eBook & Internet Publishing News
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TAF Master is an affiliate program where you put tell-a-friend forms on your web pages, and they pay based on email subscriptions. Run by email marketing company, Focalex, I think this program offers a lot of potential to the right kind of sites. Read read the review.

Well "The Rich Jerk" has generated quite a buzz on the forums. I bought a copy of his book and think it’s pretty good. You can read the review, and if you buy through our affiliate link, we’ll throw in a free full copy of Pay Per Click Galaxy (normal price $97).

QuickCommerce is an affiliate program where you sell merchant accounts (the ability for merchants to accept credit cards). A good looking program which looks like it has a lot of potential. Read the review here.

The Dish Pronto affiliate program offers the opportunity to generate revenue from selling satellite TV services. Looks like a good one to promote with SEO, AdWords or pay per click advertising, and has the potential to be sold offline too. Read the review.

AWeber (the Autoresponder people) released some very interesting statistics which are bound to be of interest to opt-in newsletter publishers.

Here they are, republished with AWeber’s permission (and by the way if you’re looking for a good autoresponder, be sure to check them out).

Before you get into the nitty gritty details, one thing to note, these statistics are for AWeber ’s own service, and may not always represent the Internet average. One such example might be the excellent delivery rate - AWeber’s emails, because of their good reputation (and because they’re all opt-in) tend to be relatively rarely filtered.

Real World Newsletter Statistics:

12,561 subscribers in an average customer opt-in newsletter list.

4 minutes and 24 seconds is the average amount of time between when a customer queues a newsletter and when AWeber completes delivery.

94% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 5 minutes of when they are scheduled.

98.4% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 30 minutes of when they are scheduled.

99.34% of all email was delivered successfully in the last 30 days.

0.66% of all email was undeliverable in the last 30 days. (mailbox closed, non-existent user, etc.)

Average open rate of HTML and Text/HTML newsletters is 29.7% over the past 30 days.

Sunday generates the highest average open rate of 41.1%, followed by Saturday at 36.7% for newsletter sent date.

Average Open Rate by Sent Date: (higher is better)

• Sunday 41.1%
• Saturday 36.7%
• Wednesday 34.0%
• Friday 32.8%
• Tuesday 29.6%
• Thursday 24.6%
• Monday 23.2%

Sunday generates the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.36% for newsletters sent on that date.

Average Undeliverable Rate by Sent Date: (lower is better)

• Sunday 0.36%
• Saturday 0.45%
• Friday 0.47%
• Thursday 0.56%
• Wednesday 0.77%
• Tuesday 0.83%
• Monday 0.88%

Monday is the most popular day of the week for customers to send their newsletters with 17.1% of newsletters being sent.

Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:

• Monday 17.1%
• Tuesday 17.0%
• Thursday 16.2%
• Wednesday 15.8%
• Friday 14.5%
• Saturday 10.3%
• Sunday 9.0%

An 8:00 AM EST send time generates the highest open rate of 50.6%. Interestingly sending at 9:00 AM EST has a significantly lower open rate of 33.7% with the worst time to send being 3-4 AM at only 19% open rate.

Plain text messages are the most popular format of sending newsletters with 65.9% of all newsletters sent. Mime format Text/HTML messages follow at 23.8% and a remaining 10.2% of customers still send HTML only messages even though it is strongly recommended to always
include a plain text version.

Plain text messages generate the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.46%. Mime format Text/HTML follows at 0.56% and HTML only messages have a whopping 1.09% undeliverable rate. This is a significant reason behind our recommendation to always send a plain text alternative with HTML formatted messages.

Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber’s first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average
open rates of 28.9%.

17% of customer newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber’s first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber’s full name or last name generated lower average open rates at 20%.