Email news: text vs html email stats, Spam from China drops

Like stated in the last post, the way of posting will change at Emailblog.eu. Today is Wednesday which means it’s email news day: a round up of what has been happening the past week in the world of email marketing.
Starting off is the news that spam from China has been dropping severely according to Al Iverson’s Spamresource. Dropping from the top 5 to the 18th spot in just 2 years it seems they have finally gotten it under control. More info can be found over at Techworld. Other countries with high volume of spam could learn a thing or two, like the USA. It was rated number 1 in spam relaying countries back in January by Sophos: read the full article here.
Stats per country:

A quote from Graham Cluley of Sophos:

Spam is certainly here to stay, however the motivations and the methods are continuing to change in order to reap the greatest rewards for the spammers,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “What’s becoming even more prevalent is the mailing of links to poisoned webpages – victims are tricked into clicking a link in an email, and then led to a site that attacks their computer with exploits or attempts to implant fake anti-virus software.

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Up next, Jaymail’s blog has posted stats on text vs html emails. It’s a combined post of stats with sources, and of pro and cons of text vs html emails. Where the sources are dating back as far as 2001, they still provide nice insights into how people react to both types of email, what they actually want and which email marketing campaigns are most succesful. It turns out that there are some conflicting stats: on one hand text emails have better CTR than html emails, on the other hand the actual conversion on html emails is better and on the rise.
Next to that, the pros and cons posted are in favour of text when it comes to having it look as a personal message and making sure it works wel in all clients (email rendering), but html gets props to in terms of open and CTR stats, content and structure formatting and a rich look. Downsides for text include the non-existing format, the non-clickable links in many email clients and the pure plain looks it has. Next to that html has downsides too: rendering is more difficult to get right across all the email clients used these days, images can be blocked by many email clients and it can look less personal than text. All in all it’s important to test and find out who your audience is and what they are using.
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Lastly there’s more stats, this time from comScore’s 2010 digital year in review as interpreted by therelevantmarketer.com. The good news is that email usage is not declining (we still have a job) but that it is shifting from web to mobile. This might not be good news for some, bad news for others: have you looked at your own email campaigns on mobile platforms like Android, iPhone, iPad and others? One part of the post I liked very much is this:

Looking at the comScore data for other demographic segments, interesting contradictions appear that may give insight into e-mail use. For example, in the 18-24 age group, unique visits increased 9%, while time spent decreased 10%. To me this points to the increasing use of mobile to triage inboxes on the go, and the desktop inbox being used to access specific e-mails and perform tasks like getting a code for a sale, or composing an e-mail reply that would be too onerous on a mobile phone. In fact,comScore found that 30% of respondents are viewing e-mail on their mobile phone, a 36% increase from 2009, and those using mobile e-mail daily increased 40% on average.

It seems mobile is becoming the prelude of the actual inbox at home or at the office to filter through email beforehand and view the ones worthy of someones precious time at higher resolution platforms like notebooks or desktops later on. If you’d like to know how much mobile has grown over the past 2,5 years, look at this Android activation video visualized worldwide from Goaruna: