Tracking Email Ads in Trade Journals

Although we’ve never done any advertising before, we’re, for the first time, doing a series of ads in some of the popular trade newsletters that many of us in the trade subscribe to (Media Post, EEC, Magilla, DM News, and others). With the publishers’ permission we’re tracking our ads in their newsletters ourselves and because we’re using MailboxIQ technology, we have a host of new insights into our ads and the audience seeing them. Even though today is only day 1—I wanted to share some really interesting preliminary results—when the full series of ads is done and we’ve shared the results first with the newsletters, we’ll be publishing the full aggregated results—so this is just a preview of what we’re seeing...

Today’s ads appeared in two different B2B email newsletters ...here are some early results...

MOBILE: One of the newsletters had 3% of recipients using mobile phones to read it; the other had 4.5%. Interestingly the mobile readership for the 2nd newsletter was at 7% when I checked at 10am Eastern this morning—likely representing folks reading the newsletter on their way to work—as the day has progressed, this has flattened down to 4.5% of total readers. Not surprising—the iPhone was the most popular mobile phone for both.

SOFTWARE: One of the newsletters had 85% software usage (e.g. Lotus Notes, Outlook 07, etc) and the other had 90%—very high relative to webbased emailclients (yahoo, hotmail, etc) but since these are B2B newsletters to a highly targeted list, we would expect a higher usage of software. While just a theory, we believe software usage for emails is indicative of more trust as many people use web-based email accounts such as yahoo and hotmail to subscribe to general mail and preserve their business email accounts they tend to read on installed software for more trusted communications. The top software email clients for both newsletters were Outlook 03&XP and Outlook 07. Interestingly, one of the newsletters has a slightly more ‘updated’ customer list with Outlook 07 representing a whopping 44% of all readers versus the other newsletter where Outlook 07 represented a still high 38%.

SOCIAL: One of the newsletters social influence readership was .07%—versus 0 for the other. While tiny overall, the difference between the two was interesting. Note—because of what we tracked in these newsletters (our ad versus the full newsletter), the amount of social network readership is depressed.

DELIVERABILITY: One newsletter had 89% inbox, 2.74% personal folders and 8.23% spam folder. The other had 94% inbox, 3.13% personal folders and 3% spam. Over the last 9 months MailboxIQ has been used by many of our big brand clients like Amex, Apple, Merck, Oracle, etc. —and whats interesting about the overall deliverability results for these 2 b2b newsletters relatively speaking is the very high percent of placement in personal folders. Since you can only land in somebody’s personal folders if the customer actually 1) moves you there or 2) sets up a filter to automatically filter you there, personal folder placement is an attestment to the engagement of the audience. If I was to hazard a guess, some folks may filter these newsletters to a resource-type folder to be read as they have time and to use for ongoing reference (hint...its what I do;->).

There is a lot more ..but I just wanted to share some tidbits as we watch the results come in.

Cheers—

Deirdre
www.pivotalveracity.com