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5 ways to avoid common email blunders

David Wertheimer is director of strategy at Alexander Interactive.

Don't be tempted by gimmicks for boosting email deliveries. Here's what to do -- and what to avoid -- when reaching out to your customers.

As consumer spending slows, online marketers are eager to retain traffic and minimize customer acquisition costs. As a result, they are taking steps to reach users who fit their target profiles. One of the quick answers -- easy to organize, inexpensive to deploy and fully trackable -- is to boost the frequency and reach of email marketing.

The logic is sound: In an ever-widening retail landscape, why not talk to the most people in the most direct manner possible, as frequently as is tolerable? More than 90 percent of online retailers email in-house lists, so leaning on those lists is a potential easy win.

Pushing the envelope
In recent months, more and more companies have been testing the limits of their lists. Monthly emails have become biweekly; weekly newsletters send midweek alerts. Companies also have become more brazen in their targeting. For example, some sites automatically add customer email addresses to lists without requesting permission. Others reinstate old, dormant emails.

Despite the hardships retailers face, these tactics are not always good for business. In the short-term, they may improve total opens and clickthroughs, but irritating users can create long-term brand damage, and ultimately hurt sales.

As with all online best practices, there are "right" and "wrong" ways to conduct opt-in email correspondence. A good email marketer is doing at least two of the following things right -- and mirroring as few of the accompanying anecdotes as possible.

1. Ask permission before sending email. This is an obvious, necessary component of successful email marketing, but many sites find it easiest just to add every address they receive to their lists. In the past six months, several ecommerce companies opted me into their programs simply because I completed a transaction on their sites. A few days or weeks after the usual order confirmations, each sent an unexpected piece of email marketing. One website even culled my email from an abandoned shopping cart. (The same site has emailed me every single weekday since. I haven't unsubscribed, mostly out of incredulity.)

A slowing economy does not undo the basic need for sites to empower their users. Inviting users to opt into emails ensures that in-house lists are populated with active, interested readers. Sacrificing this for volume only frustrates those who didn't want to subscribe.

2. Be transparent. Changed email frequency? Switched providers or functions? Re-launched an email that hasn't been sent in a while? Let users know, so they're not caught off guard, and so they don't react by hitting the unsubscribe button.

Some sites have refreshed their email lists in recent months, bringing former and lapsed recipients back into their marketing databases. But they don't tell their "new" subscribers; they just add them to the ranks.

I currently receive email from a major bookseller and a major credit card issuer, neither of which emailed me in 2007. This is less frustrating than blind opt-ins, but the messages have an air of desperation to them: a brand nightmare.

3. Accept limitations. As with site design, email marketing must account for variations in user access. Not every user checks email in Microsoft Outlook with images enabled. Be sure to account for the different ways users may read, subscribe to and unsubscribe from mailing lists, and make each function as easy as possible to achieve. Also check that email is not getting stuck in spam filters -- a sure sign that marketing messages aren't well formulated.

My bank recently prompted me to provide a new email address, stating that my current one was not working. This was inaccurate: I simply read its email messages in plain text form, and I hadn't clicked on a link in a few months. I resented the bank's impatience and am now even less likely to read its marketing pieces.

4. Let 'em out, not just in. With so many options, users will be quick to dismiss sites that abuse the privilege of direct contact. This includes opt-outs for email marketing, online and on-site.

A great new site I found started sending twice-weekly updates I didn't need. The email format is garbled and I can't find the unsubscribe link. Whether this is clever or erroneous, the effect is the same: These emails now go straight to my spam folder.

5. Be the good guy. The end result will be a more satisfied user who recommends and reuses your site and its services. The short-term effects of a larger mailing list are alluring, but the risk of alienating the users who don't bite is real.

How well is your company handling the email needs of customers? If this list looks foreign to you, it may be time to tweak-or overhaul-your email marketing strategy.

Study Reveals Email Tactics of Top U.S. Retailers

http://emailmarketing.silverpop.com/archive/2008/06/study_reveals_e.html

Silverpop uncovered some interesting results when it recently joined with Internet Retailer magazine to conduct research for the “Top 500 Guide” profiling the largest 500 U.S. retail Web sites ranked by annual sales.

To evaluate the email programs of the top online retailers, our research team logged on to the Web sites of 820 top retailers identified by Internet Retailer and registered to receive emails from each that had an email marketing program (94 percent of Top 500 companies vs. 83 percent of other companies studied). Then we compared the practices of Top 500 retailers to the other 320 retailers.

Among the findings:

• Not surprisingly, nearly six out of 10 retailers in the Top 500 offered a preference center at opt-in, while only one out of four other retailers studied did so.
• However, nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with email programs didn’t offer customers any alternatives to unsubscribing, such as choosing different subscriptions or altering message frequency. And even more interesting, three out of four companies that had offered choices at opt-in didn’t offer to let recipients change those choices when they went to opt out.
• And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn’t offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content.

While this may be a successful strategy for some companies that want as much freedom as possible in their frequency and content up-front, the impact of this tactic should be closely measured, since recipients may choose to hit the spam button instead of going to the trouble of unsubscribing, jeopardizing your deliverability.

While the study underscores that leading retail companies do optimize their programs for best results. It also reveals that even the best programs can improve and take results to new levels of success.

Silverpop uncovered some interesting results when it recently joined with Internet Retailer magazine to conduct research for the “Top 500 Guide” profiling the largest 500 U.S. retail Web sites ranked by annual sales.

To evaluate the email programs of the top online retailers, our research team logged on to the Web sites of 820 top retailers identified by Internet Retailer and registered to receive emails from each that had an email marketing program (94 percent of Top 500 companies vs. 83 percent of other companies studied). Then we compared the practices of Top 500 retailers to the other 320 retailers.

Among the findings:

• Not surprisingly, nearly six out of 10 retailers in the Top 500 offered a preference center at opt-in, while only one out of four other retailers studied did so.
• However, nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with email programs didn’t offer customers any alternatives to unsubscribing, such as choosing different subscriptions or altering message frequency. And even more interesting, three out of four companies that had offered choices at opt-in didn’t offer to let recipients change those choices when they went to opt out.
• And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn’t offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content.

While this may be a successful strategy for some companies that want as much freedom as possible in their frequency and content up-front, the impact of this tactic should be closely measured, since recipients may choose to hit the spam button instead of going to the trouble of unsubscribing, jeopardizing your deliverability.

While the study underscores that leading retail companies do optimize their programs for best results. It also reveals that even the best programs can improve and take results to new levels of success.

Give Your Subscribers Options Sooner Rather Than Later

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

Return Path, Inc

returnpath.com
Our friends over at Silverpop have a new study out on how top internet retailers use email marketing. We were most intrigued by this stat:

"And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn't offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content."

This strikes us a very risky strategy, for three reasons:

1. As Bill Nussey at Silverpop points out, this tactic can hurt deliverability if your recipients use the "this is spam" button rather than the unsubscribe button to stop getting content that isn't interesting to them.

2. If they don't complain (see #1) they might just ignore you. Return Path finds, again and again, that most clients have email files with high percentages of inactive subscribers. They don't find value and so they tune you out.

3. To our mind, the biggest risk of all is the risk of not sending high-value email - and thus driving more response - right from the beginning. In the interest of giving yourself lots of flexibility you get your subscriber onto a general list. They get the email and they don't complain (risk #1) and they don't totally ignore you (risk #2), but they don't ever respond either. Or, they respond less than they would if they were getting exactly what they wanted.

If you've gone to the trouble of creating options for your subscribers, even just for frequency, show those options right up front. If that feels too risky then at least make those alternate choices available to subscribers who have gone inactive or who haven't responded by sending a special email campaign. Waiting until the subscriber is fed up with you - which is how most people feel when they take the trouble to unsubscribe - is just silly.

Catalog Choice - Working to Reduce Unwanted Catalogs in Your Mailbox

Dear Catalog Choice member,

In just six months, Catalog Choice has become a significant consumer
voice in the direct mail industry. We could not have done it without
you and the other 730,000 people who use our service. On our blog, the
voices of several Catalog Choice members, Tracy, Yvonne, and Mary to
name a few, is also loud and clear:

  "Give us the power to decide what gets in our mailbox."

We work hard every day to achieve this goal. But we know that when you
receive an unwanted catalog in the mail, you may wonder: Is Catalog
Choice working? We confidently report that yes, Catalog Choice is
working. Our approach is showing results, for you, merchants and the
environment.

Here are some important updates and thoughts we want to share with
you:

* Nearly 200 catalog mailers are participating in Catalog Choice, and
this number grows every day. Check out our new "Bravo Merchants"
page, which gives you a convenient way to shop online by catalog
brand. In the months ahead you'll see more mailers post their
electronic catalogs.

* We are engaged with the catalog industry at the executive level,
working with key decision-makers, the US Postal Service, and
industry associations to ensure that merchants honor your mail
preferences.

* Please use Catalog Choice for those unwanted catalogs you receive in
the mail. We established our service to be title-specific. To
decrease the chances of your name being rented, sold, or exchanged
by catalog companies, consider the Direct Marketing Association's
Mail Preference Service at www.DMAChoice.org. This service will
remove you from DMA member prospect lists. In response to Catalog
Choice, DMA recently dropped the credit card verification and fee
requirements. Please avoid using Catalog Choice for catalogs you've
never received.

These are challenging financial times for merchants. There is no legal
imperative for merchants to honor your opt-out requests; we depend on
the merchant's good faith to respect consumers' mail preferences. Some
mailers are reluctant to remove valuable customer names from their
mailing lists without a confirmation directly from the customer. If
you are a catalog customer, some mailers may reach out to you with a
phone call, an email, or a post card. Others may send you a catalog to
see how you respond. If you buy from that catalog, it is unlikely that
the mailer will remove you from their mailing list.

We stand by our mission to reduce the mailing of unwanted catalogs.
Our approach is to continue working collaboratively with the catalog
industry to embrace voluntary measures to reduce unwanted mail by
honoring your mail preferences. This requires a relationship of trust
between Catalog Choice and mailers - and this takes time. We ask for
your continued patience and support. So stick with us and tell a
friend. The larger our voice, the more progress we can make together.

http://www.catalogchoice.org/pages/merchants

Sincerely,
The Catalog Choice Team

The Root Cause of Email Overload

Evolving Excellence

Our friend and occasional guest blogger Dan Markovitz has often written about the problems associated with email overload.  But he has just come to a bit of an epiphany... he may have been completely off base.

I've spilled a lot of electronic ink (fortunately, electrons are cheap) telling you how to manage email. But I'm now wondering whether my advice has merely been addressing the symptoms, and not the actual problem. Which is to say, I'm giving advice on how to handle email once it's hit your inbox. But perhaps I should be focusing more on the root cause of all those emails.

I'm impressed.  How often do you hear of a consultant that admits to being incorrect?  But that's besides the point... after only one or two "why's" you end up with "why the hell do I get so much email in the first place?"  Fundamental root cause analysis.

If you're versed in lean, six sigma, or the writings of Peter Drucker and William Edwards Deming, you know that you can't control -- and therefore can't improve -- a process if you can't measure it. And I would argue that we do a terrible job of measuring email. Yes, we know how many messages are in our inboxes, and we have some idea of how many messages we get per day, but that's only a small fraction of the measuring that we should be doing. And it's the least important fraction, too.

I confess that I manage my Inbox by how many emails are in it.  If it's below 30 or 40, I go home in peace.  When it gets over 100 I start to get nervous.  And when it finally exceeds 500 I'll usually block off a few hours some Friday to get it back down to 30 or 40... at which time the cycle begins to repeat.  At 200+ a day (after a spam filter!) it doesn't take long.  But guess what: it also doesn't take all that long to get it down from 500+ to 30. 

Why is that?  It's not because I don't triage and take immediate action on incoming emails... even though I don't very effectively.  It's because I allow those emails to get to my inbox in the first place.  Why?

Instead of simply bemoaning the flood of email you get, you should be asking questions like:

• what percentage of my emails are worthless?
• which departments (or people) generate most of my worthless emails?
• what topics show up in most of my worthless emails?
• does the volume of worthless email vary by the day of the week?
• how long does email sit in my inbox?
• why do emails sit in my inbox so long?

The last two items point to my problem with triage, but I'm more interested in preventing the need to triage in the first place... ensuring I only receive emails that absolutely require my attention.  Who is sending me the emails I don't need to see and why?  How do I stop it?  In some cases people feel the need to copy me on emails, quite often I get sucked into email "conversations" that never seem to end.  We're informally working on some policies such as "no more than three replies to any email" and "if someone calls, call back instead of emailing back."  How many questions could have been resolved with a quick phone call or even a quick meeting instead of an email?

Speaking of meetings, Dan also extends his analysis to that bane of the organizational world.

This same approach can help you analyze why so many of your productive work hours are spent in meetings that add so little value. I've yet to meet a person who isn't frustrated by the amount of time spent in meetings, and yet no one seems to conduct a thorough measurement of this blight.

Why not ask explore some of the following questions?

• how often do meetings start and end on time?
• how focused are meetings?
• how often do meetings end without resolution?
• what are the most common goals of meetings?
• are meetings the best way of accomplishing those goals?
• can the company set standards around meetings -- standard times, standard days, standard formats -- to accomplish those goals?

Yes, good questions.  Perhaps I'll email them to my staff...

Catalogers/e-Merchants strategize for looming postal increase

By Chantal Todé
DM News

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With paper, postage and shipping costs all steadily inching upwards in recent years, many catalogers have become blasé about “another price increase.”

However, next month’s jump in postage costs is so significant — anywhere from 20 percent to upwards of 40 percent for catalogers — that the industry has been voicing its opposition to Washington in an unprecedented way. In addition, businesses are finding themselves looking under every rock for a few extra pennies.

“Because this happened, it made us do all those things we talked about for the last year,” said Joe Mediate, CEO of KooKoo Bear Kids, an Atlanta-based upscale catalog offering gifts and furniture for newborns and children.

Some of the strategies KooKoo Bear has put into place since the U.S. Postal Service approved the Postal Regulatory Commission’s rate increase on March 19 include co-mailing, decreasing the catalog’s paper weight and reducing the size of its catalog order form.

Because the March decision also included a request to reconsider the Standard Mail flat rate, some catalogers have been hoping that the PRC would lower the rate before the changes are scheduled to take place May 14. This seems unlikely, however, with the PRC’s April 6 move to grant more time to the Coalition of Catalog Mailers — a new group formed as a result of this recent postage increase — to file a motion to open the record for reconsideration of its recommendations for Standard Mail flat rates. It now appears that the best catalogers can hope for is that the postage increase will be lowered at a later date.

One effect that the postage increase is likely to have will be to make some multichannel merchants even more Web-centric.

“One of the things that is working in our favor is that our Internet business has been growing significantly for the past several years,” said Tim Lyons, a spokesman for J.C. Penney.

The way the company’s direct customers shop is now split evenly between its catalogs and the Internet. As a result, J.C. Penney, Plano, TX, is mailing fewer catalogs than it has in the past.

“We still send out a lot and it is important that we do, but [mailing fewer catalogs] has helped to offset some of the increase in the cost of mailing and we expect it will continue to do so,” Mr. Lyons said.

The story is similar at science kit cataloger Edmund Scientific, Tonawanda, NY. While the company expects to reduce its catalog circulation by 20 percent this fall as a result of the postage increase, catalog manager Tim Burns isn’t concerned about a similar reduction in the number of new customers.

“We’ve successfully transitioned a lot of our business to the Web over the past four years, which means we can successfully drive acquisitions using affiliates and search engine marketing,” Mr. Burns said.

Others are more wary of playing around with their circulation.

“I don’t know if decreasing circulation is the answer,” Mr. Mediate said. “The Web site is a good place for people to go and buy, but you can’t beat the catalog experience.”

Even though the 68 percent of the company’s sales now come from its Web site, he believes the KooKoo Bear catalog is what’s driving a lot of customers online.

However, the company will soon reduce the catalog’s page count and test new products more heavily on the site instead.

Some companies are even increasing prospecting this year.

“I’d pull back on page counts before I’d pull back on prospecting