A few good welcome emails

email-marketing-reports – When someone signs up to your email program, there are four increasingly advanced ways to treat them:

1. Add them to your list and let them wait for the next email scheduled to go out

The technical term for this is “a wasted opportunity.” By not extending any kind of email welcome, you’re ignoring them at the very moment they are most engaged and positively disposed toward you.

And let’s hope they didn’t sign-up the day after your monthly newsletter went out. Otherwise by the time they get their first email from you, they might have forgotten they ever subscribed.

Now they think you’re a spammer. Great.

2. Send them a welcome email and then add them to your standard email marketing program

Here you need to adhere to some basic best practices for welcome emails. Even those using value-priced services and software should be able to send this kind of welcome message.

Miranda has some good and bad examples for you here.

3. Send them a series of “welcome” emails tuned to the needs of new subscribers, then eventually shift them across into your mainstream email marketing program

Chad White talked about this “onboarding principle” last August.

A series of welcome messages guides the newcomer into your program, priming them for the “real thing,” and making the most of the greater level of interest in your brand/business generally shown by new subscribers.

In addition, you get to learn more about the recipient based on their responses to these welcome messages. That information can feed into your main program to ensure they get relevant emails.

Adam Covati provides a good example in this analysis of the early messages in the Netflix email marketing program.

And his colleague DJ Waldow describes how one company overdid the welcome, risking an end to the email relationship before it has a chance to gain traction.

4. Send them a stream of welcome emails, customized according to the source of the signup and what you know about them. Then eventually move them into your wider program, depending on how they respond to your initial messages

If you can use segmentation with your main emails, then why not with your welcome messages?

You don’t have to wait to segment based on responses to previous emails. You can use the information you get at signup or the information you already have about the prospect/customer.

At the very least, you should know where they signed up. So you can add nice touches like “thanks for visiting our booth at the ACME Tradeshow” to your welcome.

And if the new subscriber has expressed clear content preferences, make sure you respect them. Dylan Boyd reveals the frustrations induced when you don’t.

When To Write Long Emails

mediapost.com – LONG COPY HAS BEEN THE stock-in-trade of advertising writers since Gutenberg first made type move. Like top salespeople, writers know that given a chance to flex their verbal muscles, they can mesmerize their prospects and close many a deal. “The more you tell, the more you sell” was a mantra of the direct marketers of yore.

Email marketing tends to be focused on the top 300 pixels, giving little play to a longer message. We all know why — attention spans today are so short, we feel we have to hit the consumer with a short, sharp shock in order to be noticed, never mind read.

That being said, there are still times when longer emails can outperform short ones, especially when you want to secure the understanding, engagement and loyalty of customers with your emails.

Making a complex or expensive sale. When you are promoting a high-end or very technical product or service, follow up your riveting headline or offer with a story that explains the product’s attributes and advantages. Draw in the prospect with problem-solving propositions. Present persuasive facts about your offering in sufficient detail to overcome objections. Be sure to keep your brand positioning in mind as you write.

Sample applications: luxury goods, expensive travel packages, high-end technology. Why? Long copy can help justify higher prices and convincingly point up superior differences in raw materials, manufacturing, service, user experience or longevity.

Building relationships. Email is a letter written from one human being to another. Keep this in mind when addressing fans and customers who have displayed an interest in your organization. Woo them with friendly email communications, which they will read when they have the time, because they like you and want to know your news.

Sample applications: membership communities, entertainment products, cause marketing. Once they have opted in, these highly aligned consumers will enjoy getting to know you and will become more informed and engaged with every newsy communication you send. You can write quite extensive emails to them, such as Christopher Kimball’s Letter from Vermont — it’s chatty, it’s personal, and it leads the reader seamlessly from his latest hometown experiences back to the kitchens of Cook’s Illustrated. Hook, line and sinker, and his readers love it.

Introducing new concepts. Sometimes urgency has to take a back seat to education in email marketing. Bearing in mind that your target audience probably doesn’t have time to read every email you send, it’s a good practice to repeat your message and explain your benefits more than once. If you are introducing a product or service whose full attributes won’t be intuitively grasped by a casual reader, or would require an extraordinary commitment to buy in to, spend time telling them about it. It might require a series of emails to cover the subject adequately and create the conversion response you seek. Be sure that customers know where to find any information they might have missed along the line by providing contextual links to your Web site in each email.

Sample applications: product and service innovations, new financial or investment offerings, or products with a long term of use, such as a retirement community. Long copy can help your target audience better understand your offering, and give them a chance to picture themselves being transformed by it.

Reselling your product. What better way to get a customer to buy more of a product than by demonstrating new ways to use it? Next time you plan to send a coupon by email, spend some time firing up the readers’ imaginations with alternative uses as well.

Sample applications: consumer products from avocadoes to laundry detergent can benefit from (reasonably) long copy emails. Be inventive, invite engagement, walk a mile in the consumer’s shoes and show you care about making their life better.

In email as in other forms of marketing, let your approach fit the product and the audience, and support your goals. You can leverage email effectively to build brands, change minds, and sell more, both long-term and in the moment.

Can Google Analytics help my e-mail marketing?

btobonline – Answer: Marketing professionals know that careful, accurate and constant campaign tracking and analysis are just as important as delivery itself. Integrating Google Analytics into your e-mail marketing is an easy—and free—way to make this possible.Google Analytics has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and Web site owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. It is a robust Web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.

You can learn where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, e-mails, blogs or affiliates. And you’ll know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor e-mail marketing campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign, sending carefully targeted, relevant messages.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant Web site files, then add parameters to URLs in each e-mail marketing message, denoting which visitors arrive as a result of each e-mail marketing campaign.

Once an e-mail campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting Web site traffic, telling you which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your Web site, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. You can then adjust your campaign variables to improve results over time.

Campaign managers can also drill down using the Segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce companies have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages. They can design messages to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on the Web site even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most people exit. And it’s free.

3 themes shaping behavioral targeting

imediaconnection – As marketers test BT waters, they will need to come to grips with a still-evolving landscape and integrate some of the key lessons of the past 10 years.

The tantalizing promise of behavioral targeting — delivering ads precisely to the right internet users at the right time based on their past web behavior — has been touted for nearly a decade. While advertisers have been relatively slow to adopt BT as a mainstream marketing method, there are indications that this technology is gaining traction and may even be reaching a tipping point. A recent eMarketer report projected that advertisers will spend $1 billion on behaviorally targeted ads in 2008 and upwards of $3.8 billion on them by 2011. As marketers, and brand marketers in particular, start to test these waters, they will need to quickly come to grips with a still-evolving landscape and integrate some of the key lessons of the past 10 years.

Ad networks and publishers that offer BT develop audience segments based on common content consumption patterns (say “Sports Enthusiasts” who consume a threshold level of sports pages in a certain time period), then use information collected on individuals’ web browsing to categorize users in those segments. BT providers then sell advertisers media buys that deliver ads directly to segments likely to be influenced by them.

This approach requires a shift in thinking for many marketers. BT is about buying relevant audiences, not relevant context. If a user’s consumption of auto content suggests that he is in the market for a car, behavioral targeting offers automotive advertisers a way to reach that user with a relevant message when that user is not consuming auto content.

Benefits
The benefits of BT can be significant, especially in categories like automotive, travel and pharmaceuticals in which certain predictable patterns of online content consumption strongly suggests immediate interest in buying something:

• Behavioral targeting can make acquisition marketing easy and powerful by generating “lists” of good prospects that can be mined efficiently and anonymously.
• Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography or demographics.
• Audience-based targeting enables advertisers to reach audiences of interest beyond limited, and often expensive, contextually relevant inventory, thereby increasing frequency and the potential for cost efficiency.

Shortcomings
While the benefits of behavioral targeting can be impressive, marketers must evaluate whether or not BT is a good fit. Limitations of BT include these:

• BT is really good at generating small lists of buy-now prospects, but not so good at achieving mass levels of reach or addressing and developing consumers who are “up the funnel” from the immediate point of purchase.
• The lack of standard segment definitions across BT providers puts the burden on advertisers to cobble together disparate groups in an attempt to replicate its real target, with limited ability to plan and view a cohesive whole.
• For the most part those offering behavioral targeting have yet to define an application for marketing “upstream” — in the areas of awareness building and preference shaping that account for the bulk of media spending by large, sophisticated brand marketers.
• The direct response metrics typically used to measure and manage behaviorally targeted campaign effectiveness may not be relevant to brand marketers.

Three themes for the future
As more and more marketers turn to the web to help them achieve their branding objectives, the following three themes are likely to shape the structure of the industry and new product innovation:

1. Transparency
When assessing the validity of any behavioral target classification, it is essential for the marketer to understand the assumptions used to define the target. All too often the assumptions used are not particularly transparent and are shrouded in “black box” mystery. This is particularly an issue as firms work to standardize segment definitions in an attempt to increase their potential reach. Is someone who has visited auto content once in 45 days really an “Auto Enthusiast”? Increasingly savvy buyers will demand more transparency around qualifying behavior.

2. Privacy Protection
A global concern often associated with behavioral targeting is whether a user’s privacy is compromised in the process. The simple answer is no. Behavioral targeting only tracks where an individual has been online; it does not identify the individual through any personal data such as name, address or email.

However, consumers increasingly are concerned that personally identifiable information is mingled with non-personally identifiable information, which they fear might be used to discriminate against them at some point in the future. Groups representing a small handful of privacy-concerned consumers have pressured the FTC to make all cookies opt-in rather than opt-out, a radical approach that would bring the entire internet advertising industry to its knees. Unless the industry quickly develops privacy protocols that are effective, the government is likely to step in with solutions of its own.

3. Predicting Behavior vs. Reacting to It
Rather than picking off individuals who have “tripped a trigger” indicating they are in the market for something and attempting to influence their decision at or close to the point of purchase, the next generation of targeting will focus on helping marketers “fill the funnel” with more of the right people before they register interest.

One such approach is psychographic targeting. Marketers have long known that psychographic characteristics correlate strongly with brand affinity and buyer behavior, but they have had no way of targeting them in media. Psychographic targeting would enable marketers in highly competitive categories, where psychographic traits such as spontaneity, pragmatism and assertiveness spell the difference between brand devotees and the merely indifferent, to effectively turn up the volume against their most important consumers.

Without question, it’s an exciting time to be in the media and advertising business. Today, the leading behavioral targeting firms are effective list generators for direct response advertisers. But as brand dollars follow mass audiences online, behavioral targeting is destined to become a more important tool for marketers looking to efficiently and effectively reach their target audiences. Those firms that are able to define relevant segments for brand advertisers with mass reach will succeed.

How to Maximize One-Day Shopping Events With 3 Easy Steps & Copywriting Tips

marketing sherpa – SUMMARY:  Special one-day offers are a staple for retailers, but many merchants don’t get the most out of their websites and email lists on those shopping days. See how a eretailer/manufacturer tested three offers and watched revenue jump 102% and conversions 29% for a Cyber Monday rollout.

CHALLENGE: Jessica Koster, Director, Ecommerce Marketing, Danskin, and her team were unhappy with their one-day online sales results heading into the year-end holidays. They wanted to map out a strategy to cash in on a really big sales day — specifically Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving.“We knew we could improve our copywriting for the site, while making the experience more targeted and personalized,” Koster says. “We were looking to learn…See rest of the article at Marketing Sherpa >>

2 email strategies most marketers forget

imediaconnection.com – Welcome and transactional emails both provide great opportunities for engaging with potential customers but are greatly underutilized.

Often when I’m working with clients, they just want to focus on their marketing messages or newsletters and whether or not they are getting good delivery or open rates. The problem is that no matter how great your newsletter might be, you could be missing out on another great opportunity to interact with your customers.

In my experience, the two most overlooked engagement opportunities are welcome and transactional messages. Both of these message types are highly underutilized by most marketers as a way to engage their customers.

First and foremost, the welcome message should be used to build off the initial engagement you created with the recipients when they first signed up to receive future campaigns. Many senders just send a text welcome message or a simple opt-in confirmation. There is so much more you can do with a welcome message, and the opportunity should not be wasted.

Welcome emails
Here are some tips for creating an effective welcome message template:

• Don’t be afraid to send an HTML message. A welcome message that looks like future mailings will let users know what to expect.
• Give recipients a sneak peak of the type of content they will be receiving. If you have a weekly newsletter, put one article in your welcome message from the week before to show the benefits of the information they will be receiving from you.
• Ask those who have opted in to add you to their address books. The welcome message provides the best opportunity for interested people to add your sending address to their address books, since you know they are currently engaged with your company.
• Thank the recipient for subscribing. Recipients have just done you a favor by signing up for your campaigns — remember that and tell them you appreciate their trust in you and their future business. People get a lot of email in their inboxes, and you want them to know they are special and a vital part of your business.
• Give those receiving your email an easy way to unsubscribe. By giving them an example of what the messages will contain, they might realize that it was not what they expected. Let them go now before sending multiple messages to them and eventually having them mark your message as SPAM. It is better to have them formally unsubscribe from your list right away then have them mark you as SPAM later.
• Give people an incentive to take further action now. If you want them to buy something, offer them a discount on their first purchase with a coupon code in their welcome message. They might have been thinking about eventually purchasing something from you, which is why they signed up for your messages in the first place. By giving them a little nudge, they might make the purchase sooner rather then later.

Transactional emails
The other major opportunity that’s often forgotten is the receipt or order confirmation message. While it is true that CAN-SPAM prevents these emails from being full-blown marketing messages, there can be some promotional aspects to them.

Some of the best examples of these messages usually come from the travel industry. It is a common occurrence to receive an email from an airline confirming a flight purchase, which provides links to rent a car, find a hotel or any number of other options.

These companies are always looking for opportunities to up-sell their customers. They have realized the importance of the order confirmation message and have used this to their advantage.

So what is the right amount of marketing in one of these messages? I usually suggest to my clients that if they lead with the transactional message and then add 30 to 40 percent of marketing messages, they should be OK. That way the main reason for the message is still intact, from the customer perspective. On a personal note, I appreciate these types of messages when they’re done properly.

Let’s consider these two message types in the offline space for a minute. I will use an example that happened to me just last week, when I took my truck in for some transmission work. When I went to the local shop that was referred to me, I not only received great customer service, but I was told by the shop workers exactly what to expect.

Now if the shop’s “welcome message” also included an upsell, I might have known that I could have also had my oil changed while my car was there, which is something I needed done. Furthermore, if someone had also offered me a discount on that oil change as a first-time customer, there would have been no question that I would have taken the shop up on that offer, right there on the spot.

When I was paying for the work that had been done, the shop had another opportunity to get repeat business from me. If on the receipt it was explained to me that if I brought in another car for any work within one month I would get a 10 percent discount, there is a good chance I would have brought in my wife’s car sooner, rather than later, if it needed some work.

So remember: Email is a lot like life. When you have someone engaged — even if it’s only for a short time — you need to take advantage of it. Don’t waste any opportunity to reach out to your customers and explain your worth at every chance you have. Good luck and happy sending.

Why are our targeted weekly e-mails getting little response?

Ask the Expert – When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel. Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail.

Assuming your target audience, timing and channel are right, it’s time to step back and take a closer look at your message and its relevancy. What about your personalization capabilities? If you’re relying on customer profiles and Web behavior alone, it’s time to expand your approach and take into account all customer interaction: Have you met face to face at a trade show? Spoken on the phone? Engaged in preliminary sales discussions?

Often these data are stored in two different locations. Customer profiles are housed within your Web and e-mail system, and real-world customer interactions are stored in the sales force automation (SFA), or customer relationship management (CRM) system or a lead management database. What you need is an enterprise marketing platform that will link the two. Adding this technological infrastructure links online data accumulated through Web and e-mail tracking with offline data stored in SFA/CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to automate the communication process.

There are a number of platforms out there, however the best solution will manage and gather data as well as support more personalized, tightly coordinated communications across multiples channels, not just e-mail. This technology should be able to handle sophisticated marketing automation work flows—especially those supporting highly personalized, large volume outbound communications, and should integrate with back-end transactional solutions.

At the same time, the technology should continuously and automatically monitor response rates and digital body language to provide you and your sales staff with up-to-the-minute details on campaign performance. With A/B testing and measurable results, you’ll be able to devise more targeted, impactful campaigns while integrating e-mail with new and existing communications channels to increase customer loyalty and drive sales—a far cry from the soulless batch-and-blast campaigns flooding your customers’ inboxes.

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.”