Building up your e-mail file

multichannelmerchant.com - Ask any multichannel merchant what its biggest e-mail marketing challenges are, and growing the e-mail file will certainly be one of the first topics mentioned.

So why do so many of them engage in practices that speed subscriber attrition?

A recent survey by e-mail deliverability firm Return Path found that 36.2% of consumers said they received more e-mail than they expected based on the information they were given at signup.

Nearly one in four — 24.1% — of consumers surveyed by Return Path said they received much more, but still a manageable amount of e-mail during the 2007 holiday shopping season. Another 13% said they received so much more, it was overwhelming.

At the same time, more than half of respondents, or 56.4%, said they receive a lot of “junk” from marketers, defined as “e-mail from companies I know but that is just not interesting to me.”

Also, an alarming percentage of consumers surveyed by Return Path, or 22.3%, said they handled the increase of e-mails by reporting the sender as a spammer to their ISPs.

A spam-complaint rate of half a percent or higher will result in serious deliverability troubles at the major e-mail inbox providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft.

As a result, managing people’s expectations is crucial when convincing them to hand over their e-mail addresses.

Ironically, many retailers are in a panic because their e-mail attrition rates are high, says Ben Ardito, vice president of professional services for e-mail service provider e-Dialog. But they’re high because of the retailers’ own actions.

“To them, e-mail is becoming more of a retention vehicle for their primary customers, but they don’t have e-mail addresses for everybody because they didn’t do a good job when they came in the door,” Ardito says.

Retailers are realizing that they need to nurture their lists because the volume of names that was coming in through early co-registration and affiliate marketing is dropping, he notes, “and the names aren’t as high quality as they have been in the past.”

But there are still a ton of opportunities to get people’s e-mail addresses.

For example, Ardito recommends asking in so-called transactional e-mails for permission from customers to begin sending them e-mail marketing messages.

Transactional e-mails, which include order confirmations, account statements, and product and service updates, get clicked on more often than other types of e-mail and, as a result, present a unique opportunity to open the channel for communication with customers.

There are rules governing the use of sales pitches in transactional e-mails, however, and marketers who over-sell in them run the risk of drawing the attention of the Federal Trade Commission. If an e-mail’s primary purpose is determined to be commercial, then it falls under the Can Spam Act and requires the sender to give the receiver an opt-out mechanism.

Return Path recommends no more than 20% of a transactional e-mail be devoted to a pitch. This is certainly enough room to ask the recipient to subscribe to other e-mail communications, though.

For example, Avis Budget Group has been able to enroll tens of thousands of people into its promotional e-mail newsletter by having its customer service call-center representatives ask if customers would like to receive an e-mail confirmation of their car rental reservation. The confirmation e-mail includes a pitch for renters to receive promotional e-mail messages.

While the transactional messages have achieved a not-surprising 87.1% open rate — they are, after all, car reservation confirmations — click-through rates on the promotional content within the e-mails have reportedly been an astounding 61.6%.

“The open rates were expected, since we’re sending transactional messages, but the click-through rates on promotional content have been surprisingly encouraging,” says Dawn Perry, director of CRM, Avis Budget Group.

E-dialog’s Ardito recommends advertising the benefits of signing up for an e-mail program everywhere possible, especially on the Website’s home page.

“I understand front-page Website real estate is precious, but customer retention is precious too, and you have a higher probability of getting someone to come back if you get their e-mail address,” he says.

Beyond asking for the address, one simple tactic for boosting e-mail subscription rates is to offer prospective subscribers a preview of what they’ll receive if they sign up, says Ardito.

“It’s very simple to add a link that says: ‘Click here for a sample,’” he says. “You could even do it so it’s last month’s e-mail. The ‘click here if you can’t see this’ hosted version can easily be used to put someone on the Website to see last month’s e-mail.”

He adds that merchants should be asking for e-mail addresses on every channel through which they communicate with customers and prospects. “I’m still waiting to see a TV commercial that says ‘come to our Website and sign up for our e-mails,’” he says.

E-mail appending works, Ardito notes, as long as it’s done intelligently. “When you receive the file [of appended names], don’t just put them into the promotional messaging stream,” he says.

“Treat them as a fresh opt-in with a welcome message, and within that message be clear on setting expectations for what they’ll be receiving, what kind of content, maybe what the frequency will be,” he says. “It’s about really making it a different experience from just throwing them into the promotional messaging stream and assuming they’ll know why they’re getting e-mail from you.”

The same philosophy holds true for e-mail names gathered through co-registration, says Ardito. “It’s all about being transparent,” he says. E-dialog also recommends different welcome messages based on how the addresses are gathered.

Adding Value

Stefan Pollard, director of e-mail best practices for e-mail service provider Lyris, says e-mail address gathering is simply a case of, “ask, ask, ask, and ask again, everywhere that somebody can potentially interact with your brand. Make it prominent, and make it clear what they’re opting into.”

It’s important to set up the e-mail program so people get something of value they wouldn’t otherwise get, Pollard adds. For example, electronic bookseller eReader.com offers two prices next to each title: a sale price and a discounted price for its newsletter subscribers.

Every e-mail newsletter eReader sends features list prices and discounted newsletter prices on the books it promotes.

“Everything they do is built around having those subscribers stay on the list,” Pollard says. “And it’s not complicated at all. And maybe you don’t want to hurt your margins by discounting everything you sell, so then put a valuable discount in the welcome e-mail.”

And if there’s a reader out there who hasn’t yet discerned that welcome e-mails to new subscribers are a necessity, they are. “It’s the most important thing you can do,” says Pollard, adding that the majority of marketers inexplicably still don’t.

“That’s your first opportunity to drive expectations and offer them something of value,” he adds.

Another way to keep people on a multichannel merchant’s e-mail list is by offering them exclusive promotions, such as letting e-mail subscribers take advantage of sale pricing one day before everybody else, says Pollard.

One area where most marketers fail in their e-mail file-building efforts, according to Pollard, is by not including a clear reason to opt-in to their programs on every landing page from all marketing activities.

“If you’re using search marketing and have a dedicated landing page, make sure you’re asking them to sign up,” he says. Like Ardito, Pollard is an advocate for asking for e-mail addresses inside transactional messaging.

“You know, provide a little plug for them to get e-mail-only discounts and special offers,” he says.

He also says too many companies fail to ask for e-mail addresses offline. “We just got through a heavy business season, and how many companies took the time in the package that was sent to a friend or relative to include promotional information allowing them to opt-in to get the catalog or newsletter?” he asks rhetorically.

Another area where multichannel merchants fail in e-mail marketing is thinking that once they’ve received permission to e-mail someone, they have permission to mail for all time.

“A lot of marketers think that permission is permanent; it’s not,” says Pollard. Because recipients can hit the “report spam” button and cause delivery troubles for the sender, it’s imperative to monitor e-mail list activity for those who stop interacting with the merchant’s communications.

But inactive addresses also offer opportunities many marketers fail to take advantage of. Pollard recommends using positively worded promotions to reactivate them. “Don’t say, ‘You haven’t opened our newsletter in a year,’ say, ‘You’ve been a subscriber to our e-mail newsletter for a year. Happy birthday. Here’s a coupon for 25% off,’” he says. “Now if they respond, they’re back in the active file.”

Moreover, they’re far less likely to report the merchant as a spammer. Another reason it is important to monitor inactive addresses is that a significant percentage of them will be those of people who no longer use the address and have moved on without telling the merchant.

ISPs turn abandoned addresses into spam traps. Hit enough of them and delivery troubles will result, so it’s important to clean abandoned addresses off an e-mail file.

What constitutes enough inactivity to warrant removal from an e-mail file will vary from merchant to merchant, depending on how often they mail and the length of their sales cycles.

Opting-In

No discussion of general e-mail list building tactics is complete without addressing opt-in practices.

Permission-based e-mail address-gathering practices generally fall into two groups that go by various names, single opt-in and double opt-in being the two names that we’ll use here.

Single opt-in is where the prospect signs up for an e-mail program and the merchant sends a welcome e-mail confirming the subscription, but the subscriber does not have to respond in order to start receiving e-mails.

Under so-called double opt-in — some call it fully verified opt-in — the subscriber must respond to the welcome/confirmation e-mail in order to begin receiving messages.

Many marketers argue that double opt-in is like asking the subscriber for permission twice. And a high percentage of subscribers will not respond to confirmation e-mails, making the e-mail list-building process more arduous.

Anti-spam activists will argue that the only way to ensure the person really wants to receive e-mails is to get confirmation. Forged e-mail subscriptions are not uncommon.

Double opt-in is also a foolproof way to make sure new e-mail names are clean and the risk of spam complaints from them is low.

“I’m not a real big fan of double opt-in for any purpose other than data validation,” says Pollard. “If you have store clerks entering information and call centers taking e-mail addresses, you want to use double opt-in to make sure there are no data entry problems. Double opt-in will protect you from having typos on your list.”

Testing: What Do You Really Learn?

mediapost.com - IN THE WORLD OF EMAIL marketing and marketing in general, everyone loves to discuss testing.  It’s usually the second thing out of a marketer’s mouth when discussing email, outside of how often to send email.  On the surface it seems quite straightforward: test a subject line here and there, maybe a different creative, maybe different offers to different segments.  In actuality it is likely the most misunderstood practice in email marketing and the most poorly administered.

Here’s my view of testing, how to break it down and how to develop a testing strategy.

Testing starts with developing a hypothesis and a log.  Why?  You can’t optimize without a hypothesis of what you hope to achieve and a planned action behind it.  Without storing a history of your tests or what worked and what didn’t, you will likely recycle the same tests over and over again.

So, what are the things you can test, and why are they important?

-    Targeting - Which segments will perform best to existing promotions. Could be based on past purchase, customer state, value, product affinity, site behavior or simply cohorts that you’ve established.   This is the best area to test cadence, pull out a few customer segments and hold out a group; you’ll see incremental effects of frequency on different customer segments.

-    Promotion -  This can be reward or incentive, but testing variances in promotions is probably the most typical method of testing today.  20%, 30% off, free shipping, multiple purchase discounts.  Many test this in simple fashion A/B style, primarily due to the complexity this can cause on different value segments and cadence.

-    Design - Obviously this is talked about a lot in the email world.  Short versions, long versions, use of product images, text links, layout.  This type of testing is best to do in a multivariate scenario, as it will save you a lot of time during the production crunch. The difficulty is isolating it to a few key elements that you can take forward into all your email communication streams. If you test a promotional email, will the learnings pass to your newsletter and triggered messaging?  Depends on your hypothesis.

-    Subject Lines - As we all know, subject lines are the “context” for which the receiver decides to open the message (although the from address/name is important to “scanners” as much as “poll position” is).  What do you test?  There are essentially three main elements you can test: Brand-specific subject lines, action-oriented subject lines and benefit-driven subject lines, which can be combined to test infinite combinations. Add personalization to this and placement (front, middle, end) and you get an interesting testing matrix.  It’s critical that you log these types of tests, as they are often done very adhoc, which means that at the end of a year, no one can tell you the top winning subject lines, tests or approaches.

-    Landing Pages - Don’t forget the destination!   Just because they clicked through doesn’t mean they will do what you want.  Landing page tests are best suited for multivariate testing as well. There are simply too many variables to test, frrm abandonment, form layout, sequencing of pages, and all the creative variables.  Small changes can have dramatic impact on performance.

Testing isn’t just about finding a winning solution, it’s a process of trying to find the greatest variance in tactics and validating your hypothesis.

Most companies I know have tested A/B methods, some have tested multivariate, and very, very few even think about doing more sophisticated methods like Taguchi.  Just remember, adding complexity to the test doesn’t make it valuable, it just makes it a bit more efficient — so if you have limited bandwidth, it may make sense to do less frequent, but more in-depth, testing a few times a year.

As I’ve preached for years, we don’t test unless there is a prescribed action associated with the winning hypothesis; this includes even simple things like subject lines.  Ask yourself, if “Your bonus offer is ready to view” performs better than “Get your bonus offer today” as a subject line test, what action will you take in response? Does it mean your audience is averse to directive statements, and you’ll sequence the next few messages with more passive language?

Testing can be fun, it can be a lot of work, but your job as a marketer is to find the most efficient methods to build learnings about your customers and their behaviors with email.

Email Appending Is More Than a Process

marketingprofs.com - Email address appending has been in use since the late ’90s, and if my inbox is any gauge there’s a rebound in its use. I’ve recently received emails from catalogers, publishers, and major marketers with which I’ve done business in the past, asking permission to send me emails. And that’s the first key to successful appending, since it is meant only for existing relationships.

Most marketers have email addresses for less than half their customers and prospects. If this is the case for your company, it might make sense to explore email appending.

Let’s first look at the process, and then we’ll examine how one publisher implemented its communication plan.

 

How the Process Works

Many companies offer email appending services. The larger services have 70-90 million records with name, address information, and email address. You provide them with names and addresses of customers or prospects, and they match your file against their database.

You should use fairly tight match criteria and match on an individual-name—not on a last-name or household—level.

Match rates for business-to-business will be in the 10-15 percent range and consumer marketers can expect 25-30 percent.

Some appending companies will send the first email for you, and others will simply provide you with all the matches for you to send. The first email is called the “permission pass.”

You’ll want to wait at least a week after the permission pass to collect any bounces or opt-outs. Typically, you’ll see low opt-outs, normally in the two-percent range.

The Permission Pass

There are some mandatory elements that should be included in this email. You should explain the existing relationship, tell recipients you would like to now communicate with them via email, and give them a clear opportunity to opt out.

Many e-commerce marketers will also include a special offer in the permission pass email.

I mentioned that I wanted to use a publisher as an example. I’m a former subscriber of its publication. Its permission pass email used the simple but strong subject line “[Publication] Requests Your Permission.” That’s a great start. As the recipient I immediately recognized the publication.

The publisher’s email was all text, although it used HTML-lite and the message was easy to read and had some style. I give the message negative points for not including any graphics such, as the publication’s logo.

The first paragraph got right to the point. “As a former [Publication] reader, we respect your time and value your business. Occasionally we would like to send you email communications containing special offers & exclusive invitations from [Publisher].”

The rest of the email included a chance to opt out and a toll-free number to contact customer service. The online marketing manager signed it. I found it refreshing to receive an email signed by a person.

The First Regular Email

It is likely that some recipients did not open and read the initial permission pass. A mistake that many marketers make is to add all the names to their regular sending schedule. Those who did not read the message may wonder why they now receive newsletters and other offers.

Our publisher did not make this mistake. Above the header, in small type, its first email said: “You received this email because you are signed up to receive information from [Publication].” And, the subject line also alluded to my relationship: “Welcome Back Rate for Former [Publication] Subscribers—26 issues for $20!”

Since I’m an expired subscriber, it makes sense to try to convince me to re-subscribe. The message was in HTML, included prominent placement of a sample magazine cover, and had two calls-to-action in red to “Try 4 Risk Free Issues Now.”

The Next Six Emails

I received about two emails a week from our publisher. Each one has information above the header in small type about why I am receiving their communications.

Here’s a summary of the emails received with the subject line and comments:

1. Welcome Back Rate for Former [Publication] Subscribers—just $.77 an issue. The email was sticking to the company’s mission to get me to re-subscribe. The creative was different from my first email’s.
2. 2008 Leadership Conference Invitation. This was a third-party email from one of the company’s advertisers. At the top, the message in small type explained: “You received this email because you are signed up for special offers from [Publication] advertisers.” I was surprised that I was receiving other offers, and went back to review the initial language in the permission pass. It did mention special offers and exclusive invitations. I think the language could have been clearer, though.
3. Welcome Back to [Publication]! Get 4 Free Trial Issues. The creative was the same as my first email’s; only the subject line had been slightly tweaked.
4. “Welcome Back Rate for Former [Publication] Subscribers—26 issues for $20!” The creative was the same as email 2, with subject line changes.
5. GREENER GADGETS CONFERENCE—February 1st 2008, New York City. This was another third-party advertising email. The use of caps in the subject line is not a best practice.
6. Special offer for former [Publication] subscribers: 4 Risk-Free Issues. This email featured a new creative presentation, and the salutation in the email was personalized with my first and last name.

All in all, our publisher did a good job with the permission pass and subsequent emails. I liked the use of varied creative presentations and small changes to the subject line for the main offer. I would have preferred a clearer explanation that I would receive advertising emails. My only other comment is that the publisher cross-promote its site, e-newsletters, books, and other offerings rather than just focusing on re-subscription.

Ask the Expert: How can establishing a good reputation with ISPs improve e-mail deliverability?

ask the expert - Most Internet service providers have systems in place to scan incoming messages individually for viruses and spam. The messages are then checked against black lists and evaluated with other attributes. Reputation is a newer criterion that ISPs are using to evaluate mail. A sender’s reputation is determined when ISPs request the sender’s reputation score from a central, third-party reputation database.While reputation management can decrease the amount of spam received by ISPs, it also means that senders must be able to implement a variety of specific sending rules to comply with each ISP’s requirements and be able to facilitate header markups to incorporate third-party accreditation solutions.

Some e-mail solutions readily accept new standards to adapt easily to changing ISP sending environments. Less flexible solutions make it more difficult to comply with ISP requirements, which can inadvertently damage a sender’s reputation if the company is using poor or unchecked sending practices.

Complying with individual ISP “throttling” requirements—the speed and volume at which an ISP will accept your e-mail—is a key factor in maintaining a good reputation. As a marketer, you should know if your e-mail platform (either in-house or through an e-mail service provider) allows control over settings such as total outbound connections, total message volume and volume ramping, and gives senders a way to match their sending practices to each ISP’s requirements, which change on a regular basis.

Senders should also be aware that a vast database of reputation data based on the global sending practices of thousands of companies was collected recently and published by anti-spam and accreditation vendors. This report provides ISPs with another way to filter e-mail by producing a “gray list” of senders. ISPs will make judgment calls based on the sending history published on this report to determine whether to send or block e-mail from unknown gray-listed senders.

Establishing a good reputation with ISPs is vital to deliverability. To protect your company’s reputation, consider doing the following:

1. Use throttling to insure that you are not over burdening ISPs by sending too many messages too fast. If you use an ESP, make sure they provide you with the reporting to understand exactly how each ISP treats your mail.
2. Contract with a third-party accreditation service that certifies sender policies and practices and makes those certified lists available to the ISPs.
3. Depending on the type or volume of mail you are sending, establishing an in-house ISP relations team can help ensure that your mailing practices and reporting are contributing to maintaining a good reputation and relationship with each ISP.

Retailers Ready For Narrower Opt-out Windows

mediapost.com - THERE’S NO SERIOUS TALK OF revising the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, but one of the constant fears is that Congress will narrow the window during which companies must honor opt-outs. The buzz has been that lawmakers will reduce the current window of 10 business days (14 days) down to three days. While I’ve heard several marketers fret about that possibility, the Email Experience Council’s latest research indicates that most marketers will be able to comply with that narrower window should it be enacted.

We’ll soon be releasing the Retail Email Unsubscribe Benchmark Study, which looks at the opt-out practices of 94 of the top online retailers, including how long it takes them to honor opt-outs. We found that 86% honored opt-out requests within three days, with many of those retailers honoring the requests immediately, as evidenced by the high proportion of retailers that sent no more emails after receiving the request. Another 4% honored opt-outs within seven days, and another 3% within the CAN-SPAM-mandated 14 days. The remaining 4% either didn’t honor opt-outs in time or didn’t honor them at all because of technical failures.

The EEC is also currently running a one-question survey on its homepage that asks marketers how long they need in order to honor opt-outs. Currently 82% of respondents have indicated that they can honor opt-outs within three days, roughly in line with our study results.

The results of both the study and the ongoing survey are proof of how the email marketing industry has matured in the wake of the CAN-SPAM Act in terms of technical ability. It’s surely also a sign of the need to respect consumers’ inboxes or face spam complaints and deliverability problems. For those retailers and other businesses that take longer than three days to honor unsubscribes, this should be a wakeup call to tighten up your processes to keep up with the rising standards in the industry.

Of course, while retailers excelled at quick unsubscribes, there were a few areas where their opt-out processes were lacking, like providing consumers with alternatives to actually unsubscribing. For more on that and much more, check out the study when it’s released in a week or two. Or better yet, register for the EEC’s Email Evolution Conference in San Diego next month, as every attendee will get a copy of the report for free. Hope to see you there.

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