Mobile Marketing Watch
Email remains the digital workhorse for marketers, according to new research from Gigaom and Extole. The research found that 86 percent of digital marketers use email regularly. In addition, it also revealed that 41 percent of marketers use email for building awareness, 37 percent use it for acquisition, 42 percent use it to drive conversions and 56 percent of marketers user email as a retention tool.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The US federal court is warning about an email scam in circulation which claims that recipients are being called to jury duty. The email which claims to be from the "National EJuror Program" includes a link to an alleged jury summons. The link leads to a form where recipients are asked to share personal information including their date of birth, Social Security number and their mother's maiden name. The email is spam and should be ignored.
TechRadar
Salesforce.com has added new features the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Journey Builder tool that make it easier for marketers to anticipate customer interactions and send triggered emails based on those predictions in real time. Matt Rausenberger, Senior Director of Channel Sales at Salesforce partner Return Path, told TechRadar that the new tool "helps to provide the insight and the intelligence on how the consumer interacts with the message." He continued: "We can then help our clients optimize the next sends to make them more effective to produce more traffic and more revenue."
Cnet
Fetch is a new app that lets users email themselves articles to read at a later date. The idea is to make the reading material available even when the user is offline, so rather than simply emailing links, the tool copies and pastes the entire body of an article into an email. This way the reader can access the email once it has downloaded even if they are not connected to the Internet.
The Blaze
The White House sent out an email to an Associated Press reporter by mistake on Wednesday. The email included non-classified talking points about a classified torture report and how the CIA may have kept secrets from Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State at the time.
Marketing Land
Aside from the fact that rented lists are not compliant with CAN SPAM, because consumers did not opt in to receive an email from your company, it turns out that rented email lists are not very effective, according to MailChimp's new research. The study found a spike in complaints and unsubscribes among emails sent to rented lists, and a drop off in average opens and clicks.
Market Watch
Central Technology Services has ditched Cisco and signed a four-year deal with email data security firm Zix Corporation. The new service will allow CTS employees to communicate sensitive information securely via email through encryption and secure reply options.
Beta News
Google is now reading Gmail users' email in order to send marketing messages surrounding hotel stays. Essentially if a consumer books a hotel and receives their confirmation via Gmail, Google will use this information to sell them more products and services near the hotel. For example, users can use their Gmail app to ask their inbox for restaurant recommendations around their hotel or to ask for directions to their hotel.
Newsday
Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate and former Facebooker, has launched a new service in conjunction with fellow Facebook graduate Justin Rosenstein called Asana. The new company hopes to put an end to email in the workplace by replacing it with a task management system that co-workers can access so that they don't have to be bogged down by email inboxes for internal communications. The system allows users to create shared projects in a communal page and users can follow or unfollow these projects based on their involvement with them.
The Wall Street Journal
Microsoft is going head to head this week with the U.S. government in a case surrounding email privacy. Microsoft contends that users own their own emails even if they are stored in the cloud. The government says that emails become the business records of a cloud provider. The case, which is being heard in federal court in New York on Thursday, stems from a government demand to Microsoft this past December. The government demanded that Microsoft turn over customer emails as part of a narcotics investigation.