Marketers missing out

Many delivery blogs have posted about the recent ReturnPath study showing that marketers are missing prime opportunities to use email to develop a strong relationship with recipients. I finally manged to get a few moments to read through the study and comment on it. Over a few days in February ReturnPath researchers signed up at more than 60 major retailer brands. They then monitored the subscriptions to see how often and what kind of mail the retailers sent.
Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.
From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.
There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

  1. How many companies sent welcome messages?
  2. How soon did recipients start receiving email?
  3. How did companies use information collected during the subscription process to personalize email?

Most other people commenting on the study have focused on the fact that 60% of mailers did not send a welcome message and 30% do not send any mail within the 30 days of the study. Basic, basic best practices here. Send a welcome message! This is a sender’s opportunity to touch the customer. Good marketers set recipients them up to expect future, high value messages. Really good marketers include information like how to modify subscription settings and what address future messages will come from – along with instructions on how to add that address to the recipients address book. ReturnPath points out Kraft as a good example of a mailer using that welcome message to start the relationship.

[Kraft’s] welcome message included a personalized greeting and a recipe based on the subscriber’s expressed preferences. They also include “white listing” instructions along with information on what to expect from future emails.

In the 30 days of the study, 30% of the retailers failed to send any email. I can guarantee you that in 60 or 90 days, when the retailer finally gets around to mailing, a significant percentage of recipients will forget they signed up for the mail. Some of those recipients will hit the “this is spam” button. This is a missed opportunity and ReturnPath pulls no punches about how bad it is to ignore it.

They’ve asked you to market to them! They’ve made themselves vulnerable, and now they want acknowledgment, even gratitude. You can’t put off making a connection. If you aren’t well on your way to building a relationship within a month your subscriber may have forgotten that they registered.

One of the most interesting parts of the study to me, and one many others have not commented on, was the analysis of the information retailers collect and then do not use. Only 25% of the companies who sent routine emails within 30 days actually used the information they collected from the recipients to personalize the messages. The others did not even use subscriber names in outgoing mail.

Taken as a whole, marketers lost a major opportunity to engage their subscribers through early personalization. Fifty-six percent of marketers who sent welcome messages had the data to personalize them, but only 13 percent sent personalized welcome emails.

This is where the market is going. Senders MUST learn to step up and uphold their end of the sender – recipient relationship. Personalized email is a small way to connect with subscribers, even something as simple as a name will help the recipient feel as if the relationship is two way. Recipients want to know sender sees them as more than an email address, but actually as a valuable customer.

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Unsubscribes made difficult

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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Recent comments

On my followup EEC post Tamara comments

The eec made a really bad and ugly mistake but you can take my word for it that they have learned from it and that it will not happen again. I am not going to blog about this because I really do believe in the value of the EEC and what it brings to the industry. It’s okay to call out a mistake, but do you really need to destroy an organization that is so worthwile?

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Signup forms and bad data

One thing I frequently mention, both here on the blog and with my clients, is the importance of setting recipient expectations during the signup process. Mark Brownlow posted yesterday about signup forms, and linked to a number of resources and blog posts discussing how to create user friendly and usable signup forms.
As a consumer, a signup process for an online-only experience that requires a postal address annoys and frustrates me to no end. Just recently I purchased a Nike + iPod sport kit. Part of the benefit to this, is free access to the Nike website, where I can see pretty graphs showing my pace, distance and time. When I went to go register, however, Nike asked me to give them a postal address. I know there are a lot of reasons they might want to do this, but, to my mind, they have no need to know my address and I am reluctant go give that info out. An attempt to register leaving those blanks empty was rejected. A blatantly fake street address (nowhere, nowhere, valid zipcode) did not inhibit my ability to sign up at the site.
Still, I find more and more sites are asking for more and more information about their site users. From a marketing perspective it is a no-brainer to ask for the information, at least in the short term. Over the longer term, asking for more and more information may result in more and more users avoiding websites or providing false data.
In the context of email addresses, many users already fill in random addresses into forms when they are required to give up addresses. This results in higher complaint rates, spamtrap hits and high bounce rates for the sender. Eventually, the sender ends up blocked or blacklisted, and they cannot figure out why because all of their addresses belong to their users. They have done everything right, so they think.
What they have not done is compensate for their users. Information collection is a critical part of the senders process, but some senders seem give little thought to data integrity or user reluctance to share data. This lack of thought can, and often does, result in poor email delivery.

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