E-mail CTR reaches 3.9% on Wednesdays

MarketingVox quotes eROI report, saying that the best day for e-mail is Wednesday. The average open rate on Wednesdays was 25.4% with an average click-through rate of 3.9%. The second-best day to e-mail is Monday, with an average open rate of 24.7% and a 3.1% click-through. Saturday commanded the highest CTR of 5%, but the lowest open rate with 18.7%.

60% of business correspondence has grammar or spelling errors

60% of all business correspondence still gets sent containing one or more grammar or spelling errors, according to WhiteSmoke. 32% of writers are failing to use all the words needed for a grammatically correct sentence. 28% of mistakes relate to punctuation, that is, knowing when to use a period, comma or question mark. Agreement between sentence elements comes up next in 8% of the data.

Suggestions against "phishing"

Don’t answer messages that read something like: “Our servers have been updated... Our security systems have been temporarily suspended and will be up again on... We are forced to ask for your cooperation to quickly restore the data in the new platforms... Connect to...” These are sophisticated technological mechanisms to get fraudulently e-mail addresses and other data, an illegal practice known as “phishing”.

Don’t answer even if you know the sender. If you are registered in a web page that must update its data, the most legitimate procedure is for the page to request it when you visit it, and not through an e-mail.

In the case of corporate e-mails, it is better for the company to establish specific security procedures that are totally different from “phishing”.

These suggestions are taken from my book Email at the workplace.

$3.2 bln lost to phishing in 2007

Phishing attacks in the United States soared in 2007 as $3.2 bln was lost to these attacks, according to Gartner. 3.6 mln adults lost money in phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in August 2007, as compared with the 2.3 mln who did so the year before. Of consumers who received phishing e-mails in 2007, 3.3% say they lost money because of the attack, compared with 2.3% who lost money in 2006, and 2.9% who did so in 2005. The average dollar loss per incident declined to $886 from $1,244 lost on average in 2006 (with a median loss of $200 in 2007), but because there were more victims, $3.2 bln was lost to phishing in 2007, according to surveyed consumers. Some 1.6 mln adults recovered about 64% of their losses in 2007, up from the 54% that 1.5 mln adults recovered in 2006.