve already learned something from this process that you might not pick up reading someone else’s case study.

2. Outline the success metrics. As you’re preparing to write your case study, include a list of all the metrics you decided previously to use in order to measure the success of your initiative. For example, if your case study is on “The Launch of a Niche Newsletter to a subset of our Subscriber Base,” your success metrics might include total subscribers by time, percent of house list who subscribers, percent of target niche who subscribes, as well as open-rate and click metrics from the niche newsletter compared to the primary. As above, it’s possible you might not have articulated the success metrics for your initiative at the outset of the initiative, so your case study work becomes a little retroactive. The act of writing the case study is a good reminder that these metrics are critical from the very beginning of a project, and should help you remember to define them proactively with your next case study worthy initiative.

3. Compile your data into tables and graphs. It’s useful to be able to say at a marketing meeting, “The open rate on our emails has been increasing.” But it’s much more insightful to show a table with the open rate by message over the past year. Better still, roll out a line graph charting the open rate from message to message so that it’s easier to isolate the changes and trace back their causes, and draw some conclusions about future trends as well. Visual representation of data does take some work, but is extremely powerful in communicating key findings and inviting productive feedback and follow-up questions. Inevitably, the marketer to glean the most from the graphs is the one who prepared them in the first place.

4. Reflect on what might have been. Now that you’ve compiled your data, made your charts and drawn your conclusions, step back and play a couple rounds of “what if?” Is there a conclusion you’d like to be able to draw but didn’t capture the necessary data in the process? Do ideas appear for how to improve the initiative itself next time based on the data and conclusions you’ve laid out? If you could start the whole thing all over again, what would you change? Include all this within your case study – in part to catalog some of the learning you’ve achieved merely by preparing the case study, and in part to set the course for the next email initiative or case study which will include these very improvements.

The Fiscal Responsibility of Business Ethics in the Privacy Debate
by Mike May
Published on 7.28.2010 in MediaPost’s Email Insider.

Public policy has become topical in the email industry again. The last time online privacy was as common as part of the vernacular on Capitol Hill was leading up to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. In 2003 legitimate email marketers were the beneficiaries of the legislation, though the impact of the current go-round on email marketers is up for debate. The current proposed legislation — in particular the bill set forth by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill) — puts forth a “universal opt-out program,” a sort of do-not-call list for email and other personally identifiable information collected online. If passed, this will change the way many law-abiding business operate, and would very likely hamstring many list rental and lead generation businesses. It could also have ramifications for trade-outs and co-promotions, as sending email to a house list on behalf of another company could fall into a grey area and raise the specter of lawsuits.

Frankly, we shouldn’t give a rat’s whisker about the legislation — CAN-SPAM, the Rush Bill, the Boucher Bill or any of the next bills to tumble down Capitol Hill. As email marketers who simply want to continue a dialogue with our customers and subscribers, shouldn’t we already be Beyond Reproach?

Think of Beyond Reproach as the kinder, more thoughtful cousin of self-regulation. If you self-regulate as a driver, for example, you might catch yourself tapping your brakes when you see a police car hiding in the weeds ahead. If you’re Beyond Reproach, you drive at the speed limit — not because you’re purposely abiding by the law, but because you genuinely believe that 55 mph is a safe and reasonable speed to travel. Staying within the law is coincidental to you. Drivers like this are the most laudable citizens of the highway.

As email professionals who devote enough energy to our craft that we read the best practices in the trades and attend the most highly regarded conferences, shouldn’t we be the most laudable citizens of the email industry? Shouldn’t we be the group that the laws aren’t meant to restrict, but whose business practices the laws seek to standardize?

Here is how Beyond Reproach would look in practice:

List Rental or Co-Promotion: A client of my company’s promotes conferences through media partners, which normally has them exchanging some exposure at the conference for email rights to the media company’s subscriber lists. But this year a proposed partner asked my client for the same rights, in order to promote an offer to the client’s subscriber base. My client refused, citing the integrity of his company’s list as the reason. But then company principals continued to reflect and realized their willingness to compromise their media partners’ list integrity reflected as poorly on them as it did on the partner. So they made a policy change to no longer send direct or sponsored emails to partners’ lists, regardless of the permissions granted by the subscribers. That’s good email citizenship.

Exceptions to Subscriber Preferences: Clients often set up preferences centers but want to reserve the right to email their subscribers independent of the lists they have selected for themselves. The most common reasons are unanticipated communication needs, the launch of new newsletters or content streams, or special announcements. Advising these clients is done with a single word: discipline. Rather than thinking of your list as an asset to leverage as you see fit, think of it instead as a media property you have some limited access to merchandise within. Once you turn preferences over to your subscribers, your role changes from list owner to content publisher. If you have a new newsletter you need to promote or an announcement you need to make, think about how you would include this content within your existing messages, instead of writing and sending separate messages that necessarily ignore (or at least stretch) subscriber preferences.

Opt-Out: Read DJ Waldow’s column on this very topic from a couple of weeks ago. He outlines a scenario where an email marketer is within the law, but not Beyond Reproach. With the “Universal Opt-Out” provision in the current Rush Bill, this grey area is going to have a lot of light throw on it in the near future. And DJ’s argument is even more cogent than mine. He argues not from a position of business ethics, but simple fiscal responsibility: “making assumptions and sending customers emails they have not asked for (opt-out) tends to be a combination that can be deadly.”

I don’t mean to open up a can of flames about the current proposed legislation. I’m sure there are some aspects of it that some readers of this column object to, and there are likely provisions that could impact how my company and/or our clients conduct some parts of our business. So yes, we’ll stay current with it and follow the laws if passed. But the fact that privacy is on the Hill again should be a wake-up call that as an industry, we are not currently Beyond Reproach. Yes, your list is an asset, and you have the right to profit from that asset. But is it a more valuable asset than your company’s reputation? As competition intensifies, aren’t likability and integrity more meaningful differentiators than list size or trailing quarterly revenue?

And as a professional and an organization, is your energy best spent defending established tactics shared by yourself and all competitors in light of a rapidly evolving environment, or is it wiser to devote your resources towards innovations that differentiate you and forge newer and stronger connections with your subscribers?

I believe acting Beyond Reproach is a path toward long-term prosperity, despite the occasional near-term compromises it requires. And every time I’m pulled away from thinking about the fun possibilities in email innovation to read 55 pages of privacy legislation, I’m further convinced.

As the market for mobile devices powers forward, more recipients are viewing your messages on smartphones, iPads, and other gadgets. In September, Real Magnet will release a tool set to help you market more effectively to this expanding group of mobile recipients. These tools for mobile email are comprised of three components:

Mobile Content Creation Tool

You’ll be able to create a mobile version of your message with new content editing tools. With a click, Real Magnet will auto-generate a web version of your message that is optimized for mobile rendering. You’ll have maximum flexibility to edit this mobile-web version according to your own requirements.

Mobile Indicators and Geo-Location Tracking

Real Magnet’s message tracking is expanding to include new metrics on how and where your messages are being viewed. This data can play a critical role in your targeting efforts. For each message, you’ll now see:

• Open % – mobile vs. PC
• % breakdown of Opens by mobile devices
• % breakdown of Opens by browsers (PC and mobile)
• % breakdown of Opens by Operating System
• Opens by recipient location

On the main tracking page for each message, you’ll see the graphic below.  You can mouse over the pie charts to see percentages and drill down to get the details.

Overview Technical and Geo-Location Display

Mobile Rendering Previews

Just like the email in-box you use on the web (Outlook, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.), different smartphones will render your HTML messages differently. As part of this release, a rendering preview feature will be added that provides the actual display of your content in the most popular devices, such as iPhones, Blackberrys, Window mobile, and others), so you can avoid design mishaps BEFORE sending your message.

Preview of Blackberry

Preview of iPhone

In the upcoming weeks, more information on the Tools for Mobile Email release will be available right here, so stay tuned!

post from Mike May, Real Magnet’s Director of Insights

I talk a lot about engagement, not just because it’s going to start impacting deliverability, but also because engagement is the primary objective of most email programs. You send email because there is a connection between your organization and a subscriber, and you wish to nurture that connection. The desired end result is usually some action – registering for a conference or webinar, downloading a research report or white paper, participating in a survey, or consuming some relevant content online. But when your subscribers take these actions they are exhibiting the engagement your email strives to foster.

Alas, not all of your subscribers take each action you present to them in every one of your emails. Fortunately, there are other ways to measure how engaged they are – and how engaging your emails are – independent of the results of your message’s primary call-to-action. Here are a few metrics to employ to evaluate how engaging your email program is:

1. Open Rate. Open rate is typically used to evaluate the effectiveness of subject lines. But syntax aside, open rate also measures a very important component of engagement: anticipation. Your subscribers are more likely to open an email from you if they are expecting it and looking forward to receiving it (and any subscriber looking forward to receiving your email certainly qualifies as engaged). How do you tell which part of open rate measures the effectiveness of your subject lines, and which measures engagement? It’s impossible to pinpoint one from the other, but you can find some clues. If your open rate doesn’t move much, despite very different subject lines from message to message and even A/B testing within the same message, your score is probably more a reflection of your engagement than what’s actually in the subject line itself.

2. Click-to-Open. The number of click-throughs (or “Links” in your Real Magnet reporting) measures the number of message recipients who clicked on one or more links. Your click-through rate (or Link %) is that quantity divided by the total number of delivered messages. What this measures is the size and shape of the funnel, from your universe of recipients down to the success of the call-to-action. But while click-throughs are evidence of engagement, this metric doesn’t measure how engaging your messages actually are. A better metric is click-to-open, or the percentage of the people who opened your email who went on to click something in it. Only the people who open and read your email can judge whether or not your content is compelling.

For example, let’s say Company A sends its newsletter to 10,000 people. It gets a 50% open rate and a 5% click-through rate, for 500 links. Company B also sends to 10,000 subscribers, and gets a 20% open rate and a 2.5% click-through rate for 250 links.

Company A got double the click-through rate, but because its open rate was much higher, it had a larger universe of subscribers who saw the content in the first place and were in a position to click on it. Company A’s Click-to-Open rate is 10%. Despite Company B’s lower click-through rate, it had a Click-to-Open rate of 12.5%. Company A’s open rate could be evidence of a stronger relationship with its subscribers and greater anticipation, but Company B’s content is more compelling – pulling more of the people who read it to take action.

3. Unique and Gross Clicks.

The number of “Links” reported by Real Magnet Overview Tracking Page is the number of people who clicked on one or more links within your message. You can drill down into your Links metrics to see these Unique Clicks (the total number of clicks excluding multiple clicks of the same link) and also Gross Clicks (the total number of clicks including multiple clicks of the same link).

In the example above, Company A might find that its 500 recipients who clicked through actually generated 600 Unique Clicks and 700 Gross Clicks. That means that many of its subscribers were reading the email, clicked through, and then returned to the email to either click on something else, or to click again on the same link later on. The larger the difference between the number of Links and the Unique and Gross Clicks, the better your content is working to compel action from your recipients.

4. Social Clicks.

If your message includes links to follow your organization in social channels like Facebook and Twitter, or links to Real Magnet’s SWYN (Share With Your Network) feature, the activity around these social icons can also telegraph engagement. The easiest way to get a sense of the effectiveness of these icons within your message is to use Click-View tracking, which is linked by the thumbnail of your message on the top level of Message Tracking. You’ll see how many clicks the Facebook and Twitter and other social icons attract.

Activity here is evidence of your most engaged subscribers, as they are the ones who are most likely to forge a connection with your organization in addition to the email, or pass along something you’ve sent to their friends and colleagues.

5. Recipient Level Tracking. You can run extremely informative reports with Recipient Level Tracking. One of my favorites to measure engagement is to quantify the number of subscribers who click-through emails on a regular basis. Customize a report to show how many recipients have clicked 2, 3, 4, 5 or more times in the past 10 messages, and compare these quantities to your total subscriber base. Very quickly you’ll have a sense of how large your most active and engaged population is. You can even drill down into these reports to identify who these subscribers are, to target them for other high-engagement campaigns. (There is an added cost for recipient level tracking because of the costs associated with keeping such a high volume of data available and current for immediate reporting. Contact your account manager for details.)