The DMA puts email marketing’s ROI for 2011 at $40.56 for every $1 invested. The figure for 2012 is predicted to “fall” to $39.40, when email will account for $67.8 billion in sales (reference).

Email is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it in 2011, compared to catalogs’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile’s return of $10.51. – Direct Marketing Association “Power of Direct” (2011)

72% of respondents to an Econsultancy survey in early 2011 described email’s ROI as excellent or good. Only organic SEO scored better (reference).

A late 2010 customer survey by Campaigner found 61% intending to do more email marketing in 2011, and 33% planning to continue at the same level (reference).

30.7% of retailers surveyed send abandoned cart emails to customers. – “Abandoned Shopping Cart Email Strategies Report”

Abandoned cart emails getting 20 times the transaction rates and revenue of standard email campaigns – Experian & CheetahMail “The remarketing report” (2010)

Only 33 percent of those surveyed have images turned on by default in their email client. This is a vast difference from 2006, when the figure was a still concerning 55 percent.- MarketingSherpa, (2010)

37% of major online retailers provide a link to change or manage subscription preferences and 22% provide a “change email address” link. Looking to capitalize on forwards, 18% of retailers also include a subscribe link. – Smith-Harmon “Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study” (2010)

A few links for further reading:

http://emailstatcenter.com
http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/basics/why.htm
http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/

Got more? Post them in comments!

Yes, I’ll be flying off to New York City for a weekend with a good friend and PR queen before me and hubby board the plane for Lima, Peru.

The plan is that there is no plan, we only know what route we want to take across South America (Google maps has roughly outlined this for us) and that we will definitely visit Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, Iguazu falls and the jungle.

I’ve always been fascinated with jungles and this is the first time I even get close to visiting one. You have to remember that I live in Iceland and for me, a couple of 3m trees actually constitute a forest.

If I see a monkey in the jungle I can die a happy woman.

I will be there in a few weeks!

A part of the majestic Iguazu waterfalls

Look at that cute monkey! Yay!

I will be in South America for roughly 4 weeks and will have limited Internet activity and absolutely no Photoshop.

The only thing I’ve done to prepare so far is buying light Scarpa shoes, a shiny red backpack and Lonely Planet’s South America on a shoestring. Your input would be much appreciated!

Please if you have any travel tips for me, please leave them in the comments!

(And off course, I scouted all my flights using Dohop.com, the world’s best flight search engine haha)

All the areas on the home page are now clickable and interchangeable, whereas before the areas were static. Links to social media websites and a newsletter sign up box were also added, increasing the signup rate by roughly 1000%.

The redesign was launched fall 2010.

Before:

Like we all know, unicorns are white. So are most programmers after all these hours in front of a computer screen.

2. You approach them carefully so you won’t scare them off

In the rare case that you do meet one, I’d recommend giving them candy, smile and nod and accept all their wishes (especially $$$ wishes). Otherwise you probably won’t see them again.

3. They make magic happen

They say something like <?abracadabra> and un-explainable magic happens! Yay!

4. You treat them like royalty

Don’t expect them to work over the weekend. Don’t expect them to fix your printer. Be thankful for what they do. Always pay them well and promptly.

5. They are so RARE…

… or more to the point: they are always taken.

I saw this nice little infographic about caffeine and wanted to share it with you:

At the end of the day I realized that, like almost all other days, I had learned and discovered a variety of new things and new ideas. And I decided to sit down and appreciate what I had discovered.

Here are my top 3 for today:

1. Prey – This was brought to my attention via @haukurhomm. I have not tried it yet, but it came recommended by Haukur so I probably will. Basically, Prey is an anti theft program you can install on your PC, Mac, iPhone or Android and if one of your devices get stolen, Prey is able to do a variety of things to locate it or scare off the thieves. Prey is free – as in free beer! Excellent.
2. ThinkUp – ThinkUp is a program that you can set up on your domain and it gives you an overview over your activity on social networks. This one came from @ingig. I’m setting mine up right now… and it’s done. You can probably find out a  lot of weird things about me through that.
3. Great Gmail Labs features on Mashable.com – brought to my attention via @hjortur. This is not the first time I tinker with Gmail Labs but I haven’t checked in there for quite a while now and in the meanwhile gotten myself a new email address and everything. Needless to say, after reading the post on Mashable and going though the list I have almost 70% of the lab options enabled. Too much? Yes, probably. In a few days I will disable a few of them again.

May this list also help you discover new things today.

Part 1:

Part 2:

But now Facebook has stopped supporting the Facebook Share button in favor of an updated Like button functionality. Now when someone presses a Like button on a web page the full story/post/article/whatever along with a thumbnail and headline will be posted to that person’s wall. That person can also add a comment to what they are posting.

This means that the Facebook like button is essentially taking over the Share button features.

Personally I like this change because Likes will now be more prominent on Facebook and ultimately lead to increased traffic to the Liked webpage. Also because it doesn’t really make sense to have two different buttons for a single social media website, even if that website is dominating the social media atmosphere.

The normal user might be less hesitant to press Like now, but that is a good thing. It should decrease low quality content being liked just because it is so easy and increase Likes for releveant high quality content.

Now the only obstacle is to make the content on your website relevant and high quality!

Are you as happy as me with this change?

You can also view the slides from this presentation (even though they don’t make much sense on their own )

What do you think?