In the new 2009 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report, Experian CheetahMail explores trends and tactics utilized by the industry’s largest emailers. The data collected in this report comes from a client survey taken in April 2008. Be sure to have a look at the report to see what’s happening in the world of email and beyond.

Let’s see if you can guess the result of one of the questions asked in the survey regarding email marketing.

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Baseball season is in full-swing! To celebrate this national pastime and shed some light on common characteristics and behavioral tendencies of baseball fans in America, Emailresponsibly.com would like to share some interesting facts and statistics from Experian Simmons’ National Consumer Study.

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With social media trending towards character limitations, layout restrictions, and quicker feedback times, it seems that URL shortening services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL are becoming more and more ubiquitous every day.

So what exactly is URL shortening? In a nutshell, these services convert long web addresses into short, easy-to-use URLs that are convenient for sharing. If you’ve ever used Facebook’s status update tool or Twitter’s microblogging service, chances are you have come into contact with a link referring to a URL shortening service.

While I have yet to come across an email campaign that links to a shortened URL, I’d imagine that some email marketers will soon begin coordinating the links in their emails with the links distributed via Twitter and Facebook (to maintain consistency across channels). I also foresee email marketing messages occasionally incorporating tweets and status updates into the body of the email, which means that some URL-shortened links could be distributed via email.

So what should you know about URL shortening services before you incorporate them into your emails?

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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in Austin, TX, where a number of interesting discussions took place on the state of word-of-mouth marketing across the digital landscape.

Bazaarvoice is a partner of ours and has helped a number of our clients combine the power of user-generated content with email marketing. As I told a number of colleagues at the event, the real beauty of combining email marketing with ratings and reviews is that the numbers speak for themselves – according to a recent article by Mary Wagner of Internet Retailer, fifty-three percent of shoppers “prefer to see recommendations based on top ratings by other consumers” compared to only twenty percent who prefer to see best sellers. Likewise, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research recently stated that “two in five online shoppers are partial to retail sites that offer customer ratings and reviews,” and that “tactics like adding a link to write a customer review in the order confirmation email are the new standard.”

A few high-level takeaways I gathered from the event include:

• Product review submission/confirmation emails perform exceptionally well across the board, especially when it comes to open and clickthrough rates.
• User-generated content (UGC) not only drives sales, but also functions as a product development and inventory tool for some of today’s biggest brands, including Dell and Sephora.
• While it is difficult to predict which content will become truly “viral,” marketers can help guarantee ROI by ensuring that viral campaigns are initially distributed to a large enough group of people. That way, even if the campaign is only forwarded at a 50% rate of decay, the campaign reaches close to double the size of the initial recipients — half of which were essentially sent for free.

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