Sending an e-mail marketing campaign is one thing. Thanks to spam filters and consumer overload, getting those messages to their intended recipients and opened is a whole other story.
Spam filters have really challenged agencies to phrase subject lines so messages will get through, notes Maria Mandel, vice president/director of interactive marketing for Draft Inc.
“We're trying to get clients on white lists to avoid the whole filtering process,” she says.
Company names should be up front in the subject line, so consumers know the message is from a brand they trust, she says. And above all, the e-mail should be something relevant to the consumer, rather than just promotional.
“The message should be all about them and what you can do for them at this point,” says Mandel.
“Your brand needs to be highly visible,” agrees Dave Lewis, vice president of deliverability management and ISP relations, Digital Impact. “Make sure the customer understands it's from you.”
In addition, there should be an urgency to respond, says Mandel. Offers that give something special to the “first 50 to respond” or specify a cutoff date encourage the consumer to click through, she says.
Marketers must understand the filtering technology from both a transmission and message-creation point of view, says Michelle Feit, president of ePost Direct.
Transmission companies need to keep their lists clean and avoid ending up on blacklists, she says. And subject lines and messages have to avoid combinations of words like “free,” 100% HTML messages and numerous “click here” lines.
“It's a real balance,” says Feit. “E-mail is a really powerful tool if used properly.”
Al DiGuido, CEO of Bigfoot Interactive agrees, noting that many players in the marketplace don't spend enough time managing their relationships with ISPs.
“You need to work with ISPs and be open in your sending,” adds Lewis. “That's key, because that's what a spammer doesn't do.”
Lewis notes that for many business-to-consumer marketers whose e-mail lists are comprised mainly of addresses in top domains such as AOL or MSN, the issue becomes more of placement in the recipient's inbox, rather than deliverability.
Users of AOL 8.0, for example, have the option of directing their mail to go into folders for people they know, bulk mail and unknown senders. And version 9.0 will have a spam folder, as well as a global filter and an adaptive member filter, which learns from what you've previously identified as spam. If you're a white list user, you're exempt from the global filter, but you're not exempt for individual members' filters. V.9.0 also will suppress all images and links in a message unless the sender is in the member's address book.
The issue of delivery becomes more important with secondary, smaller domains that don't have the resources or tolerance to handle large volumes of bulk mail — whether it's spam or legitimate marketing mail — so they block it out.
“Whether you're filtered or end up in unfavorable placement, it's the same result,” says Lewis. “You don't reach your target audience.”
On the message creation side, excessive punctuation, extraneous coding done by a software program rather than a live programmer, colored fonts and varying sizes of fonts will also trip up a message in many spam filters, says Michael Della Penna, CMO of Bigfoot.
Draft's Mandel says she's seeing many clients using e-mail both as a brand-awareness tool and a way to build a database, particularly in the consumer packaged goods arena. The agency's program for Jose Cuervo helped drive traffic to both Cuervo.com and Cuervonation.com, an online community.
The tequila maker has a database of over 100,000 names, created with “minimal spend,” thanks to e-mail, says Mandel. The goal of the program was to develop relationships with target audiences and get them to register for Cuervo Passport, where Cuervo can capture demographic and product usage data. Consumers over age 21 (the site has two stages of screening to keep out minors) interact with the brand via contests and interactive promotions on the sites.
Because liquor isn't like other packaged goods items like soap where you could track usage of e-mail coupons to determine who made a purchase, the site has done surveys and seen a 24% increase in purchase intent from people who participated in the program.
Retention messages also work well, says Mandel, noting that Verizon has had success with such efforts. And service messages that help clients manage their accounts have huge increases in open rates, sometimes up to the 80% range, notes Della Penna.
Deb Goldstein, president of IDG List Services, says she hasn't seen as much of a problem with messages getting through Internet service providers to their intended recipients on the business-to-business side.
She does, however, advise clients to stay away from things like personalization, “ADV” or the word “free” in the subject lines. “Those are the things that are going to get caught.”
The basics are still what work best, notes Goldstein, adding that, especially in business-to-business, the more straightforward a message is, the better.
“When you send somebody something, you literally have a very short period of time,” she says.
“The subject line has to grab them, the first two sentences have to be relevant and pertinent or you've lost them.”
