Helpful Hints
E-MAIL LIST HYGIENE 101
Clean Those Files
Deleting inactive addresses from a house file may be the last thing most traditional direct marketers would do, but it’s becoming a necessity in e-mail.
For one thing, Internet service providers like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! use subscriber complaint rates as the standard to determine whether to block incoming e-mail.
So the trick is to eliminate the addresses of complainers and potential complainers. But how?
Some people will hit the “this is spam” button as a convenient way to opt out. In fact, 41% of consumers surveyed by e-mail deliverability company Return Path recently said they sometimes do just that.
As a result, inactive e-mail addresses can be dangerous, and it’s imperative that marketers strive to eliminate them. When should an address be removed from a marketer’s file? The answer to that question will vary from company to company.
For example, a company that mails frequently will need to remove inactive addresses more frequently than a company that mails, say, once per month. — KEN MAGILL
DID YOU KNOW?
- In a recent study by the Direct Marketing Association’s E-mail Experience Council, just 16% of e-mail DMers gave those trying to opt out the choice of receiving messages less frequently. Forty-four percent offered no alternatives whatsoever.
- If you want to get the best results in transactional e-mail, make sure the from line contains your company name, rather than a person’s name, says usability expert Jakob Nielsen. And make sure the name is no longer than 20 to 25 characters so it doesn’t get truncated.
- Keep your subject lines meaningful to the transaction, says Nielsen. “Your order has shipped” is more relevant than “shipping information.”
Strategies/AVOID LIST POISONING
Your marketing efforts could be 100% opt-in and your outbound e-mail could still end up being blocked as spam. The problem: list poisoning.
It has been happening for years, but many marketers who use e-mail are unaware of it, according to George Bilbrey, vice president and general manager of Return Path’s Delivery Assurance division.
To poison a marketer’s list, someone — possibly a competitor, or just someone with too much time on his hands — writes a small computer program that dumps a bunch of bad addresses into a company’s sign-up form and hits the submit button.
List poisoning can result in a marketer’s outbound e-mail being labeled as spam and blocked by inbox providers — and this can happen even to marketers who collect addresses on an opt-in basis. It is the second-most common cause of an opt-in marketer’s e-mail getting blocked, Bilbrey says. The first is using a sloppy third-party data source.
List poisoning doesn’t happen every day, but when it does, forget about trying to catch whoever did the deed, says Bilbrey. You need to protect yourself before they strike.
One way is by using so-called closed-loop permission practices when collecting e-mail addresses. In closed loop — also known as double opt-in — the person who signs up for a marketer’s e-mail gets a confirmation message, to which he or she must respond in order to remain on the list. The tactic prevents list poisoning by requiring a human to verify the request.
E-MAIL OPT-OUTS
TIP 1: Don’t make a customer work to find your opt-out information. While 96% of e-mail marketers include an unsubscribe function in their promotional messages as required by federal law, almost two-thirds try to discourage opt-outs by putting such language in tiny type or burying it in the message footer, according to a poll of more than 400 DMers by marketing services provider Lyris.
TIP 2: Just because someone unsubscribes doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve stopped being a customer. And people who can’t easily find a way to unsubscribe may report the message as spam to their e-mail inbox provider, increasing the likelihood that the mailer will have deliverability problems. Offer subscribers a choice of receiving fewer messages. Opting out doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
TIP 3: If the customer experience ends on a sour note and the last thing they remember was that you infringed on their inbox, they’re going to take their business elsewhere, says Stefan Pollard, director of e-mail marketing best practices for Lyris HQ. “But if you end it on a positive note and give them choices, you’re still a viable option. Odds are they’ll type the product into a search engine, and when your name comes up, they’ll be more likely to make a repeat purchase.”
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E-MAIL DESIGN: PREPARE FOR BROKEN GRAPHICS
Morgan Stewart, director of strategic service for Indianapolis-based e-mail service provider ExactTarget, estimates that 10%-20% of e-mail images are not rendering. Image blocking is causing such havoc that the phrase “e-mail creative” might be considered an oxymoron. After all, if the inbox providers are blocking images, what can possibly be creative about it? Turns out, quite a bit. One of the biggest mistakes merchants make in e-mail creative is simply repurposing their print direct mail creative. Getting all the necessary sign-offs is considered too much of a pain to warrant designing an e-mail campaign from scratch, says Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of Worldata. “The ‘let’s-just-get-it-out’ mentality is rampant.” Think about it: If you’re simply going to repurpose print direct mail for e-mail, you might as well not send the campaigns at all.
AVOIDING SCAMS IN E-MAIL LIST DEALS
So you’re sitting at work one day doing whatever it is you do and an e-mail arrives from someone you’ve never met claiming to be a data vendor offering you millions of records including e-mail addresses.
The rep wants to schedule a conference call to discuss a possible deal. Moreover, the rep is offering you 100 free records to prove his or her data’s quality.
You’ve never heard of this person or the company he or she claims to represent. The firm named in the e-mail has never exhibited at any of the tradeshows you frequent, and its representatives have not taken part in conference panel discussions. Not that you know of, anyway.
Should you do business with an unknown firm offering millions of compiled e-mail addresses?
No, you shouldn’t. You should also familiarize yourself with the top signs that an e-mail deal may be a scam. And, in no particular order, here they are:
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The rep is pitching you from a Gmail account or has an e-mail address that doesn’t contain a version of his or her company’s name. Why would an executive from a legitimate vendor not have a company e-mail address?
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The vendor will not send messages on your behalf to the list they’re repping. It’s an indication their servers may be blacklisted as sources of spam and they can’t get their e-mail into recipients’ inboxes.
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The prospecting pitch contains no physical address or, if it does, the address turns out to be a rented mailbox or a mail-forwarding service. A suite number that is too high to be an actual office address is an indication the rep is operating out of a rented mailbox. Also, it’s fairly easy to do a Google search on an address. If it’s a P.O. box, the box-rental company will appear in the results. In larger cities, Google Maps will return a photo of the address. Take a look at the neighborhood. Does it look like a place out of which a major data seller would operate?
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The company wants full payment up front. Anyone who has ever dealt with a contractor knows never to pay 100% up front. If things go bad you have no recourse. Half down is appropriate.
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The company’s Web site offers no identifiable details about its executive team, such as where they went to school or where they have worked.
Bottom line: If the deal smells funny, walk away. There are plenty of reputable vendors out there. — KM
MAKE THE MOST OF IT
Leveraging Transactional E-mails
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently published a study conducted in two phases, five years apart, of close to 100 transactional e-mails. The results aren’t pretty.
“Judging by many of the messages we tested, e-mail design often seems to be a side effect of the software implementation and consists of copy written by the programmer late at night,” he wrote.
“Alternatively (and even worse), some messages are hard-hitting, written by aggressive sales people without a true understanding of Internet marketing’s emphasis on relationship building.”
Besides order and service confirmations and shipment notifications, Nielsen said his firm also tested reservation confirmations and e-tickets; available-now notices; billing and payment notices; cancellations, returns, refunds, rebates, bonuses; information-request responses; government responses; customer-service messages; failure notices; and registration and account information.
“As the many message types show, transactional e-mail offers abundant opportunities for enhancing a site’s relationship with its customers,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, most companies are apparently failing to take advantage of the opportunity.
Nielsen also concluded that marketers’ use of transactional messages didn’t improve in the five years between the two studies.
“Transactional messages still exhibit the same problems as five years ago: subject lines are vague, and body text continues to be too long, difficult to scan, and lacking in clear facts,” he wrote.
Got an e-mail tip to share? Contact Ken Magill at [email protected]
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