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Email Marketing Spend to Reach $1.1 Billion by 2010
Spending on email marketing will reach $1.1 billion in 2010, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.5 percent from $885 million in 2005, according to a Jupiter Research forecast, writes InternetRetailer. Also, the average number of spam emails per consumer is forecast to decrease at a CAGR of 13 percent, to 1,640 per year, from 3,253 in 2005. Email delivery rates have now stabilized at 88 percent, on average, and will surpass 90 percent in next few years, according to the report.Survey: U.S. Users Addicted to Email
An America Online study to be released today indicates that email use is so addictive, that some people even check email while using the restroom, driving a car or attending church. MediaPost writes that the report, based on an Opinion Research Corporation survey of some 4,000 online adults in 20 U.S. cities, found that 77 percent of email users have more than one account - on average 2.8 accounts - and typically rely on email at least as much as the telephone. On average users spend about an hour a day checking email. Email users tend to read personal email at work (61 percent of users who work away from home) and check email in bed (23 percent), classes (12 percent), and business meetings (8 percent). Some even admit to checking email in the bathroom (6 percent), while driving (4 percent), and in church (1 percent).Non-Profits' Email Response Rates Increase
Constant Contact reports that a bare majority of associations and non-profit groups are seeing improved email response rates. A DM News report on the release notes that just over half of the 500 groups surveyed indicated they had both better open rates and higher clickthrough rates over the past two years.E-Commerce Ten Years Old, Worth $140 Billion
In a new report, "E-Commerce in the US: Retail Trends," eMarketer reviews changes over the decade since the first online purchase and looks to the future of e-commerce. A full decade old, e-commerce accounts for a $140 billion in business, and online shoppers now closely resemble the U.S. population as a whole. According to Forrester, between 2003 and 2004, the average online shopper became a year younger, was more likely to be female, less highly educated, with slightly lower household income, and increasingly accessed the Internet through a broadband connection.Americans get used to spam
According to a survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project, compared to a year ago, fewer e-mail users now say that spam is undermining their trust in e-mail, eroding their e-mail use or making life online unpleasant or annoying.
As spam mailings continue to permeate email inboxes around the Internet, the majority of those who receive spam accept the unsolicited emails in stride, almost as if it's an expected occurrence when using the Internet. (Xinhuanet)E-Mail Marketing Survey
Why e-retailers are expanding their e-mail marketing
Surveys show that 68% of e-retailers are doing more e-mail marketing this year than the year before and the majority of those surveyed believe e-mail marketing is as or more effective than other forms of web site marketing. The explanation for this dichotomy appears to be found in the fact that e-mail is seen as an extremely effective way of communicating with online shoppers, even if that communication does not result in a sale that can be attributed to an online sale. Furthermore, the low cost of e-mail marketing makes it an extremely "effective" sales generator measured in terms of return on investment, if not in absolute sales. (Jack Love)
Anti-ICANN Groups Spam The US Department of Commerce
Osopinion.com -
Groups who despise the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have organized an email campaign to let the US National Telecommunications and Information hear their concerns.
Industry vows fight on child porn
BBC News -
Databases will be used to prevent the distribution of child pornography Thousands of child pornography images will be collected into a database to prevent further distribution.
Outblaze Joins Anti-Abuse Working Group
ChinaCSR.com -
Hong Kong-based Outblaze has joined the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group , a group of communications and technology companies working to eradicate email spam and other types of messaging abuse.
Austin spammer faces over $10M in penalties
A former University of Texas student and his partners will face civil penalties and attorney fees of over $10 million after a federal court found they bombarded Internet users with millions of e-mails.
Spam-spyware combo will spawn targeted attack tools
The IT security landscape is about to be hit with a potentially devastating seismic shift, says Mark Sunner, CTO of Message Labs: the convergence of phishing-type spam e-mails and spyware.
IM attacks on the rise in May
The number of Instant Messaging attacks increased by 500 percent in May, Postini reported this week.
OPINION Momentum for Global Internet Regulation Mounting
"There are many non-technical aspects of Internet governance that would benefit from multi-stakeholder input at an international level.
Open Email Rate Bounces Back Strong
In the first quarter of 2006, the best email open and click rates were on weekends, according to online marketing firm eROI's most recent, Q1 2006 email study. Moreover, open and click rates increased significantly in the first quarter (40 percent and 60 percent increases, respectively.)
Spam bounce messages compromising networks
IronPort study finds more than 50% of the Fortune 500 corporations have experienced mail service outages or delays because of misdirected bounces targeting their networks.
Sleeping with the enemy
Insiders were responsible for nearly 60% of information security breaches experienced by organizations over the last year, according to the fourth annual Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) study on information security and the workforce.
Microsoft offers one-day security summits
Provided at no charge, Microsoft's Security Matters-Security Summits serve as a venue for IT professionals and developers to learn about key trends in the security industry, learn what Microsoft is doing to help customers address risk and build business opportunities, and participate in discussions on specific security topics.
Cloudmark warns against VoIP-based phishing attacks
Scammers posing as banks are emailing people to dial a number and enter personal information needed to gain access to their finances.
Jailed spam king caught conspiring to kill witness
Spam king and online drugstore operator Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, 26, who is awaiting trial at the Sherburne County Jail, Elk River, Minn., used his phone privileges to arrange a hit on a witness and the witness' family.
Jumpstart hit with $900,000 spam fine
Jumpstart Technologies LLC will pay a $900,000 civil penalty for violating the CAN-SPAM Act, the largest penalty yet for illegal spam, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Fidelity laptop with HP employee data stolen
The laptop was being used by several Fidelity Investments employees in an off-site location. It contains information on 196,000 current and former HP employees. The data includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other employment-related information.
SEC shuts down 12dailypro.com
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Charis Johnson of Charlotte, North Carolina, 33, raised more than $50 million from more than 300,000 investors worldwide by convincing visitors to the Web site that they could earn a 44% return on their investments in 12 days by looking at Internet advertisements.
South Korea to fight hackers from China
Chinese hackers are suspected of leading the cyber crimes via a bypass link based on unlawful IPs.
Auto-Surfing: What you need to know
Auto-surfing is a form of online advertising that purportedly generates advertising revenue for companies that want to increase traffic to their websites. These companies hire an auto-surf firm, which in turn pays individual Web surfers to view certain websites on an automatically rotating basis.
Spam-u-like service
A London-based e-company is to launch a service enabling Net users to request direct marketing e-mails. OK-mail - said to be the first opt-in service in Britain - will collect and provide e-mail addresses of consumers who have specifically asked to receive online mailshots. Lionel Thain, one of the co-founders of OK-mail, said; "We are totally anti-spam. We always seek permission from consumers before sending them any information." The service has been designed so that Net users have to give their consent twice - once when they register and once to confirm. This, according to Thain, will ensure that people's names are added to the list without their consent. OK-mail received 1 million in VC backing in March and reckons it will have signed up between two and three million people by the end of the year.Forrester Research Releases US Online Advertising And Marketing Forecast — Market To Reach $26 Billion By 2010
Marketers are quickly losing confidence in the effectiveness of traditional advertising channels and feel that online channels will become more effective over the next three years. Seventy-eight percent of survey respondents said that they think search engine marketing will be more effective, compared with 53 percent of respondents who said TV advertising would become less effective.Cell Phones are target for viruses, spam
An estimated 500 million spam e-mails will be sent to cell phone users in North America this year, says Ferris Research.
Security experts predict that Americans will face the same problem as the Japanese, who frequently use cell phones to access the Internet and are inundated with spam.
McAfee and others see an emerging market. McAfee has developed anti-virus software for smart cell phones, and is working on firewalls to prevent unauthorized access. (Jon Swartz, USA Today)
File-sharers facing spam attacks
Many people are accidentally sharing sensitive information.Research has revealed that peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are proving a lucrative hunting ground for spammers.
Start-up Blue Security has found that junk mailers are actively harvesting and spamming e-mail addresses they find on file-sharing networks.
The address books they are exploiting are inadvertently being shared on the peer-to-peer networks by novice users.
The company warns that addresses stolen this way could be used to avoid filters set up to stop spam getting through.
(BBC News website)
1 in 10 Bought from Email
Spam is popular, claims survey. A Mirapoint and Radicati Group study showed that about a third of email users have clicked on links coming in messages. About ten percent of users have actually bought something as a result of getting a piece of spam, according to a BBC report on the study. The project, sponsored by both a computer security firm, found that spam can lead to security issues, as it can often leads to sites that push spyware software.
The motivation behind spamming lives on, as the business model behind it seems to continue to work.
"This preliminary data is surprising and somewhat shocking to us," said Marcel Nienhaus, market analyst at the Radicati Group.
Response rates are increasing, not declining
It might stand to reason that the growth in both legitimate and illegal e-mail marketing is leading to a general deterioration in response rates to e-mail programs. According to respondents to a recent survey, the opposite is true. Almost 45% of respondents to the survey say the response rates to their e-mail marketing campaigns are climbing; only 16% report a downward trend. The rest say response rates are holding steady. Furthermore, the trend in improving response rates is evident across all e-mail frequency groupings--from the more than weekly to the less than monthly. (Internet Retailer)
Email Lists See Resurgence
Consumers are asking to receive emails and marketers are applying lessons from from the past.
For the past six months or so, email list rentals have been enjoying a strong comeback as a lead generation and customer acquisition tool. Advertisers who were mailing pre-CAN-SPAM are back in full force, while newcomers enter the email marketing space at break-neck speed. It’s my belief that there are three key drivers behind this trend:
-Most of the bad actors are gone. I’m not talking about spammers. I’m speaking of the middle tier of questionable vendors who blurred the lines.
-Email list brokers haven’t exactly been asleep at the switch. The bar for a responsive prospect email list is incredibly high given the maze of deliverability issues, higher churn rates and so on.
-Email prices have remained at a seven-year low. (Topics)
Sex Is Out, Consuming Is In ( Associated Press )
Internet users are doing far fewer searches for sex and pornography and more for e-commerce and business than they were seven years ago, University of Pittsburgh and Penn State researchers say in a new book.
"Twenty percent of all searching was sex-related back in 1997; now it's about 5 percent," said Amanda Spink, the University of Pittsburgh professor who co-authored Web Search: Public Searching of the Web with Penn State professor Bernard J. Jansen.
E-Mail Marketing: Alive and Well
Despite the assault e-mail marketing endures from spam and phishing, even with the drag on delivery rates imposed by the filters, and regardless of the sheer e-mail overload in most people's inboxes, 71% of US online advertisers used e-mail marketing in 2004," says Mr. Hallerman. "That's only six points less than the number of respondents using paid search — the current interactive marketing favorite — and 12% of advertisers plan to start e-mail campaigns in 2005." (eMarketer)
Email: Turning Up the Volume eMarketer
eMarketer’s David Hallerman surveys the state of email marketing and ways that smart marketers are building and maintaining their lists.
No matter whether the sender is a legitimate marketer sending permission-based email, a spammer, a friend or family member, or some other source, email volume continues to grow at a steady pace. Email volume in the U.S. will rise from over 2 trillion messages this year -- personal, commercial and spam -- to nearly 2.7 trillion by 2007.
'John Doe' Phisher Identified; Owes Microsoft $3 Million
One of the first phishers pursued by Microsoft was arrested under a federal indictment in Iowa, charged with sending email to MSN customers that directed them to a website masquerading as a Microsoft registration page asking for personal data, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via Techdirt). Microsoft had filed suit in 2003 against John Doe - which turned out to be Jayson Harris, 22, of Davenport, Iowa - and used the subpoena power in the suit to help identify him. It received a $3 million default judgment in the case but has not yet collected any money.Trojan Postcard Targets Windows Users.
If you receive an unexpected postcard and you really just can’t bear to delete it without checking first, don’t click on the link, but manually type in the purported address of the alleged postcard company, and see what you can see.Microsoft pushes Sender ID
Bill Gates wants to junk your messages. Sender ID