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Today, MarketingSherpa released the 2008 edition of its Email Marketing Benchmark Guide. According to the press release: "the updated guide delivers exclusive results data from real-life marketers' campaigns. Containing 260-charts and tables, this is the largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted with professional email marketers. Readers will learn how the impact of email marketing has changed over the past year and how to overcome various future challenges of email marketing."

The group’s latest stats show that delivery rates fell to 68% for acquisition emails and 80% for retention emails in the period, continuing the drops seen in Q1.

MarketingSherpa is offering a free download, Dirty Dozen: Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes. Find it under Email Marketing Resources on this page, along with other free downloads.

Take a new approach to list growth. Ask!There are a surprising number of companies that, for whatever reason, fail to prominently position opt-in requests on their Web site. With the prominence of search driving customers deeper into Web sites and bypassing the home page, companies need to request email addresses more often and in more locations.

If you aren’t delivering a regular eNewsletter to build your business, you should ask yourself why.  You are probably missing the biggest and best opportunity to communicate in a consistent and meaningful way with your customers.   Of course, you need to generate regular content that brings value to your customers. But, with that basic proviso, an eNewsletter should become an integral part of your content marketing arsenal.  Here’s why:

Preparing to broadcast an eMail campaign is like getting ready to launch a satellite; it's a nightmare to run a mistake-ridden programme. However, working with a list of detailed quality control checks will identify problems before they have a detrimental effect on customers, prospects, deliverability, the brand and ultimately your profits.

Many preference centers are great ideas that are poorly executed -- not because the registration page isn't functional or the users can't update their profiles, but because of  mismatched expectations.  When many marketers are still grappling with permission management practices (opt-in vs. opt-out), why add another layer of consumer management to the problem?