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“The size of your e-mail file is not as important a measure of the health of your program as the engagement level of the file,” states Austin Bliss, president of FreshAddress, an e-mail hygiene and deliverability solutions firm in Newton, Mass.
E-mail has developed as a more personal medium, one where people feel more ownership of their address (or addresses, as it might be) and thus exercise caution before sharing it with others. They also take extreme steps to protect the content of their inbox. A study from the Email Sender and Provider Coalition indicates that eight out of 10 respondents do not casually hit the “Report Spam” button in their e-mail clients; they understand the consequences for marketers and find it an acceptable way to force businesses to do a better job of meeting their needs.
“A customer who doesn’t like you can hurt you. You can’t push your agenda on them,” explains Morgan Stewart, director, strategic services at ExactTarget, an e-mail software solutions firm in Indianapolis. A high spam complaint rate can get your e-mails blocked by ISPs, and a high unsubscribe rate has a negative impact on your program ROI—and could even affect your activity across other channels.
That’s why meeting the regulations in the Can Spam Act is the “lowest threshold for best practices in e-mail,” advises Bliss. It’s also why of the 94 percent of marketers using e-mail, each company has to more tightly define best practices and benchmarks based on its particular marketing climate.
The following best practices quiz has been developed within the context of a customer e-mail program and is the starting point for any marketer interested in improving the health of its e-mail program. All best practices go beyond legal matters to ethical issues of treating customers with respect for their preferences, but it’s even more true of e-mail marketing. See how well your company’s practices align with what these e-mail experts had to say on key program guidelines; if you’re not on the same page, it’s a signal to conduct a deeper investigation into your entire program to identify weak spots.
The Questions
1. Stop contact to inactive addresses (no clicks/opens) within:
a) three months
b) six months
c) one year
d) never
2) Stop contact to addresses after how many soft bounces in a month:
a) one
b) two
c) three
d) four
3) If you choose to reconfirm opt-in status, after how many attempts should you stop:
a) one
b) two
c) three
d) four
4) Newly appended e-mail addresses should be:
a) mailed immediately
b) mailed in waves
c) added into regular contact cycle
5) Keep your customer unsubscribe rate below:
a) 0.2 percent of mail sent
b) 0.3 percent of mail sent
c) 0.4 percent of mail sent
d) 0.5 percent of mail sent
6) Keep your spam complaint rate below:
a) 0.2 percent of mail sent
b) 0.5 percent of mail sent
c) 1 percent of mail sent
d) 1.5 percent of mail sent
7) What minimum of data on proof of permission must be collected for each e-mail address you contact:
a) date/time of opt-in
b) source (URL, reply card, etc.)
c) IP address
d) A & B only
e) A & C only
f) all of the above
8) Do you send out differentiated welcome e-mails:
a) yes
b) no
9) Are you sending your e-mail through an authentication source:
a) yes
b) no
The Answers
1. Stop contact to inactive addresses (no clicks/opens) within?
Answer: a) three months
Hard and soft bounces aside, if you’re not effectively reaching someone at an e-mail address, then you should stop, says Bliss. For whatever reason—the person no longer uses this e-mail address, his corporate ISP blocked you, he prefers not to read your communications, etc.—this address simply is not working.
“It’s a hard standard,” Bliss acknowledges, “but it’s the right standard if you’re looking to avoid spam traps.”
And if your main objective is to reap the maximum ROI from your e-mail program, it’s important to remove the dead weight in your file. Just because it’s cheaper to send e-mail than other forms of push marketing doesn’t mean there is no cost. You’re pulling resources away from other activities that return a better ROI, such as segmentation and the collection of more active names, than blasting away to out-of-date addresses.
“Marketers should keep a close eye on the performance metrics of their mailings and work to optimize their respective KPIs. By doing so, they are better positioned to customize the content and relevancy of their mailings. It will also help maintain the hygiene of their list, improve their IP reputation and thus avoid deliverability issues with the ISPs,” says Rick Buck, director of e-media and privacy/ISP relations at e-Dialog, an e-mail marketing solutions firm in Lexington, Mass.
“Likewise,” he adds, “taking a hard look at their database will enable them to set different expectations for different segments and identify who they are, when and why they may cross the line from, say, a responder to a nonresponder. Marketers need to be ruthless about culling their e-mail lists of all names that aren’t likely to continue to be customers … This is very difficult because nobody wants to drop customers, but the reality is that they are already gone.”
2) Stop contact to addresses after how many soft bounces in a month?
Answer: b) two
Getting a soft bounce on an address is not a green light to keep on truckin’ with your regular e-mail contact indefinitely. While it’s important to know the various ISPs’ thresholds for bounces, the best practice to keep in mind is two soft bounces in a month to an address requires offline steps to salvage contact.
For example, Bliss says, you might use an e-mail change of address (ECOA) service, send a postcard asking the customer to update his e-mail address or flag the record so that the customer service department can request an updated address the next time the customer makes inbound contact. Whatever path you pursue, he emphasizes the need to resell the benefits of receiving your e-mail messages.
Bliss’ firm offers ECOA processing, and he notes that most clients who use this updating method, especially those with large files, run their e-mail lists quarterly.
According to Reggie Brady, president of Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions, a direct and e-mail marketing consultancy in Norwich, Conn., between 20 and 25 percent of e-mail addresses change on an annual basis, so marketers must be diligent about keeping their e-mail housefile clean and deliverable. E-mail preference centers—where customers can update contact information, change format preferences, etc.—are a proactive way to preserve the size of your e-mail housefile and help customers retain control of how you market to them, she explains.
3) If you choose to reconfirm opt-in status, after how many attempts should you stop?
Answer: c) three
If you’re a weekly e-mailer, Stewart says, you probably want to take accounts that remain inactive after 90 days and ask not just about whether these people want to remain opt-ins, but also if they want to opt out. Extensive testing with ExactTarget clients has shown that a yes-no option, especially when listed side by side, produces more “yes” responses than when the only response option is “yes.” Stewart thinks this approach is driven by engaging the recipients to make an active choice. As for the rest of the message, he advises marketers to restate their value proposition for e-mail contact and to point out any new content offerings that customers might not know about.
Stewart explains that clients do get “no” responses with this practice, but not as many as one might think; additionally, a “no” response is a clear signal to flag such records for no further contact right away. He advises marketers to cap this reconfirm contact cycle after three attempts, which should be sufficient to reach someone who hasn’t turned a deaf ear to you or whose address still is valid.
Buck adds that, “The point of reconfirmation mailings is to attempt to rejuvenate non-responsive segments of your database. Another benefit of this is that it will help to remove complainers and worse, spam traps, from the list. Ultimately, this will enhance performance and deliverability of e-mail campaigns.”
And if a marketer e-mails its file daily, he notes, then it should consider re-confirming opt-in status on nonresponders once a month.
4) Newly appended e-mail addresses should be?
Answer: b) mailed in waves
The best practice here is to mail addresses in systematic waves, so that you can monitor the impact on deliverability and customer receptivity.
“Marketers need to always be thinking, ‘How will this impact my IP reputation?’ Mailing a lot of unqualified names all at one time could generate a lot of complaints, bounces and the like. So, start small to see how well the e-mail campaign is received before mailing the entire list of new addresses,” Buck advises.
You have to remember that this e-mail address is not yours, says Stewart, meaning the customer did not provide you this information for contact. So, the most responsible course of action is to request permission from this group and then only add those people who opted in to your file, he advises.
Marketers who are less risk-averse, however, might pursue an opt-out approach. In that case, Bliss stresses that, in addition to working with a reputable appending service, marketers whose vendor handles the opt-out e-mail pass should make sure they get the list of unsubscribes that arises from this process. Amazingly enough, he says, it doesn’t always happen.
Another critical factor is to understand the match type. If appends are at the household match level, Bliss explains, you cannot send e-mails that are personally addressed. Companies make the mistake of not flagging the match level in their records, and then assume later down the road that they can attempt a personalized e-mail.
When it comes to the opt-in or opt-out message sent to appended names, marketers should take care to introduce this group to their company as well as the benefits of receiving e-mail contact. And use clear language about what action, if any, the customer needs to take to indicate he doesn’t wish to receive e-mail contact.
5) Keep your customer unsubscribe rate below?
Answer: a) 0.2 percent of mail sent
“Anything approaching 1 percent or more is an unhealthy unsubscribe rate. Track unsubscribe rates by customer segments to watch for trends, as it is a direct indicator to the relevance of the e-mail being sent and the quality of the addresses being obtained through acquisition programs,” Buck stresses.
Stewart puts a finer point on it still by noting that when this rate gets above 0.2 percent, a marketer has to ask what’s going on in its e-mail program; anything above 0.5 percent means there’s a definite problem. If you’re experiencing such red-flag rates, the first place to look at for culprits is the content of your e-mails, he explains, suggesting that your messaging likely is too sales- and we-oriented. The next trouble spot, he continues, is probably your list hygiene and address collection practices.
6) Keep your spam complaint rate below?
Answer: b) 0.5 percent of mail sent
Again, the various thresholds allowed by each ISP differs, but industry best practice dictates striving to keep your spam complaints as far below a half a percent as possible. While a rate closer to 1 percent might not necessarily get your e-mails blocked, this number can creep up quickly if you’re lax in your practices. Anything higher than 1 percent, and you’re flirting with danger, Buck warns.
“Complaints typically result from sending inappropriate or irrelevant mailings, sending too frequently, or by questionable list-building practices. They not only tarnish an e-mail marketer’s reputation with ISPs, they also influence the content filters that flag e-mail as spam,” he says.
7) What minimum of data on proof of permission must be collected for each e-mail address you contact?
Answer: d) A & B only
OK, this was somewhat of a trick question. According to the Can Spam Act, marketers need only collect the date and time of opt-in for each address as well as the source of the address collected (i.e., the URL on which sign-up occurred, etc.).
But it’s also not a bad idea to collect the user’s IP address, says Bliss.
In addition, he points out that just because you have what is required for proof of permission to contact a particular address does not really mean people still want your communications. You have merely captured permission at one point of interaction in time with an individual. That’s why best practices guide e-mail marketers to assess the activity on their files regularly and then take the appropriate steps to strengthen customer relationships in this channel.
8) Do you send out differentiated welcome e-mails?
Answer: a) yes
“From our research,” Stewart says, “we know the probability of response is highest on the first e-mail after sign-up and continues to decrease thereafter.” Given this insight, why not send something more than a boilerplate confirmation message to start off on the best foot possible, he asks.
Marketers should make a special offer or serve up different content based on what they know about each customer. Often, an e-mail address, first and last name, and ZIP code is all a marketer needs for a fantastic profile that will provide a good completion rate when enhancing with demographic data, he explains.
Reggie Brady concurs on the timing aspect of initial contact, adding that open and clickthrough rates have been proven to decline significantly in the first 90 days of a recipient’s tenure. Based on this finding, she says, marketers might want to consider a welcome series instead of a single welcome e-mail.
Stewart shares an example on this tactic, with a slight twist. A tire company decided to let its audience define through behavior what content it most desired. The marketer started out by providing a customer newsletter with two types of editorial; by following the clicks for each customer, the marketer could see which content each person preferred over time and then continue to tailor offerings in future e-mail contact.
9) Are you sending your e-mail through an authentication source?
Answer: a) yes
Without getting into the merits of one authentication type versus another, the main point here is that marketers who are serious about the livelihood of their e-mail program need to be authenticating their e-mail.
First off, says Bliss, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) requires its members to do so. Second, you get better delivery by distinguishing your legitimate e-mail from that of spammers, he explains.
“Marketers send a ton more e-mail than they think they do,” Bliss remarks. To help ISPs more easily identify your e-mail as coming from a legitimate company, then you want to authenticate it—and all of it. If only your marketing e-mails are authenticated, then your other corporate e-mails look different to ISPs. And you really don’t want an ISP to stop for a second to question whether your e-mail is legitimate, he says.
If you’re not already authenticating your e-mail, the DMA offers marketers an interactive guide (http://www.the-dma.org/emailauthentication/index.shtml) to learn more about this tool and take steps to make it part of their e-mail best practices.
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