According to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, reported by Direct Marketing News, affluent consumers are more willing to share their information for a personalized experience than the general population. IAB commissioned Ipsos Mendelsohn to survey 2,088 adults and found that 32% of affluent customers (household income over $100,000) were willing to share their information online, versus 26% of the general population.

Affluent customers spend an average of four more hours online weekly than the general populace, and watch almost half as much TV. It seems that affluent consumers are more reachable via digital channels, and more open to trading information for something to enhance their user experience with more relevance. Now that seems like good news for the email marketing industry!

More time online may be the reason why more affluent consumers are willing to “give to receive.” Perhaps they are a bit more comfortable in the digital world due to acclimatization.

Sherrill Mane, SVP of industry services at IAB, said the findings suggest affluent customers appreciate something which increases relevancy and efficiency in their lives.

“They’re open to the notion of quid pro quo: I will share, I will give you something about myself, if you give me what’s relevant to me. I think that’s kind of groundbreaking,” said Mane. “It shows you how well they understand the value proposition of sharing information in order to get something. These are people who are very busy, and I think to them if advertising can help organize their lives and make their lives more efficient, they will participate in that process.”

I don’t believe that these numbers reveal any secret knowledge on the part of affluent consumers. Groundbreaking yes, but only because this demographic is seemingly setting the path for the rest — as I said, I suspect they are simply ahead of the pack because they tend to be more wired.

The good news is that consumers are beginning to realize that they are active participants in the dialogue with brands. For a quality relationship which adds value to their lives, they understand they have to participate.

The issue for marketers to consider is how easy you want that participation to be for them. Do you want to force subscribers to fill out forms and check boxes in preference centers, thus taking up more of their time or do you want that relationship to be built in real time based on their choices and behavior, thus saving your subscribers time and increasing your value to them with enhanced relevancy?

I am excited to announce that our client and partner Business Insider has launched “Your News,” a new service powered by Scout, Sailthru’s latest behavioral product. Your News provides the new level of personalization that’s sorely needed to meet the expectations of today’s sophisticated consumers.

There’s too much information online for me to absorb, so I want to quickly find the right content from the media brands I trust. I’m biased, as it’s my company, but I love how Sailthru technology is helping find what’s important to me without any effort. I rely on my daily Business Insider emails to equip me with the news I’m interested in, and to keep the content fresh. As an added bonus, I can now have that same technology power my very own RSS feed.

We’d love to hear your feedback about our recommendations: Do you notice how Your News provides you with dynamic, relevant content each time you visit Businessinsider.com? If we’re doing our job, Your News will make your time on the site even more enjoyable and efficient.

Do you want your brand to be perceived as not looking after your customers? If I’m a subscriber to your content who wants out, and it takes me 3 clicks to do it, I’m likely to do two things: start referring to your site as being shady, and report you as a spammer.

Make it EASY for users to unsubscribe, not hard. Putting up roadblocks to unsubscribing may provide the illusion of a large list, but it is deleterious to brand image, member satisfaction and list activity. It’s much better to have a high quality email list with an 80% open rate than a large list with a 10% open rate.

Yesterday, I posted my thoughts on this service on Business Insider. Sailthru, as you might have noticed, also sends email. Isn’t Amazon competitive and charging a much lower price? Not really. Sailthru is a full service provider, while Amazon is providing a piece of infrastructure. What’s the difference?

Here’s what both SES and Sailthru do:

1. send emails

Here’s some of what Sailthru does, that SES doesn’t:

1. industry-best deliverability
2. open, click, and purchase tracking
3. list and campaign management
4. userbase analytics (engagement, geo, interest-based, time-of-day, etc)
5. dynamically assembled emails using templates
6. behavioral targeting and segmenting
7. user interface to build and manage all of the above
8. 24-hour support with human beings whenever you have delivery problems or need help

Anyone who considers email an important part of their business is not going to be able to use what Amazon is offering without building significant additional pieces on top of it. At Sailthru, we’re excited about Amazon’s new product and look forward to evaluating and possibly integrating with it.

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Who am I?  I’m a professional woman living in New York City between the ages of 18-35.

These are the differentiators that traditional marketers have gathered, and the ones that have identified me on every list I’ve joined in the last decade. Now the received wisdom dictates that I should be sent discounts on lipstick and anti-aging cream rather than those on equipment for grilling animals and hitting balls with crooked sticks (or whatever you brawny men like to do with your free time). These perceptions are fostered by the basic information marketers have gathered on me.

I finished tiling the walls early so I made this dress out of taffy!

But they are wrong.

People are far more varied than flat demographics and geography can show. We are complex individuals with eclectic interests that break the boundaries of standard or average.  With the explosion of the internet has come the birth of hundreds of thousands of niche interest groups.  We’ve excelled past generic labels and are demanding to be identified more specifically by the media we consume and the stores we shop in.

Imagine being able to really know who your customers are; what content they care about (the gulf oil  spill and the Red Sox), what items they’re browsing (leather belts and smartphone apps), buying (hip-hop music and vegan cookbooks) or abandoning (football tickets and summer shoes), and then being able to use that information to speak directly to them.

Knowing WHO is in your database has become the new standard of excellence. The ability to market to the individual means that you, as marketers, are on the pulse of the very audience that can make or break you.

In addition to the change, you can also select the time interval to display.  Select from “daily”, “weekly” or “monthly” from the duration drop-down menu, depress the refresh button, et voila! a powerful new chart is displayed.  Finally, in the view drop down menu you are also able to select to calculate the growth report against the total number of email addresses in your list (including optouts and hardbounces) or against valids only.  Yep, it’s pretty cool.

Stay tuned as we bring many powerful new features online over the coming weeks.

Clicking the banner takes donors directly to the Red Cross donation site where they can choose between the Haiti Relief and Development and the International Response Fund.  Including the banner costs nothing but may help to ease the suffering of a people in need.  We hope that you will consider including one of these banners in your outgoing emails and we’d love to hear ideas you have about helping out.

First a definition of terms: in it’s basic form an A/B split test is the competing of two versions of an email within a given campaign, each on a small percentage of a list.  Having monitored responses to each, the more effective of the two test emails is then sent to the remainder of the list.  It is important to remember that the two competing versions are run on exclusive segments of the list, that is, test recipients receive either version [A] or version [B], but not both.  The purpose and great power of an A/B split test lies in the ability to determine how your users are likely to respond to an email before having sent it to the vast majority of them.  Of course, coming up with two versions of a single campaign also puts to the test your basic assumptions about who your users are and how they will respond to a given message, thus making it a teaching tool as well.

Our system has a default setting of 10% for each of the A/B segments, which means that 80% of the list is withheld.  So, under the default settings, the winning email can be sent to 90% (10% test + 80% final) of the list (unless the final version of the email is a hybridized third version… So many options!).  You can specify any number of recipients for your tests, just remember that you want it to be a large enough proportion for the test to be meaningful, and a small enough proportion that the vast majority of the list receive the most effective version of your email.

A 50:50 A/B test is not really an A/B test
We sometimes get requests to run A/B tests on a different proportion of a given list.  The system lets you choose any fraction of your list that you specify.  But quite often we are requested to run a split of 50% and 50%.  As I said before, the system will let you do this, but just know that to do so defeats a central purpose of the A/B test.  After-all, once you’ve run your test on 100% of the list it’s too late to use any of the knowledge gained!  And even if you were to send the same email a second time you’d be in new conditions and sending to users who, at least half of which, had received the ad already.

For detailed instructions on how to perform an A/B split  visit:  http://docs.sailthru.com/ab_split

In the mean time we will keep trying to make the email business a better place so that spammers and phishers can do no harm!