CBSSports.com—formerly CBSSportsline.com—is wrapping up a massive e-mail file cleanup in which it asked its millions of recipients how much—if any—e-mail they wanted from the organization.
And inertia being the force that it is in marketing, CBSSports’s file is a mere shadow of its former self from a sheer numbers standpoint. But the folks at CBSSports.com are convinced they did the right thing, not just for CBSSports, but for their advertisers, as well.
CBSSports sends three types of e-mail to consumers: newsletters, product-promotion messages, and alerts based on preferences set by the user, such as when important information becomes available about favorite sports teams or players on their fantasy rosters.
What’s more, the company has several newsletters, several types of alerts and multiple types of product-promotion massages—all of which can amount to an irritating amount of e-mail from one source.
“We were well aware of how our policies and practices were affecting the customer experience,” said Patrick Herde, vice president, product management and marketing, CBSSports. “That was a legacy business that reached its heyday in 2001 or 2002 when the broadcast e-mail mentality was at its height. What happened was that over time, the average consumer was on two or three or more of our lists.”
And because many people thought they were getting too much e-mail from CBSSports or they simply didn’t find communication from the company all that valuable, open and click rates were unacceptably low.
As a result, last year, CBSSports executives began discussing a radical idea: Ask subscribers if they’re getting too much e-mail. Those who didn’t respond would automatically be removed from CBSSport’s e-mail files.
The idea of re-opting in its e-mail files was “a pretty big cultural change internally,” said Herde. “The legacy culture internally was the old broadcast e-mail thinking. It took a lot of education internally and it’s still going on.”
However, e-mail deliverability issues also helped spur change. “Historically, we’ve had challenges in that area,” Herde said.
Internet service providers like AOL, MSN and Yahoo use spam complaint rates as the No. 1 gauge to determine if incoming e-mail is spam. By all accounts, a spam complaint rate of 0.5% or higher can result is serious delivery issues. Many folks on CBSSports’ lists were either ignoring the company’s e-mails or complaining about them, even though they had opted in.
“The customer may have signed up for three different lists at CBSSports, but when they see three different e-mails coming in one week, the perception is: ‘Why the heck are they e-mailing me so much?’” said Herde.
In April, CBSSports began re-opting subscribers who had been inactive for six to nine months. The process was finished in August. Each inactive subscriber received two messages: a notice and a final reminder.
On July 31, for example the company sent an e-mail to one group asking: “Are you getting too many e-mails?”
The message continued: “CBSSportsline.com values you as a subscriber and we want to make sure we are not overloading your inbox with e-mails you do not wish to receive anymore. If we do not hear from you by August 8, 2007, we will remove you from our e-mail list. Please confirm that you would still like to subscribe to the e-mails below.”
The e-mail offered subscribers three options: Opt in to receiving e-mails containing third-party offers, opt in to receiving updates on new products, fantasy games and contests from the company, or opt in to both.
On Aug. 7, the company sent an e-mail to the same group reminding them they had one more day to opt back in or they would be removed.
Though Herde declined to give exact figures, he said the cut was pretty dramatic.
“We went from pretty enormous lists that were in the seven-figure range to much smaller lists of people who have said, ‘I care about this communication and I want to have it ongoing,’” he said.
Matt Yorra, senior product manager for core services integration, CBSSports, added, “Needless to say, it didn’t go from 1 million to 999,000.”
However, Yorra said, the resulting files are simply better for CBSSports and better for its advertisers.
“If I’ve got a list of 500,000 people and get an open rate of 20%, that’s a hell of a lot better than having a list of 5 million, getting a 5% open rate and pissing off the other 95%,” said Yorra.
Now the trick will be to reposition the properties to advertisers and sell on performance rather than tonnage.
“A lot of our customers [advertisers] want to send a standalone e-mail to a big list with a nice big picture in it of whatever they’re offering,” said Yorra. “In giving our customers [e-mail subscribers] the types of e-mail they want when they want it, we’re trying to convey to the advertisers that it is ultimately going to result in a better performance. Since they want to receive the e-mails, they’re going to open them and have a positive association with the ad.”
Next up will be some unspecified changes in e-mail content, said Herde.
“We’ve got a long way to go in terms of the roadmap for increasing the value of e-mail and turning into what we think it can be,” he said.
