Here are some quick stats:

- Open rates increased 18% from the same time 2 years earlier
- Click rates (5.3%) decreased 5.9%
- Average volume per consumer is up 10.5%
- The non-bounce rate slightly increased from 94.1% to 94.8%

Mailers need to practice creating relevant email messages to their consumers, also cutting back on image heavy email and using text based email has shown higher clichthrough rates due to many email platforms blocking images within emails.

Feel free to share your email tips and tricks!

Delivered: Once upon a time a valid email address was a sign of success. Fast forward to reality and just having an email address means squat. There are many more variables such as knowing what the consumer likes, when they shop and what offers they respond to so you can target the right message at the right time of day.

Opened: Open rates used to be used to simply optimize subject lines, now advertisers are learning more from this statistic. The consumer trusted your brand to open the email, you reached them at a convenient time and your message was of interest. One must also keep in mind that consumers may just be opening your email to unsubscribe.

Credible: Measuring the read rate of your message is a more accurate indicator of user engagement. A message should remain open for longer then 5 seconds to indicate the user has read the message and not simply clicked your unsubscribe link.

Relevant: Advertisers must use all data such as purchase history, RFM metrics and clickstream reports to build a successful targeted email campaign.

Interactive: All advertisers want their customers to share their positive experiences. The more relevant your ads are to the consumer the more likely they are to blog, tweet or refer new customers to your products.

Engaged: An engaged user is one that continues to respond to your marketing efforts, it’s great to have a consumer purchase once but if a user is targeted correctly by the 5 steps above they will become a lifetime customer.

The real ROI comes in the shared messages of these type of campaigns. Messages that included a sharing option generated 30% higher click-throughs than emails without the social sharing links.  Three or more generated 55% higher click-throughs.  Twitter alone showed a 40% higher CTR than without a sharing link.  Twitter appears to be the most popular option at 67.2% of all social emails with Facebook coming in a close second at 62.7%.

Think about it, you send an email to a million users in your email list.  If 55% of the users that click through your message and share it with their 130+ friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter, imagine how much ROI you are getting on that email campaign without any additional cost!  Folks, time to start A/B testing!

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
• A Wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
• A Wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a Wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

If the Wave is able to combine all of the forms of conversation that are currently available, how will this change an industry such as Lead Generation? Will this replace the need for topic specific forums, and blogs? If a demand for lead types is posted, and instantly a supplier is able to respond and make a connection and discuss in an open format for others to see, it could be a huge thing for brand recognition! Being able to edit content and rewind to see where posts are coming from, could be an asset when the need for “damage control” arises.
I have signed up to be on the list of hopefuls in the next rounds of invitations sent out, I can’t wait to get on this wave!