Recent articles that feature news, client quotes, case studies or expert assessments of Pivotal Veracity's services.
DM News, September 1, 2008
Marketing e-mail through mobile devices can be a challenge for marketers, who may not yet be comfortable developing messages for the third screen. Four experts offer their tips...
Mobile Marketer, August 1, 2008
6,000 design elements across mobile, web, and desktop email readers..
DM News, April 16, 2008
Still think mobile has no relevance to your e-mail marketing program? Think again. With more than 250 million wireless users in the USA and more than 3 billion users worldwide, mobile phones have reached mainstream status...
Mobile Marketer, April 15, 2008
Social networks have mastered the art of engagement with enviable stats. Mobile? You'd think these fat cats would be resting on their laurels, but they're not.
Magilla, February 5, 2008
The chief executive of e-mail marketing firm e360 Insight sued Comcast recently, claiming the cable and Internet service provider was blocking his e-mails from reaching recipients.
It turns out Comcast is blocking a lot of senders' e-mail, according to multiple sources...
Media Post, January 23, 2008
Search for Mobile Marketing on the Web, and you'll be presented with a plethora of resources and articles on SMS and MMS. Search for mobile email marketing, and you'll be hard-pressed to find much at all. Lacking an adequate set of published resources, we powered up our mobile email rendering solution and began examining what a variety of business- to-business and analyst newsletters were doing to optimize the mobile user's experience.
Magilla Marketing, June 12, 2007
Everyone in e-mail marketing seemingly knows they need a good reputation to get their messages delivered, but do most know what factors go into creating one?
Marketing Sherpa, June 12, 2007
The question is so simple, it's scary to ask: are your subject lines broken? Even if you think they're OK, read on, especially if you're in the SMB category and do your own email blasts.
Our friends at Pivotal Veracity passed along an exclusive special report this morning with new data from tests they conducted on 18 ISPs and how subject lines get displayed. The results may surprise you. Plus, solutions to fix the problem.
Business Wire, April 16, 2007
JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, is lending its expertise to a cross-industry work group of e-mail marketing professionals...
Full Coverage, March 5, 2007
The Email Experience Council (eec), an organization of global professionals driving and defining email marketing and communications practices, today announced new survey results that are available in a white paper entitled "The State of Email Metrics & Bounce Management." The eec Deliverability Roundtable initiated the survey project and analyzed the results in a comprehensive white paper that reveals a lack of standards around industry metrics, bounce data, definitions and bounce management practices.... READ THE FULL COVERAGE..
DM News, February 26, 2007
While most other online marketing seems to be adding more engaging visual, audio and video bells and whistles, e-mail is under threat of being stripped of its key charm: images that entice consumers to click through to the retailer or publisher’s Web site. Not everyone is aware of the repercussions this will have, particularly for retail, news media and marketing...
MediaPost Email Insider, February 8, 2007
We’ve all been reading a great deal about email rendering these days and the direct impact this issue has on a mailer’s brand, delivery, reputation, and performance. However, as so often happens with the issue “du-jour”, good information is often paired with bad as everyone jumps on the band wagon to capitalize on the latest hot topic. Read expert answers to the questions you've been asking...
DM News, January 26, 2007
Images and links in e-mails are often stripped out due to e-mail reader restrictions, reputation scores or coding errors, according to a new study by the Email Experience Council...
Email Insider, January 11, 2007
EMAIL RENDERING IS ALL
THE rage these days and the latest battlefront in the
deliverability wars. And it doesn't look like this issue is going
away in 2007. Thanks to the help of some of our experts at the EEC, we
wanted to take a look at what all the hoopla is about...
Multichannel Merchant, January 3, 2007
With Internet service providers using consumer spam complaints to decide which incoming e-mail to block, house file hygiene is taking on a new meaning, according to one expert...
DM News, November 1, 2006
The Email Experience Council conducsts mailer survey on bounce management processes and core deliverability metrics.
Email Insider, October 5, 2006
The "gray" area surrounding email appends and basic tips to mitigate the risks associated with them.
Target Marketing Magazine, August 30, 2006
If you handle any part of your e-mail program in-house, then an audit of your e-mail programs can reveal both the good and the bad—allowing you to take action to eliminate the weed-like practices spoiling your overall garden. Curious as to how such an audit could help a marketer identify potential weak spots in its e-mail address collection, maintenance and usage practices, Target Marketing put its own file to the test.
OMMA, July 21, 2006
E-mail is a great marketing tool, but despite the movement over the last few years toward centralized databases and integrated marketing programs, some agencies and e-mail solutions providers remain at odds with the siloed approach most companies continue to take with the medium...
DM News, June 19, 2006
Observers often regard China as a sleeping giant because the Chinese people represent a large population of the world's potential Internet users with only a small proportion of individuals actually online. But the difference in culture from the West alongside government regulation has made China a tough nut to crack for marketers. Pivotal Veracity..
Email Insider, June 12, 2006
YOU WORK HARD TO COMMUNICATE with your customers through e-mail. But what if you can't get your message through to the intended recipients due to arbitrary blocking by ISPs, corporate filters, consumer filters, or junk mail folders? What does that REALLY cost you over time?..
MediaPost Email Insider, May 30, 2006
SOME OF THE BEST IN the business submitted samples to the E-mail Makeover Panel for review at MediaPost's recent E-mail Insider Summit. The samples were very strong. Turns out no one wants a bunch of "experts" (make that finger gesture for quotation marks in the air) to publicly slay one's work. Still, the panel had a few common issues among the submissions. Is your design guilty of the 4 sins? ...
ClickZ, May 15, 2006
It's a question I'm often asked by clients, colleagues, and friends. People are curious and eager to debate whether e-mail plays a serious role in influencing loyalty and purchase decisions.
ClickZ, April 30, 2006
E-Mail Is a Science: The Case for Function
For many years, a number of clients and industry experts have pointed to search boxes and forms included within an e-mail as the main area of interest and source of clicks. As much as 85 percent of the clicks seem to come from these areas. This clearly represents a scientific approach to e-mail: test to find what works, then use it.
E-mail Is an Art: The Case for Form
Yes, search boxes are great inside an e-mail. Usually they look nice. But given all the content filtering and code stripping ISPs do, these boxes and forms often don't work. Yet companies still use them, claiming the presence of the box, even though only usable by part of the audience base, still drives significant traffic and outperforms e-mail creative that doesn't include it.
DM News, February 7, 2006
On Jan. 30, it was widely reported that: 1) AOL is discontinuing its Enhanced Whitelist in June, and 2) Goodmail will introduce a new class of paid e-mail known as CertifiedEmail that will receive preferential treatment by AOL. The first is incorrect, according to AOL postmaster Charles Stiles, and the second has been heralded as nothing less than the Armageddon of e-mail...
eMail Insider, February 6, 2006
There has been quite a rumbling in the industry since AOL announced that it will be "discontinuing" its enhanced white list and instituting a paid-for service that has a relative "postage" fee for e-mail delivery provided through Goodmail Systems. But it's difficult to understand the impact this could have if you didn't understand the benefits of the enhanced white list in the first place...
CSO Magazine, December 15, 2005
With somewhere between 80 percent and 95 percent of all Internet messages now consisting of spam, phishing attacks and e-mail based worms, organizations have been forced to filter their incoming mail more aggressively than ever before. But as a CSO, you have another job as well: You need to make sure that your organization's e-mail filtering system isn't filtering out the wheat with the chaff...
One Degree, December 6, 2005
Part 2 in a 5-part series dealing with how to optimize email rendering for different email clients.
BtoB Online, November 10, 2005
More than 50% of all marketers believe deliverability is their biggest challenge, and rightfully so. But sometimes, it’s not what you send, but how you send it that keeps your messages out of your prospects’ in-boxes, said Deirdre Baird, president-CEO of delivery auditing and optimization company Pivotal Veracity. “Content is important, but there are a number of things related to infrastructure that can keep your message from getting through. Baird suggested running this list of technical mix-ups past your e-mail service provider or mail administrator...
DM News, November 7, 2005
If only managing e-mail deliverability were as simple as handling a werewolf. Sure, the creature appears terrifying, but everyone knows how to cope with it. A simple "silver bullet" does the trick. But there is no one simple solution to guarantee successful e-mail delivery. In response, most successful online marketers have developed a process that some call as delivery optimization...
Marketing Sherpa, October 13, 2005
71% of the top 360 US companies (as ranked by D&B) now offer an email opt-in on their Web site. Unfortunately some of them dampen responses to their lovely HTML messages with a mistake that even email newbies should know to avoid...
Direct Magazine, September 1, 2005
Four years after the dot-com bust, DMers are creating a mini-boom, according to Direct's 2005 online marketing survey. Almost 60% plan to raise their online spending in 2006, and this year they shifted money out of traditional channels to do it. Where are these dollars going? For search, analytics, Web site customization and staff. However, there's little or no growth in outside e-mail list rentals, largely because of the spam issue. But e-mail is still being used for multiple purposes. The result of all these expenditures? Online sales now account for 25% of our respondents' total revenue, up from 20% a year ago. And online orders have been as profitable, or more so, than offline ones.
ClickZ, August 11, 2005
The Independent Deliverability Email Audit or I.D.E.A. is a new service jointly developed and exclusively offered by the single largest group of premier providers in the permission-based email space. I.D.E.A. offers a comprehensive assessment of a company’s infrastructure, reputation, permission polices, messaging practices, inbox penetration, advertiser/partner policies and more...
Direct Magazine, August 3, 2005
Every merchant sending commercial e-mail wants to make that mail more deliverable—to get it into the recipient’s mailbox, yes, but just as importantly to get it past the spam filters and junk folders now in use by many Internet service providers (ISPs) and into that all-important inbox. For that reason, growing numbers of Web marketers are outsourcing the management of their e-mail channels to e-mail service providers (ESPs)...
eZine, July 31, 2005
This link contains the 2 articles from Christopher Knight on TRUSTe's new privacy seal program.
DM News, July 29, 2005
E-mail list owners can use IDEA to audit their files for deliverability issues related to infrastructure, inbox penetration, permission level, reputation and best practices. IDEA also documents CAN-SPAM compliance, bounces, complaints, data sources, opt-in processes and deliverability into specific e-mail systems such as AOL, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail.
BtoB Online, July 11, 2005
Authentication services are the buzzword of the year, and for good reason, explained Robb Wilson, VP-deliverability for e-mail marketing software and service provider Lyris Technologies, Berkeley, Calif. As marketers realize that end users are increasingly skeptical about the mail they receive-a recent Pivotal Veracity study found that 54% of marketers had their e-mails falsely identified as spam-guaranteeing e-mails come from where they actually do may be the only answer.
Direct Magazine, July 6, 2005
The June 22 issue of DirectTips included a story about a test run by e-mail delivery service Pivotal Veracity to judge the extent to which large companies’ e-mail program can be affected by “false positives”: having their permission-based e-mail blocked or delivered into spam folders. The Pivotal Veracity experiment used three dedicated e-mail accounts on MSN Hotmail, Google’s Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. The test found that out of 90 companies, 54 had some of their e-mail blocked by spam filters during a six-week period. Another six turned up blocked e-mails just after the test period ran out. Pivotal Veracity found that some of those blocked e-mails were sent out under a “bonded sender” program. In fact, the experiment’s results found that the rate of false positives was slightly higher among companies that used that form of delivery assurance. According to the survey, 55% of companies used a bonded sender program experienced at least one false positive, compared to 53% of those that did not. In fairness, and to stimulate a productive debate, we are publishing the following response from Matt Blumberg, president and CEO of Return Path, which operates the Bonded Sender e-mail accreditation program.
Direct Magazine, June 22, 2005
For those e-mailers who go out of their way to do everything right—getting permissions, using double opt-ins, employing an e-mail service provider, applying SPF authentication and generally treating the Can-Spam Act as the e-mail equivalent of the Bill of Rights—here’s some disturbing news: Those measures are no guarantee that your message will get delivered.
Marketing Sherpa, June 9, 2005
Are you tearing your hair out worrying about filters stopping your email messages to your house opt-in list? Results from a six-week study conducted by Pivotal Veracity, and released exclusively to MarketingSherpa today, reveal that you're in very distinguished company indeed. Turns out 54 major mailers from AARP to The Wedding Channel can't get their permission email messages past filters at Hotmail, Yahoo, and/or Gmail all the time either. Even AOL's own outgoing email newsletter department couldn't get all of its bulk mailings past other ISPs' filters. Plus, even worse news, 18% of filtered messages were transactional -- such as Welcome messages to new opt-ins.
DataMation, April 19, 2005
E-mail is increasingly losing its reliability as a way for businesses to send notifications to interested consumers, according to new figures from a message-monitoring firm.
Direct, April 12, 2005
Feel like fish? Red Lobster makes it easy with online purchases and overnight delivery. And if you're an Overboard Club member, you can enter the Passion Prize drawing and win dinner for two, a fresh lobster delivered to your door or a trip to an exotic locale.
ClickZ, March 21, 2005
Since CAN-SPAM took effect just over a year ago, we've seen our clients' delivery and open rates drop. When e-mail does get through, it works just as well as it did before CAN-SPAM, in some cases even better. Unfortunately, less e-mail is getting past gatekeepers.
ClickZ, March 16, 2005
A common e-mail marketing misconception is e-mail is filtered because it contains words such as "free" in the subject line or body. By itself, that won't get your e-mail filtered. Though certain content combinations may get a message filtered, ISPs may be trapping your legitimate e-mail for infractions you rarely pay attention to. Take HTML code...
1to1, January 27, 2005
Michael Friedman doesn't believe in taking advantage of the customer. That conviction has served his company well. When the interactive marketing manager at Red Lobster came on board early last year, the restaurant chain's loyalty program, Overboard Club, consisted of 32,000 members-mostly employees. Friedman has since grown that database to more than 800,000 Red Lobster customers in an effort to retain the company's Most Valuable Customers.
Destination CRM, January 21, 2005
As the Internet became an increasingly efficient marketing vehicle for Harbor Freight Tools, the company's email marketing campaign had become a weak spot. The 37-year-old tool-and-equipment catalog retailer was using a multichannel approach--including about 190 retail stores, a catalog business, and a Web site--to deliver more than 7,000 tool and equipment items to more than five million customers. But Harbor Freight had no means to track its outgoing email, and had no idea how effective that email marketing was. Plus, it couldn't confirm if messages were reaching intended audiences or if they were being sent into the abyss of spam filters.
Mighty Interactive, January 1, 2005
Once upon a time, you could send and receive e-mail without incident. Just like the era when you could leave your doors unlocked or eating medium-rare hamburgers, the glory days of e-mail were blissfully free of hassle and worry.
DM News, November 24, 2004
Every e-mail marketing program, be it business-to-consumer or business-to-business, hinges on three factors: list quality, content and deliverability. Yet until recently, BTB marketers have been less concerned about deliverability than those in the BTC realm. Federal legislation targets consumer abuse explicitly. BTB, however, remains a frontier, full of all the Internet's risks and potential benefits.
DM News, November 15, 2004
Open rates, click rates, conversion rates and $/1,000 mailed are the traditional metrics upon which the success of e-mail marketing programs is measured. Are they enough in today's spam-dominated e-mail world?
B to B Online, November 8, 2004
The experts concur: In-house lists can be more effective and provide better ROI than buying or renting third-party lists. But what's the best way to build your list without buying addresses on the open market?
Rising Media, October 28, 2004
I received a phishing email today that made me smirk. The email pretended to be an "eBay Fraud Mediation Request," saying that someone had used my account to make "fake bids" at eBay. Funny thing is, I don't have an eBay account and the address the email was sent to, privacy@exacttarget.com, isn't subscribed to anything-so it was clearly scraped from the web. The email then asked for me to provide my eBay account log-in information, which they would have no doubt captured for their own fraudulent operations.
ClickZ, August 27, 2004
Many ISPs delete e-mails containing URLs on their blacklists without bothering to notify the sender. That's according to a recent e-mail deliverability study undertaken and released by Pivotal Veracity.
ClickZ, August 12, 2004
Marketers using permission-based e-mail marketing face a multitude of challenges. They're up against countless configurations of hundreds of spam filters, which businesses and individuals have installed in droves. How can they determine just how many of their messages get to their final destinations....
ClickZ, August 3, 2004
Pivotal Veracity has expanded its eDelivery Tracker, a tool that audits the e-mail delivery process, to address the needs of the B2B marketer. The new product augments a suite of online tools the company released in April, which specifically focused on B2C e-mail marketing....
Direct Magazine, June 30, 2004
Direct Media Inc. has formed a strategic partnership with Pivotal Veracity to offer that firm's eContent Scorer and eDelivery Tracker tools to its clients. EContent Scorer diagnoses messages that might be construed as spam, and provides guidance on how to get them past spam filters...
DM News, June 30, 2004
Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., Chicago, selected an e-mail solutions package from ExactTarget to improve its e-mail marketing program, ExactTarget said yesterday. Britannica is known for its 32-volume encyclopedia and its work in electronic publishing, including the first encyclopedia on the Internet.
DM News, June 14, 2004
Red Lobster Restaurants is intensifying its online marketing as it looks to strengthen its relationship with customers and entice prospects. The world's largest seafood restaurant chain is incorporating dynamic content delivery for more targeted communications and adding more features to its online invitations component as it fine-tunes its Internet strategy....
eBusiness IQ, May 3, 2004
Florida-based Pivotal Veracity, an independent e-mail delivery audit and management company, launched comprehensive suite of delivery optimization tools that enable permission-based direct marketers to monitor, manage and substantially improve the delivery of their e-mail marketing, retention and service communications.
Destination CRM, April 28, 2004
Pivotal Veracity, an email delivery audit and management company, launched its new suite of delivery optimization tools--the eContent Scorer, eDelivery Tracker, and pvIQ Enterprise Platform. The tools enable permission-based direct marketers to monitor and manage the delivery of their email marketing, retention, and service communications, whether mailed from in-house systems or external vendors or any combination of the two, from a single platform. Operating independently of the mailer's deployment solution, the technology allows enterprises to ensure their legitimate email communications do not end up in the "bulkbox" or the "trashbox."
ClickZ, April 26, 2004
As an increasingly complex e-mail landscape continues to challenge marketers, e-mail delivery company Pivotal Veracity launched a suite of online tools Monday intended to help monitor, manage and improve e-mail delivery rates. It's estimated 17 to 25 percent of opt-in e-mail is delivered to bulk or spam folders, or simply never delivered at all.
Marketing Sherpa, April 24, 2004
Never underestimate the power of text when trying to crack Fortress AOL: Switching from HTML to text messages recently helped retailer Harbor Freight Tools go from zero to almost 100% delivery to 300,000 addresses practically overnight...
DM News, April 12, 2004
While list professionals agree that spam and filtering have affected the deliverability of e-mail marketing messages, contention exists about e-mail list pricing. The current standard is to pay on a cost-per-thousand basis for the e-mails that are delivered. Though cost-per-acquisition deals exist on a smaller scale, they are much less common than they were a few years ago...
