Internet Retailer
Barnes & Noble, Payless Shoe Source and Ghirardelli are among marketers who used email to push holiday promotions around the Easter holiday. The retailers sent emails for gifts including free shipping offers and percentage off discounts. According to a recent study from the National Retail Federation more U.S. consumers were expected to shop for Easter gifts online this year than in previous years. According to the report, 21.1 percent of consumers said they planned to visit e-commerce sites during the holiday in 2013, compared to 18.7 percent in 2012.
USA Today
It's tax time and as usual, spammers are taking advantage of the season to pose as legitimate mailers. There a new Android Trojan going around through emails claiming to be from the IRS. Dr. Brett Stone-Gross, researcher for Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, explained how the trojan works to USA Today. "The malware has a number of features such as stealing a victim's contact list, making phone calls to premium numbers and intercepting text messages," he said, explaining that the ability to intercept text messages is a big deal because it can be used to get past two-factor authentication programs.
Nieman Journalism Lab
The Texas Tribune has launched a new email newsletter dedicated to water issues called "In the Flow." The bi-monthly newsletter is taking a new approach to delivery and instead of serving up snippets of an issue in a subscriber's inbox, the newsletter will simply function as an alert with a redirect back to the TexasTribune.org homepage. The delivery mechanism will be more like a push notification on a mobile phone than a traditional email newsletter.
Tech Cocktail
Not satisfied with what he thought of as clunky programs, Igor Polevoy designed to create his own email marketing services company. In 2011, Polevoy founded ExpressPigeon with the idea that anyone can produce high-quality email campaigns without technical know-how. The platform lets non-technies create their own email campaigns by manipulating some basic templates. The company lets users segment lists and organize lists based on prior mailings. They also offer web contact form services.
The Next Web
London-based startup Kickdynamic is turning heads in the email world. The company's recently launched a service that lets marketers create live dynamic content in email. In a nutshell, marketers can change content after an email has already been sent. The service also lets marketers optimize emails based on the device it is opened on and include countdown clocks which count down in real-time to add urgency to a special offer.
eMarketer
The average open rate for an email marketing message in Australia is about 22 percent, according to a February 2013 report from Australian email marketing firm Vision6. The company gathered the data from emails that it sends on behalf of other companies. According to the report, the sales and marketing sector had the lowest unique open rate in the first half of 2012 at 11.1 percent. However, that number went up to 14.19 percent during the second half of the year. Advertising and media, on the other hand, had a higher open rate of 20.7 percent during the first half …
ClickZ
Chuck E. Cheese's has created a new photo app that encourages diners to take photos of "Say Cheese Here!" signs located throughout the pizza chain's restaurant in order to activate the app's augmented reality camera. Diners are encouraged to snap photos of their experiences while at the chance and then share their photos online. Under the Share Memories tab, the Chuck E. Cheese's website asks fans to submit photos and videos of their favorite Chuck E. Cheese's experiences to an email address. The chain will then post approved content to its Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest pages. The chain will continue …
ComputerWorld
Spam-fighting organization Spamhaus became the vicitim of a large distributed denial-of-service attack this week raising awareness of the security threats posed by millions of poorly configured Internet Domain Name System (DNS) servers. The attack was launched in the form of a spoofed email which appeared to be from Spamhaus and was sent to tens of thousands of DNS resolvers. The DNS resolvers responded to directly to Spamhaus generating a huge volume of traffic, a method spammers use to take down a network by directing huge volumes of useless traffic to it.
WebProNews
Consumers check their email more often than they browse the web or check Facebook on their mobile phones, according to a new report from IDC Research that was sponsored by Facebook. According to the report, which studied the mobile habits of almost 7,500 18-44-year-olds over a week in March, 78 percent of respondents said that email was the activity they did the most on their phone, 73 percent chose web browsing, and 70 percent chose Facebook. The report also revealed that 84 percent of mobile phone users' time is spent communicating via text, email and social, and only 16 percent …
The Verge
There is a new iPhone app on the market called Sunrise lets users send emails directly from your calendar. The app pulls data from Facebook, LinkedIn, and the contacts already listed in your phone. You can tap on an attendee from any given event on your calendar, which will bring up a contact card which includes the person's Facebook photo, their professional experience, and the option to call, text, or email them.