According to a new survey, 80% of U.K. retailers are using email marketing campaigns to strut their stuff. Opt-in is king, with the full 80% using sign-up boxes and ListBuilders to get customers to subscribe to their newsletters and emails. However, not every retailer has an easy to find sign-up box, which is rule #1 in any opt-in campaign. A full 35% said that they buried their email registration somewhere on their Website. Why? Who knows. But the bottom line is, opt-in email marketing is catching on like wildfire in the UK.

Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, has become one of the largest online shopping days of the year. This is precisely why email campaigns were sent out at record levels on the Sunday before the actual day. An interesting tracking study by RetailEmail.blogspot.com shows that 67% of retailers sent emails leading up to November 26th. That’s 44% more than last year. Click here to read more.

Email marketers went all out this Thanksgiving, sending a record number of email campaigns to recipients showcasing show-stopping deals and no long lines (see story above). Thanks to this effort, shoppers spent more than $730 million online on Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving. The only drawback to the sales blitz? Site slowdowns. Internet traffic analysis company Keynote Systems saw that 10 of the top 30 retailers struggled to handle all that traffic, and customers faced significant delays when orders were being processed. Click here to read more.

Using Sender Policy Framework (SPF), a technology that shows Email Service Providers that you are who you say you are when you send emails, is one of the key elements to email marketing success, according to the SmartBiz.com blog. This short column illustrates why SPF is needed and how not using it can cause thousands of emails to end up in the bulk email box or spam file. If you’d like to access Benchmark’s SPF records and use them for your domain when you send emails, feel free to email our support staff. If you’re not sure how to do this and need Benchmark to set up a domain and SPF records for you, Benchmark can do this for a fee of just $149 per year. Contact our support staff for more info. To read more on how SPF Records can help your email marketing business, click here.