Much time has been spent discussing the subject of user engagement lately as it becomes more and more obvious how much of a key role it plays in the current email marketing landscape. For your edification – a few recent related posts from the blogging world:

• Engagement: The New Frontier In Deliverability? – George Bilbery from Return Path weighs in
• How to attract customers, engage them & keep them coming back – backyard birding as a study in user engagement
• Email Marketing Today: Episode 29 – “Lessons learned from WWD New Rules of Consumer Engagement”
• How Engagement Metrics Influence Deliverability – key points
• User Engagement & Email Delivery – a few quick notes
• Using Personality To Help Drive Engagement – why it’s important to show you’re not a faceless corporation
• Future of deliverability: 1 – the role of user interaction (see also part 2)
• How Can Non-Profits Send More Engaging Email? – a new study with some interesting statistics

Twitter have in the past week or two made several important changes that I think are worth mentioning, particularly because of the launch of our new Share section. One thing that I noticed this morning (being one of the lucky 5% of users getting a sneak preview) was the new ability to set up lists (apologies for the link to a slightly out-of-date post, but there’s no more recent information available that I know of, yet) – which for me is a very cool feature I have long wished for. Our own Mr Gareth Langston will be posting more about this later, so I’ll leave the details for him to describe.

Also, as many people are aware, Twitter searches will soon be incorporated into Google search results. What hasn’t been as widely discussed is Microsoft already have a Twitter search up and running – at least for part of the world (NB: I finally got it working by tweaking the URL). Finally, on a technical note, they’ve also introduced support for API versioning, which will allow the introduction of new features more easily than previously, and makes my developer side a happy little geek.

Special mention this week to Marketing Sherpa‘s recently announced 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report. It’s not free ($297 for the PDF-only version), but to whet your appetite there is a fairly large executive summary slash excerpt available (16 pages, including several pages for the index). The report itself contains research from 1,493 “real-life marketers” with a plethora of charts, tables, statistics, and advice totalling 283 pages of content: quite honestly the most comprehensive research on email marketing that I know of, especially when complemented by our very own UK email marketing benchmark report. Good stuff, Sherpa!

One of the more meaty topics this week has been the never-ending flood of spam:

• Barracuda and BarracudaCentral RBL – hidden pitfalls of this anti-spam service
• Important information for users of spamassassin – and bl.open-whois.org
• MessageLabs Stats: Spam Learns a New Language – foreign spam on the rise
• More Spam? Say it ain’t so! – all spam on the rise
• There Oughta Be A Law! – “Anti-Spam Legislation Around the World, Part 1″
• You might be a spammer if… – … you read this post’s comments without smiling

Widely reported this week was the news that AOL are no longer providing report cards on people who have received a high number of spam complaints. Fortunately this doesn’t affect Sign-Up.to, as we already closely monitor our feedback loops and will be in touch with clients long before they reached the 30% threshold that previously trigged a report card from AOL.

Speaking of reports, this week’s special mention must go to our very own Matt McNeill, who has painstakingly cleaned, sorted, and analysed over 200 million emails in order to present us with the most comprehensive Email Marketing Benchmark Report in the UK. Check it out for all sorts of statistical goodness related to industry averages for bounce rates, unsubscribes, clicks, and more.