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Here are a few highlights:

• “Paid search is the most effective marketing tactic for customer acquisition … email marketing continued to the most effective for customer retention.”

• Email marketing to house lists the most popular and effective. 91% of online retailers do this. Email marketing to prospecting lists is less common with only 27% of retailers doing this. Makes sense.

• “… retailers find that emails about new products are much more effective than simple transactional or sale messages.”

Great points. I found that the third point to be particularly insightful. At the most recent Shop.org conference, I led an email marketing panel with two of our customers — Trek Bikes and Hancock’s of Panducah.

Both customers explained that their most effective campaigns entailed introducing new bikes or the latest fabrics, respectively. I like to refer to these as “inside the castle” campaigns. They are often very successful because they build trust with the audience by giving them the inside scoop to what’s going on. This success ultimately translates into higher number of conversions with larger orders.

Related posts:

• Put the marketing into email marketing
• SaaS and Email Marketing

For those of you not in the environmental know, carbon neutral means that an equal amount of the the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere from running the lights and driving cars is being offset by investments in sustainable energy practices somewhere else. Terrapass facilities that exchange.

As aside, I bought a Civic Hybrid last spring and drive about 5 miles a day going back and forth from work. So, my CO2 is lower than most. Should I get a refund check from Terrapass for the difference? Now, that would be interesting.

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This is great news. Domain Keys has been around for several years and all major email marketing companies have had this feature built in for some time. With this feature, messages that you send will automatically be signed with Domain Keys authentication. Ideally helps delivery at Yahoo. Bronto added the Domain Keys option in September 2005, over two years ago. So, if you are a Bronto customer, no worries. You’ve have had Domain Keys authentication for some time.

Now, Yahoo has stepped up the game by requiring it for certain senders, the ones most affected by phishing. I’m sure that we have all received phishing emails from eBay and PayPal so this is a welcome addition. Next in line are major commercial banks like Bank of America that frequently are the bait for phishing attacks as well.

I look forward to Yahoo requiring DKIM signed messages for more communications. It’ll help spread adoption of the technology with other ISPs, reduce the phishing spam in our inboxes, and most importantly let the reputable messages rise above the noise.

Good job Yahoo.

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Constant Contact is an email marketing provider targeting small businesses. They have been at it for a number of years and have developed a strong base of over 130,000 small business customers. With that large of a customer base, we could not have helped but compete with them at Bronto. We compete with them less now that we’ve moved more upmarket but still show up fairly often with our small business customers.

So, what are they going to do with their new found $100mm in cash? The obvious and stated play for them is to extend their strength in email marketing with small businesses into other avenues — online surveys are natural choice, which they added in June. I would expect them to use some of their new found cash to acquire someone with a stronger position in that space — Zoomerrang or SurveyMonkey. If it happens, you heard it here first. I can also see acquisitions of other companies with like products geared toward small businesses. I don’t see them purchasing other small business focused email marketing companies. Acquiring companies with complementary products is definitely the way to go.

The strong showing is exciting and validating for Bronto, but I cannot help but find this IPO reminiscent on ones from the tech bubble six years back. 73% one day rise for a company with about $40mm in revenue this year, unprofitable and high customer acquisition costs. There’s something positive there but I would suspect their stock has a bit of a roller coaster ride in front of it.

As they say, “rising tides raises all boats” so congratulations Constant Contact with a strong IPO. We look forward to seeing what you do.

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Cheers!

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To build off of last night’s success, I’m happy to say that I’ve entered 2005 and uploaded my first video to YouTube. Here is a short video from the event:

** A short low-quality video was once here **

Thanks to Michael Brooks in Client Services for taking the video.

===
In my zeal to try out YouTube, I overlooked the sensitive issue of publicly sharing a video of job applicants who might be currently employed elsewhere. Sorry about that. The video has been removed.

Joe

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• Job Fair this Wednesday @ 6pm

Come to our job fair this Wednesday at Bronto HQ. Our last job fair last October was a resounding success. Like last time, I’ll do a number of presentations in our smaller media room going over a general overview of Bronto. It should be fun and interesting.

Read the pdf that describes the event.
Read about our our open positions.

Hope to see you there.

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Why is this interesting? Well, it’s a great example of where a consumer web application has made in-roads into the business web. This trend, of course, has not gone unnoticed by the Internet titans and further explains why Google acquired the wiki startup Jotspot last September

Like any new software implementation, you have to get people using the software to make it truly valuable. Here are four things we have done to inspire usage:

1. Had a contest: We jump started activity on the wiki with a “Pimp My Page” contest for everyone in the company. The contest included real prizes for the best and worst participants. It was good fun and got everyone educated and active on the wiki.
2. Made it dynamic: A death spiral can happen with a Intranet between frequency and usage. People don’t use the Intranet if it’s not frequently update. The Intranet is not frequently updated if people don’t use it. To avoid this, we added several dynamics widgets to the wiki to keep it continually fresh and interesting – e.g., Google Calendar, Flickr pictures, and RSS feeds tied to Del.icio.us tags, our blog and Google News searches. These widgets have been a great way to keep the pages fresh and get people using the wiki.
3. Moved content: We are aggressively moving Word documents off our file server and onto the wiki. So, the wiki becomes more and more the only place to read and edit documents.
4. Branded it well: Brontopedia is a catchy and appealing name – wiki.brontointranet.com or something else equally dull is not. Branding matters and helps increase uptake.

Of course, we weren’t the first ones to think of this. Intelpedia is a fairly well known internal wiki for Intel. We also got some good ideas from a good blog post on the subject by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School. He describes some of the interesting ways that Avenue A | Razorfish has applied their wiki.

Drop me note if you know of any other good wikis in the workplace. We are always looking for good ideas on how to improve ours.

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

This passage inspires me to lead Bronto not to hold back in doing truly great things for 2007. I encourage our customers
and my fellow Brontos to do the same.

Best Wishes for 2007!

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