Government tops the list of effective email marketers

For all the claims of government communication being expensive or ineffective compared to the private sector, government has topped the Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics Report for January - June 2012.

Vision 6, an email marketing company based in Queensland, has reported on the email marketing effectiveness of Australian companies and agencies for the last five years.

Government has consistently performed well in these reports, well ahead of industries such as IT & Telecommunications, Insurance and Superannuation, Advertising/Media/Entertainment, Retail and Consumer Products, Hospitality and Tourism and other 'traditional' heavy email marketers.

In the January - June 2012 report, Government topped the list of 16 industries both for most email opens (33.64%) and most clickthroughs (8.89%).

Open rates for industries from Vision 6's Email Marketing Metrics Report

Looking across all industries, the average bounce rate for emails was around 5.5%. This varied slightly by size of list, the lowest for lists of 10,000 or more email addresses at 5.01% and the highest for lists of 500-9,999 email addresses at 5.81%, with Government averaging 5.38% across the board.

The lowest bounce rate was received by the Trade and Services industry at 1.98% and the highest by Science and Technology at 11.67%.

All days saw fairly even open and click-through rates, dispelling the myth that people prefer opening emails on Tuesdays, and Thursday appeared to be the most popular day for sending emails, despite being average for open and click throughs.

Almost two-thirds of emails (64.65%) that were opened were opened within the first 8 hours (30.2% within one hour and another 34.45% between one and eight hours), four in five within 24 hours and 91.66% within 72 hours (three days) of sending.

Vision 6 says that with increasing use of mobile devices the time before emails are opened is falling - so with only about half of Australians using smartphones and 12% of households owning a tablet (compared to 18% in the US according to Pew Internet), there's plenty of scope for email open timeframes to continue to decrease.

Mobile has become so important already for consumers that Vision 6 also reported that the iPhone mail application has leapt into third spot (at 16.28%) behind Outlook 2003 (at 17.54%) and Apple Webkit (at 16.53%). In fact mobile accounted for 24.33% of all email opens.

To gain more insights on email marketing, and to view all of the reports back to 2006, visit Vision 6 Email Marketing Metrics centre.

eDemocracy report from Lowey - US striding ahead

If I were the leader of a nation that wasn't friends with the US I would be very concerned with the successes of their eDiplomacy program and looking to counter it with my own.

And if I was the leader of a friendly nation, I'd still be seeking to carve out my own eDiplomacy space, to retain some element of influence in the future.

The UK has realised this, Canada has realised it, though I'm not as sure Australia has woken up to it as well.

The Lowey Institute has released an excellent report on the state of US eDiplomacy by Fergus Hanson, which may help as a wake up call.

Brought to my attention by Peter Timmin, who writes the Open and Shut FOI blog, Fergus's report, the result of four months spent in the US with the State Department, found that there are now 25 separate ediplomacy nodes operating at State’s Washington DC Headquarters employing over 150 full-time equivalent staff.

Additionally (the report says) a recent internal study of US missions abroad found 935 overseas staff employing ediplomacy communications tools to some degree, or the equivalent of 175 full-time
personnel.

The report states very clearly that, in some areas ediplomacy is changing the way State does business. For example,

In Public Diplomacy, State now operates what is effectively a global media empire, reaching a larger direct audience than the paid circulation of the ten largest US dailies and employing an army of diplomat-journalists to feed its 600-plus platforms.

In other areas, like Knowledge Management, ediplomacy is finding solutions to problems that have plagued foreign ministries for centuries.

One of the key changes that Fergus noted was how the organisation functioned as a start-up, not as a staid old-fashioned bureaucracy. For example,

In interviews with office staff, conversation quickly turns from notional duties to ‘passion projects’ – the new ideas and platforms staff work on in their spare time. And there are plenty in the works. The Inspector General, whose recent report on the office made it sound like a review of a Silicon Valley start-up, noted over 40 underway.

Other employees also seem to have got a message regularly repeated at the Office of eDiplomacy; Experiment. It’s okay to fail. One enterprising official working on US library spaces abroad realised how costly and pointless it was sending physical books across the globe and cut a deal with Amazon to get discounted Kindles delivered instead.

And in Zimbabwe, the greying US Ambassador, Charles A Ray, has embraced Facebook as a way of circumventing the iron grip Robert Mugabe exercises over freedom of the press. He engages in an active and animated discussion with Zimbabweans about how they view the world.

In my view this report doesn't only highlight the new world of diplomacy, but also the new world of the public service.

The approach taken to engage foreign citizens could be transferred to domestic agencies and used to engage US citizens as well.

Is State the future of public services around the world? Time - and good leadership will tell.

However just as nations who fail to remain commercially competitive find it increasingly difficult to maintain incomes, education levels, lifestyles and services, countries that fail to be competitive in their public governance are likely to be at significant disadvantage in international relations.

eDiplomacy is already here and working. The challenge has been laid down. Can Australia's present public sector and political leaders take it up?

If Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and MySpace were Aussie states

Many of you are probably aware that Facebook's active membership is larger than the population of the world's third largest country, however the numbers are getting too big to relate to Australia.

So I've taken the idea and compiled a view of Australia by state, including the main social networks used by Aussies as if they were states.




Notes

• Growth rates are based on 9 months, with state population for March 2012 extrapolated by applying 75% of the growth for the 2010/11 year from the ABS. The growth rates for social networks were calculated backwards based on having statistics on subscribers for both March 2012 and June 2011.
• Google Plus wasn't on the scene until August with 365,000 users - since then it has grown at a rate of approximately 337% per year, making it by far the fastest growing social network.
• Some social networks have decreased in numbers. Two data points are not enough to establish a trend and Twitter tends to fluctuate up and down on a monthly basis and it is difficult to define a clear direction for the service. MySpace's trend has generally been down for several years (refer to this Infograph and data for 2011 from Social Media News).

Sources:

• Australian population: Census projection - extrapolated to March 2012 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Social media statistics: Social Media Statistics Australia – March 2012 from Social Media News