. list up the people!

The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using Twitter(). It started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. By that definition though, only 21% of Twitter users are active users.

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If you’ve spent any time on Twitter, it will probably not shock you to learn that about 40% of tweets are “pointless babble,” according to Pear Analytics. In fact, in their recent study, they rated only 8.7% as having “pass-along value” – the gold standard for true viral marketing.

http://bit.ly/clmIoy

It’s a little over-simplified, but an email marketer’s job is to get the right message to the right person at the right time to achieve a specific goal. Doing that means understanding what motivates subscribers to open a message and engage with your offer – and that’s where the process gets tricky.

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1. Calibrate Your Content so You Don’t Misfire

One of the major causes of backchannel disasters is a mismatch between what audiences expect, and what you deliver. Make sure you match your audience expectations when you are planning your material by using Twitter to reach out to the followers who will be in attendance. Ask for their feedback. Query them about challenges they are facing that you can help resolve, case studies of how they tackled situations related to your topic, or suggestions of what you should be sure to cover.

http://bit.ly/9tY6rJ

If you subscribe to our informative email, you know that we send it in the middle of the night. By testing, we learned that email messages sent before 9 a.m. EST dramatically lifted click-through rates for our list. Here are the key takeaways from our testing:

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[S]o, while it appears there is still at least some validity to the commonly held belief that special characters in the email Subject Line reduces deliverability, our research (this experiment plus two others conducted with different products and industries) suggests that when they serve to do so, these negative factors are dwarfed by the power of clarity.

http://bit.ly/bs9Qnk

This morning, I took one of the numerous bits of B2B spam that I received, and I replied to the sender. This time around, it was a staffing services company, looking to help me with all of my staffing needs. He’s ready and willing to help me with all of my staffing needs in the aerospace, transportation, and defense verticals, just to name a few.

http://tinyurl.com/yhp5xfe

As Email Marketing Strategists at Bronto, part of our job is to coach clients on template design best practices and when to revamp that design once it’s gone stale or been used too often.

Here’s another idea: how about changing your design based on how long your subscribers have been receiving your emails? Do older subscribers really need to see your whitelisting instructions, online version links or huge logo every time?

Let’s talk it out (hat tip to Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports for providing food for thought):

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Occasionally, Microsoft updates the list of key words and phrases that will trigger rejection by their spam filters.

It means that if you do not pay attention to them, your emails will automatically go into the recipient’s Junk folder. As a result, your email deliverability may decrease.

http://bit.ly/bV4T2j