09 June 2005
Life After Spam
Things looked pretty gloomy for e-mail marketing when lawmakers, regulators and Internet service providers took steps several years ago to ban the most abusive practices of spam marketers. Online merchants worried that the anti-spam measures would limit the effectiveness of their e-mail marketing campaigns. Indeed, many retailers found their messages diverted into junk mail boxes simply because they used graphics or coding that triggered a red flag.
Over the same time period, the volume of e-mail messages exploded. EMarketer Inc. estimates e-mail volume in the U.S. will hit 2.1 trillion this year, up from 1.2 trillion in 2001. That increases the chances that customers weary of e-mail inboxes gorged with messages will send the retailer’s e-mail message straight to the trash bin.
More sophistication
But a funny thing happened on the way to e-mail marketing’s funeral: E-mail marketing refused to die. And today, with retailers adopting more sophisticated approaches to e-mail marketing—and possessing a better understanding of how they should use e-mail—e-mail has become a valuable weapon in marketers’ arsenal.
“If you’re in the e-commerce business, you have two things to really drive your sales—search, which is the ability to get somebody to come to your web site for the first time, and e-mail, which gets them to repeat,” says Arthur Sweetser, vice president of professional services and marketing for e-mail marketing company e-Dialog.
Getting to this point in understanding how to use e-mail wasn’t easy. In fact, it required a change of mindset by marketers—one that required sending what the customer wanted and not what the retailer wanted. Today at American Eagle Outfitters, for instance, e-mail messages are tailored to appeal to different customer groups, says David L. Brumback, director of operations at AE Direct. “It’s not about what I want to talk about so much as it is about what the customer wants to hear,” he says. “That requires understanding the data I have about that customer to make what I say more relevant.”
The industry still faces plenty of obstacles, but e-mail still can be an effective marketing tool, even in the post-CAN-Spam world. A recent Jupiter Research survey found that 10% of 2,229 online consumers reported they opened a promotional e-mail and made a purchase online immediately. Additionally, 17% said they opened a promotional e-mail and later made an online purchase as a result.
Everybody’s concerned
But the resistance hasn’t evaporated. The Jupiter Research survey also found that 73% of consumers have deleted promotional e-mails without opening them and 42% unsubscribed to e-mail newsletters in the past 12 months.
In today’s e-mail environment, to run a successful e-mail marketing campaign, online merchants need to build relationships and trust with their customers, experts say. “Everybody is concerned about e-mail—whether or not it’s going to survive because of spam, because of filters, because of all that,” says Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive. “But it comes down to basic principles, which is a matter of getting your target to trust you.”
To build trust, merchants need to gather as much information as possible about customers so they can personalize messages. “It’s all about relevancy and how we develop relevancy,” Sweetser says.
That’s the approach that American Eagle takes as its e-mail strategy has become more sophisticated, Brumback says. “When we started doing this five years ago, the vast majority buying online were male,” Brumback says. “Today, the vast majority is female. All of that information that comes with direct marketing changes how you talk to people.”
In fact, appealing specifically to what the customer wants is a key to e-mail marketing success, marketers say. “E-mail is about learning, it’s not a single event,” says David Baker, vice president of e-mail marketing and analytic solutions for agency.com. “The value of e-mail is learning the response patterns of your customers.”
Following the path
Tracking the path of e-mail messages can give Internet retailers deep insight into their customers, Baker says. That information can include which ISP the consumer uses, which links the consumer selected, and which products the customer bought, he says.
One of the best ways to gain access to that customer information is through an opt-in form, in which a consumer signs up to receive information from the merchant. Some e-mail marketers recommend double-opt-ins, a process in which a consumer registers at a retailer’s site and then responds to an e-mail from the retailer asking the customer to verify the opt-in.
“Numbers go up and down in terms of whether people open your e-mail, whether they’re going to act on anything that you send to them, so one factor in all of this is making sure they really want to receive your e-mail,” Carr says. “Companies that do double opt-ins have higher open rates, higher click-through rates and higher deliverability.”
What’s more, if retailers only offer opt-out marketing, they’ll run into problems with spam filters and other anti-spam measures, says Ziv Yaar, director of strategies for Molecular.com. “It’s an opt-in world these days,” he says.
Yaar says the best time for a merchant to get opt-in permission is at the time the customer makes a purchase. “At that point, they’ve made an investment in the product and they’re really a retention customer,” he says.
Another way to forge ties with consumers is through e-mail newsletters, Carr says. “We communicate to our clients to be generous with information rather than sending their prospects a weekly ad for their services,” he says. “They’ve got to think about their targets and what they’re concerned about, then tailor newsletters and e-mails that are going to enrich their lives.”
It’s about brevity
To make it more likely that consumers will open an e-mail, retailers should display their name, rather than their address, in the From field of the e-mail message, says Mike Adams, president and CEO, Arial Software, an e-mail software company. “The number-one way a customer is going to trust you from day one is looking at the From name in the e-mail,” he says. “They recognize that, yes, they ordered something from you, you’re a trusted company.”
The body of the e-mail message also affects whether the consumer acts on the message. “E-mail is about brevity,” Baker says, adding that people make a decision on e-mail in about three seconds. “I can’t tell you exactly what content works and what doesn’t. But if the intent of the message is promotional and you can’t push that impression in three to five seconds, you’re failing.”
A recent Arial survey found that by an eight-to-one ratio, customers preferred a table of contents with a web link to a text message. “They don’t want the e-mail to be full of content, where they have to scroll down,” Adams says. “That finding surprised me because a couple of years ago it was about 50-50.”
Adams attributes the change in attitudes to the heavy volume of e-mail consumers have to contend with. “People have such a short amount of time to spend on each e-mail,” he says. “If it’s not right there in the preview pane, they’re going to trash it.”
What a retailer puts in the subject line of an e-mail also can make a difference. “The subject line is extremely important, and it will continue to be,” Carr says. “Make sure it’s consistent, make sure it’s informative so they know what you’re sending.”
Prominently displaying information about opt-out lists and other CAN-Spam requirements on web sites also can help online merchants win the trust of their customers, Carr says. “When a user sees all this information, sees that you’re making your best effort to protect them, they’re more likely to trust you,” he says. “When they trust you, they’re going to be more open and respond.”
The importance of frequency
Starting off messages with a statement that the customer requested e-mail updates also can increase the effectiveness of the message, Yaar says. “We’ve seen some fairly substantial—high single to low double-digit—increases in click-throughs when you include sentences like ‘you’ve requested that we inform you once a week about the following things.’”
Placing instructions in large print on how to unsubscribe to a newsletter also can make consumers more comfortable with an e-retailer, Yaar says. “You are sending your customer the implicit message that we understand you may not want this information so we’re going to make it easy for you to remove yourself.”
The frequency of e-mail also can make or break a campaign. Carr counsels merchants to send e-mails only once a month or every few weeks, unless they have something really powerful to offer consumers, for example, coupons or a link to a daily news site. Indeed, more frequent mailings could drive consumers away because they will be perceived as junk mail.
Still there are customers who want to get daily e-mail updates, Sweetser says. “There’s a loyal customer base that wants to get their deal of the day,” he says. “That type of frequency is really dependent on the audience.”
For the retailers e-Dialog works with, customers select the frequency via a permission-based pop-up box on a weekly or monthly newsletter, Sweetser says.
Once retailers establish a relationship with customers via e-mail, they still face another challenge: getting through the spam filters of ISPs. Getting past those barriers is a combination of science and art, Sweetser says. E-Dialog does spam reviews of clients’ e-mail campaigns to head off problems. “Content with the word ‘free’ capitalized and bolded twelve times is just screaming to be filtered and put into bulk mail,” he says.
e-Dialog , like other e-mail marketers, has mailboxes with the major ISPs and checks them daily to see whether clients’ e-mails were delivered, he adds.
Despite all the obstacles, e-mail marketing will continue to be an important tool for online retailers, observers say. For one thing, it’s cheaper than other types of advertising—about a penny per name compared with 50 cents to $1 per piece of direct mail or catalogs.
It also gives online retailers the ability to change messages on short notice, as opposed to print and other ad campaigns where changes take weeks or even months.
Strategy focus
It appears that more online retailers are beginning to take the advice of e-mail marketers, Sweetser says. “Clients are more strategy focused,” he says. “It’s not about just getting it out the door, but who are we sending it to, what are we trying to learn, what deeper insight are we trying to get, and then applying that.”
As for now, online retailer’s heavy reliance on e-mail marketing continues.
In fact, e-mail marketing has the most value as a retention tool, Yaar says. The use of e-mail to acquire customers is losing effectiveness—as much as a 20% to 30% drop—as search engine optimization increases, Yaar says. “But as a retention tool, e-mail is still very, very powerful, because it can draw customers back to sites,” he says.
Over the same time period, the volume of e-mail messages exploded. EMarketer Inc. estimates e-mail volume in the U.S. will hit 2.1 trillion this year, up from 1.2 trillion in 2001. That increases the chances that customers weary of e-mail inboxes gorged with messages will send the retailer’s e-mail message straight to the trash bin.
More sophistication
But a funny thing happened on the way to e-mail marketing’s funeral: E-mail marketing refused to die. And today, with retailers adopting more sophisticated approaches to e-mail marketing—and possessing a better understanding of how they should use e-mail—e-mail has become a valuable weapon in marketers’ arsenal.
“If you’re in the e-commerce business, you have two things to really drive your sales—search, which is the ability to get somebody to come to your web site for the first time, and e-mail, which gets them to repeat,” says Arthur Sweetser, vice president of professional services and marketing for e-mail marketing company e-Dialog.
Getting to this point in understanding how to use e-mail wasn’t easy. In fact, it required a change of mindset by marketers—one that required sending what the customer wanted and not what the retailer wanted. Today at American Eagle Outfitters, for instance, e-mail messages are tailored to appeal to different customer groups, says David L. Brumback, director of operations at AE Direct. “It’s not about what I want to talk about so much as it is about what the customer wants to hear,” he says. “That requires understanding the data I have about that customer to make what I say more relevant.”
The industry still faces plenty of obstacles, but e-mail still can be an effective marketing tool, even in the post-CAN-Spam world. A recent Jupiter Research survey found that 10% of 2,229 online consumers reported they opened a promotional e-mail and made a purchase online immediately. Additionally, 17% said they opened a promotional e-mail and later made an online purchase as a result.
Everybody’s concerned
But the resistance hasn’t evaporated. The Jupiter Research survey also found that 73% of consumers have deleted promotional e-mails without opening them and 42% unsubscribed to e-mail newsletters in the past 12 months.
In today’s e-mail environment, to run a successful e-mail marketing campaign, online merchants need to build relationships and trust with their customers, experts say. “Everybody is concerned about e-mail—whether or not it’s going to survive because of spam, because of filters, because of all that,” says Reid Carr, president of Red Door Interactive. “But it comes down to basic principles, which is a matter of getting your target to trust you.”
To build trust, merchants need to gather as much information as possible about customers so they can personalize messages. “It’s all about relevancy and how we develop relevancy,” Sweetser says.
That’s the approach that American Eagle takes as its e-mail strategy has become more sophisticated, Brumback says. “When we started doing this five years ago, the vast majority buying online were male,” Brumback says. “Today, the vast majority is female. All of that information that comes with direct marketing changes how you talk to people.”
In fact, appealing specifically to what the customer wants is a key to e-mail marketing success, marketers say. “E-mail is about learning, it’s not a single event,” says David Baker, vice president of e-mail marketing and analytic solutions for agency.com. “The value of e-mail is learning the response patterns of your customers.”
Following the path
Tracking the path of e-mail messages can give Internet retailers deep insight into their customers, Baker says. That information can include which ISP the consumer uses, which links the consumer selected, and which products the customer bought, he says.
One of the best ways to gain access to that customer information is through an opt-in form, in which a consumer signs up to receive information from the merchant. Some e-mail marketers recommend double-opt-ins, a process in which a consumer registers at a retailer’s site and then responds to an e-mail from the retailer asking the customer to verify the opt-in.
“Numbers go up and down in terms of whether people open your e-mail, whether they’re going to act on anything that you send to them, so one factor in all of this is making sure they really want to receive your e-mail,” Carr says. “Companies that do double opt-ins have higher open rates, higher click-through rates and higher deliverability.”
What’s more, if retailers only offer opt-out marketing, they’ll run into problems with spam filters and other anti-spam measures, says Ziv Yaar, director of strategies for Molecular.com. “It’s an opt-in world these days,” he says.
Yaar says the best time for a merchant to get opt-in permission is at the time the customer makes a purchase. “At that point, they’ve made an investment in the product and they’re really a retention customer,” he says.
Another way to forge ties with consumers is through e-mail newsletters, Carr says. “We communicate to our clients to be generous with information rather than sending their prospects a weekly ad for their services,” he says. “They’ve got to think about their targets and what they’re concerned about, then tailor newsletters and e-mails that are going to enrich their lives.”
It’s about brevity
To make it more likely that consumers will open an e-mail, retailers should display their name, rather than their address, in the From field of the e-mail message, says Mike Adams, president and CEO, Arial Software, an e-mail software company. “The number-one way a customer is going to trust you from day one is looking at the From name in the e-mail,” he says. “They recognize that, yes, they ordered something from you, you’re a trusted company.”
The body of the e-mail message also affects whether the consumer acts on the message. “E-mail is about brevity,” Baker says, adding that people make a decision on e-mail in about three seconds. “I can’t tell you exactly what content works and what doesn’t. But if the intent of the message is promotional and you can’t push that impression in three to five seconds, you’re failing.”
A recent Arial survey found that by an eight-to-one ratio, customers preferred a table of contents with a web link to a text message. “They don’t want the e-mail to be full of content, where they have to scroll down,” Adams says. “That finding surprised me because a couple of years ago it was about 50-50.”
Adams attributes the change in attitudes to the heavy volume of e-mail consumers have to contend with. “People have such a short amount of time to spend on each e-mail,” he says. “If it’s not right there in the preview pane, they’re going to trash it.”
What a retailer puts in the subject line of an e-mail also can make a difference. “The subject line is extremely important, and it will continue to be,” Carr says. “Make sure it’s consistent, make sure it’s informative so they know what you’re sending.”
Prominently displaying information about opt-out lists and other CAN-Spam requirements on web sites also can help online merchants win the trust of their customers, Carr says. “When a user sees all this information, sees that you’re making your best effort to protect them, they’re more likely to trust you,” he says. “When they trust you, they’re going to be more open and respond.”
The importance of frequency
Starting off messages with a statement that the customer requested e-mail updates also can increase the effectiveness of the message, Yaar says. “We’ve seen some fairly substantial—high single to low double-digit—increases in click-throughs when you include sentences like ‘you’ve requested that we inform you once a week about the following things.’”
Placing instructions in large print on how to unsubscribe to a newsletter also can make consumers more comfortable with an e-retailer, Yaar says. “You are sending your customer the implicit message that we understand you may not want this information so we’re going to make it easy for you to remove yourself.”
The frequency of e-mail also can make or break a campaign. Carr counsels merchants to send e-mails only once a month or every few weeks, unless they have something really powerful to offer consumers, for example, coupons or a link to a daily news site. Indeed, more frequent mailings could drive consumers away because they will be perceived as junk mail.
Still there are customers who want to get daily e-mail updates, Sweetser says. “There’s a loyal customer base that wants to get their deal of the day,” he says. “That type of frequency is really dependent on the audience.”
For the retailers e-Dialog works with, customers select the frequency via a permission-based pop-up box on a weekly or monthly newsletter, Sweetser says.
Once retailers establish a relationship with customers via e-mail, they still face another challenge: getting through the spam filters of ISPs. Getting past those barriers is a combination of science and art, Sweetser says. E-Dialog does spam reviews of clients’ e-mail campaigns to head off problems. “Content with the word ‘free’ capitalized and bolded twelve times is just screaming to be filtered and put into bulk mail,” he says.
e-Dialog , like other e-mail marketers, has mailboxes with the major ISPs and checks them daily to see whether clients’ e-mails were delivered, he adds.
Despite all the obstacles, e-mail marketing will continue to be an important tool for online retailers, observers say. For one thing, it’s cheaper than other types of advertising—about a penny per name compared with 50 cents to $1 per piece of direct mail or catalogs.
It also gives online retailers the ability to change messages on short notice, as opposed to print and other ad campaigns where changes take weeks or even months.
Strategy focus
It appears that more online retailers are beginning to take the advice of e-mail marketers, Sweetser says. “Clients are more strategy focused,” he says. “It’s not about just getting it out the door, but who are we sending it to, what are we trying to learn, what deeper insight are we trying to get, and then applying that.”
As for now, online retailer’s heavy reliance on e-mail marketing continues.
In fact, e-mail marketing has the most value as a retention tool, Yaar says. The use of e-mail to acquire customers is losing effectiveness—as much as a 20% to 30% drop—as search engine optimization increases, Yaar says. “But as a retention tool, e-mail is still very, very powerful, because it can draw customers back to sites,” he says.
# posted by vdodon @ 01:58 
