Gmail and MSN Hotmail have recently started offering an unsubscribe link instead of a report spam button for some permission-based mailing lists, using the hidden X-List-Unsubscribe header that many email marketers and ESPs include in their emails. It makes sense, as many people use the This is Spam button instead of unsubscribing from opt-in email.
A customer asked us for some solid numbers on their unsubscribes, as they're trying to make some internal decisions on how to handle their unsubscribe process. I knew the number of subscribers who click on the spam button was significant, but the numbers were eye-opening. I looked at data for almost 80,000,000 emails sent (Yes, 80 MILLION emails), with complaint rates that never came near where an ISP would block and bounce rates that would make you drool.
17% of unsubscribes came from customers who hit reply and asked to be removed.
43% of unsubscribes came from customers who followed the unsubscribe link in the email.
40% of unsubscribes came from customers who clicked the This is Spam button.
That's right. 40% of legitimate unsubscribes came through the feedback loop as a complaint. ISPs take this figure into account, but it should give you something to think about next time you look to expand your email campaign.
Even though they recognized the brand.
Even though they signed up for the email.
Even though they recently purchased from the company.
Even though many of them will continue to purchase services from this company.
On a list with engaged and active subscribers, 40% of the subscribers who no longer wanted to receive promotional materials that they had signed up for used the spam button instead of the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
Being an avid participant in the social media sphere - I’ve found myself subscribing to more and more email. (So much for email being dead!) I generally keep a separate email for these opt-in’s and check in once a week to see what cool things other companies are doing with their email marketing. Randomly a B2B opt in email started coming in to my personal account from a company who I had NOT opted in to. I started doing some sleuthing on how they acquired my email address.
We had two things in common:
- The company was in Fort Wayne, Indiana - my hometown
- They were in the communication/advertising industry
I had solved the case. This company received my email because I had added one of their employees to my social network.
But did that constitute opting into their email campaign? Just as my colleague (and true social media friend) Al Iverson has said, giving someone your business card does not imply permission. The same should be said for all your friends, connections, and followers in your social network. By adding you into my social network, the only one to one communication I’ve opt-in to is that you communicate to me personally, thru that network.
I'd be interested in your thoughts. Does adding someone to your social network equate to opt-in permission? Does it matter what network you’ve accepted them on (LinkedIn vs. Facebook)?
Marketing to the Gen Y College Student’s Interests
In Experience, Inc.’s Recruiter Whitepaper, they suggest marketing to student interest as a way for today’s companies to recruit Gen Y employees. They found a discrepancy in students’ top fields of interest and fields they find job offers in (page 5).
Experience suggests tailoring job postings to fit student interests may increase recruiting yield. I think they are right on track of keeping information relevant.
An opt in email marketing campaign can be one way to connect with Gen Y and keep them updated with job information that might be different from someone in their 40s. The ability to develop targeted email campaigns is another feature of a quality email service provider, like ExactTarget.
Kyle Schroeder
Slingshot Summer Intern
Clients are sometimes confused by this process, and they often question it. Understandably so; email guidelines are sometimes clear as mud, and even though we spell them out in detail in every contract, and have a plan English version of our anti-spam policy online, it can be a lot of information to digest. And if you're one of our clients, you're probably more focused on marketing objectives and email success, which means that policy compliance may not always be at the forefront of your mind.
Investigating and resolving spam complaints is very important to us. It's not the only measure we employ to ensure that our clients comply with the law, and with best practices. But it's a very important measure. If we don't stay on top of things like this, bad things happen to your ability to deliver mail to the inbox. Don't believe me? Check out my recent example of how one single spam message caused a university to block all mail sent from the ExactTarget network. Part of the resolution process was having that administrator send me that spam complaint and his understanding that I will handle the complaint to his satisfaction and in line with our published guidelines. That means reforming and/or terminating a client sending non opt-in email.
Read that again - what I'm saying there is: Our ability to get your mail delivered is dependent upon our policy that we police our clients to ensure that they don't send spam, and that we demonstrate to ISPs (and blacklists and universities etc.) that we will shut off people who send spam.
It's that simple. It's that practical. We require permission because we know is a requirement to get your mail to the inbox. We prohibit spam because we know it is a detriment to the ability to get your mail to the inbox.
Last week, one of my coworkers approached me. She tried to forward a personal message from her work email account over to her university alumni account. That message was bounced back with "Message rejected due to spam policy." She sent it to the deliverability team, and I investigated. Here's what I found:
- Some client of ours sent ONE SINGLE MESSAGE to a bad address at that university.
- The university's email server caught the spam message and routed it to an administrator for review.
- The administrator reviewed the message and saw that there is no way that recipient could have legitimately opted-in. It wasn't a valid address; it didn't belong to a person.
- The administrator then immediately blocked ALL emails from ExactTarget.
Thankfully, we picked up on this very quickly. I contacted the university, who kindly worked with me to resolve the issue, and the block was quickly removed. I won't always be that lucky, though. Some administrators are not always so friendly, not always so willing to address an issue and remove a block. If that administrator had been unwilling to help, mail sent by other clients would have been negatively impacted.
As a result, that client found their ability to send email messages suspended, while they work with us to figure out what the heck went wrong, and implement a resolution plan to help ensure they're not mailing any other non opt-in email addresses. (And if the client won't do what we require, they won't find their ability to send re-enabled.)
This is the kind of thing we're trying to prevent with our anti-spam policy and opt-in contract clauses. Simply put, opt-in matters. Wander away from opt-in and stuff like this is going to happen, and you're going to end up blocked, maybe even causing other people to get blocked. This issue shows that there is a direct correlation between opt-in and the ability to deliver mail.
In a perfect world, the university would have notified us before blocking. But, the university administrator (whom I actually know from industry circles) is overworked, just like every other spam fighter. He knows me, but he didn't remember that I worked at ExactTarget. Nor does he have the time to notify every single company who he's blocking for sending spam. If he did, his workload would explode exponentially, and he would be deluged with replies from bad guys wanting to debate him on the merits of their send practices. (Seriously, nobody sending spam ever admits that it is spam. They always lie. Get lied to a couple dozen times a day, every day, by every spammer you talk to, and eventually, you stop listening. This is why ISPs work from complaints and statistics, not your personal assurances.)
Back on March 10th, I quoted Chip House on why opt-out email append is bad news. That was one of Chip's “5 Ways to Kill your Email Deliverability” from his article in this month's Visibility magazine. Today, I'll talk about another one of the points he raises: Misstep #3: Buying a list.
Chip says: “This is so bad, so insidious, and so detrimental to your deliverability that I don’t know where to start. Where appended lists might have a few spamtraps per million addresses, a purchased list will have hundreds. Nothing will raise your complaint rates more or drive blacklisting more than sending to a purchased list. This will kill your deliverability and your reputation and it will take a long time for you to climb out of the hole.”
Want an example of what can happen when you buy a list? Here's my favorite.
E360 is a company labeled by Comcast, and even by a judge, as being what “some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.” (That quote being from a court ruling that did not go in E360s' favor.) E360 is famously in a number of legal tangles – against anti-spam blacklist Spamhaus, with internet service provider Comcast, and with various individual plaintiffs who allege that E360 spammed them.
Now, E360 has turned around and sued a company called Choicepoint. From what I can tell, Choicepoint is the source of the email data in question, the data that got E360 sued by those various individuals. E360 is alleging that Choicepoint gave E360 email addresses that were people who had supposedly opted-in to receive emails, but had not.
That's the core of the problem here. When you buy a list, you're taking somebody else's word for it that the people really did opt-in to receive third-party emails. There are a lot of liars out there selling lists, and even if the vendor is not a liar, are you sure they're smart enough to have appropriately vetted and validated the addresses themselves and the associated permission? (After ten years in the email industry, I'm still not sure that any vendor I've dealt with is smart enough. “Legitimate” vendors have sold clients spamtrap addresses one too many times.)
And what does it actually cost to buy a list? In E360's case, it cost them approximately $350,000. That's what they ended up spending “defending and/or settling three lawsuits: Ferron v. e360; Silverstein v. e360; and Ferguson v. e360.”
These include:
Misstep #1: Cheating on Permission
Misstep #2: Opt-out Email Appending
Misstep #3: Buying a List
Misstep #4: Assuming More is Better
Misstep #5: Abusing a Subscriber’s Trust
Read the article and do what George Costanza did to change his success. Since spamming isn't working, do the exact opposite.
Chip
From my boss, Chip House, published in the March 2009 issue of Visibility: The Magazine for Online Marketing Strategies. In the article, "5 Ways to Kill Your Email Deliverability," Chip has this to say about opt-out email append:"The database companies of the world who make money by buying and selling your information will tell you that email appending is a good idea and that “everybody does it.” My advice to you is: don’t do it. If you are not familiar with the term, email appending is where a database company appends an email address by making a match on the postal address. Since most companies have a legacy file of customer postal addresses that is much larger than their email file (often 10 – 100x larger) this allows these companies to have a quick fix to grow their list of email addresses. As you know, if it seems too good to be true it probably is."
Click here to read the rest of it. It's very much all good advice.
We all know it's happening - but a recent article in eMarketer proves that the demographic shift in Facebook users is happening more rapidly than many of us expected. According to the eMarketer article 45% of Facebook users in the US are now 26 and older - and the fastest growing demographic group is women over the age of 55 (membership up 175.3% in about 6 months).
This is big news for companies who hope to tap these markets - this demographic shift translates to increased purchasing power.
However, developing a marketing strategy around social networks can be challenging. Extending the reach of targeted communications is not enough. Email marketers, brand managers, and retail advertisers need to be able to quantify the results of their 1 to 1 marketing efforts and tie them back to click throughs, conversions and engagement metrics.
In the context of email marketing (near and dear to my heart) ExactTarget has a vision to solve this problem through our integration with ShareThis. Identify your top subscribers, the most popular content for sharing, and the top networks for your content - this would allow you to drive targeted content to specific subscribers and networks. In addition to enabling your advocates to share with their friends (which is great in itself) - we believe it will prove to be a great list growth strategy for your opt in email marketing programs.
Stay tuned for more!
We all do it. We think we know everything there is to know about what we do. Then something changes or we come across a situation where we're just out of our depth. The same basic concepts have applied in email delivery and online marketing for the last decade, but there are different, better, newer tracking and laws and and and... CAN-SPAM compliance, feedback loops, DNS-based blacklists, right-hand side blacklists, email authentication. The list goes on and on.
Delivery is the act of transferring email from the sender to the recipient. Deliverability is the art of achieving maximum inbox delivery across multiple domains. You cannot approach email deliverability with the same mindset that you approach offline marketing. Email marketing is a powerful, powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but the strategies that apply are more about interpersonal relationships, relevance, and the recipients' preference - the coffee shop relationship.
How do you use combine the basics with new technologies to optimize your email campaigns? What have you done to design the best opt-in email advertising program possible for your company?
The reason append doesn’t work is you’re sending email to people who don’t expect it. Let me explain the issue with this simple equation: Unexpected = Unsolicited = Spam = Complaints = Deliverability Issues = Brand Erosion
Derek Harding went on the record against email append today in ClickZ with his article titled, “The Dangers of Email Append.” He referred to email append as hold-over from the early days of direct marketing. In his own words, “E-mail append is essentially old media, print direct marketing thinking shoehorned into the online world. When print direct marketing evolved, there was no realistic way for user preferences to be expressed.”
That’s true. Direct mail and even telemarketing is largely one way, and no where near as interactive as email or emerging social and mobile media. Consumers hold email sacred, and they know what spam is. Don’t let your brand be associated with it. If you choose to append, talk to your append provider about doing it in an opt-in manner. When they do the permission pass, have them get the opt-in, then mail only to your customers that raise their hands. Those that do will likely appreciate the outreach, those that don’t will be at best annoyed and at worst cease doing business with you.
As Derek mentions, much of the advice you’ll receive from industry experts on append is a list tricks to minimize append's negative impact and protect yourself from fallout if it goes wrong.
Derek continues: “Why such advice? Because we all know it can go wrong in a lot of ways. The best we can hope for is marginal ROI and list growth with low-value subscribers.”
So if it is fast, but doesn’t work well, then why do it? Remember the Turtle vs. the Hare?
According to ForeSee data published in this Media Post Article, cell phones will help influence purchase behavior for shoppers in 2009. As more subscribers' phone plans grow to include mobile messaging (including SMS/text messaging and MMS) as a part of their subscription cost, we might see a large spike in the amount of influence an SMS has in the marketplace.
In the meantime, there are a number of ways retail operations can incorporate SMS in your one-to-one marketing strategy now to get ahead of this trend. Here are just a few ideas:
In Stock Inquiry: subscribers in-store can text in a product code to check availability of an item (rather than find a store employee to do it for them, or wait for them to "check in the back").
Out of Stock Alerts: allow would-be purchasers to sign up for an SMS notification when an out-of-stock item comes back in-stock. Note: store managers/operations could also use SMS in this way to alert them when to order new inventory, or when stock is running low.
Opt-in to Email Lists: retailers sent more email this past holiday season than ever before. And list growth provides huge growth opportunity. Use text messaging to drive your opt-in email list with ExactTarget's Text Capture.
Confirmation Codes: instead of printing a receipt or relying on an alpha-numeric code scratched on the back of a coupon, include SMS on your ordering website, or in your call center to allow subscribers to receive a text message with a confirmation code that can be saved and taken with them.
Product Numbers: After browsing online, nothing is more frustrating than going to a store and not being able to find the item. Let subscribers use your website to text themselves a product code that they can bring into the store.
Upsells: If your system recognizes that a subscriber is in-store (by way of participation in a product inquiry or voting), use that chance to send a special deal to be used in-store only in the next 30 minutes.
There are likely hundreds of ways to leverage SMS for retail stores. For 15 more, check out the ExactTarget Field Guide to SMS.
If the term “opt-in” had a brand manager, they would be fuming! At this point, they’d also likely be fired for incompetence. Ken Magill’s article entitled “Opt-in is Dead” is sadly dead on and the riff-raff that use email as a dumping ground are to blame.
It never ceases to amaze me that I receive spam daily from companies hoping to sell me “opt-in” email addresses. Kind of ironic isn’t it?! They promote their “opt-in” email, database business by spamming me.
Email append is one example of how the spammers and data providers of the world have screwed up the term. See Al Iverson’s comments on his blog.
Al references my 2005 blog entry where I complained about the email append industry relying on confusion around the term “opt-in.” Certainly the email addresses on the append provider’s database have opted into something, but until they raise their hand and ask for email from your company, they haven’t really opted in to anything. So anyone sending email to appended names is sending unsolicited email.
I agree with Ken, the term “opt-in” has been used and abused. We either need to hire a PR firm for it, or come up with another term. Permission-based marketing is another one I’ve used historically to describe sending email only to people that request to receive it. Will that fly, or is that too abused as well?
Do you have any thoughts for “Opt-in’s” brand manager? He could use the input…
On Monday I gave insights into the last few days of the Email Insider Summit. As promised here are my predictions and recommendations of what the future holds.
First, I recommended that marketers should leverage cross-channel opportunities and trends. Forrester Research’s report on “The Web's Impact On In-Store Sales: US Cross-Channel Sales Forecast, 2006 To 2012” says that “Overall growth of cross-channel sales is strong, far outpacing not only total retail but even eCommerce…” This leaves a huge opportunity for email marketers to leverage cross-channel selling opportunities. Retailers should begin thinking of their email program as being multi-channel, certainly with one key being driving in-store sales. We think marketers should be investing in single-use, barcoding and coupon functionality which allows marketers to deliver a customized, personal coupon, These coupons can then be tracked at brick-n-mortar POS systems. Those using coupons in a store could then be marked as “high value” and “highly engaged” customers – and be messaged differently based on this behavior.
Much of the audience agreed that coupons are good, and customized coupons are even better. Questions and comments focused on the complexity of implementing this across organizational silos. I agree this isn’t an easy transition to link online and offline efforts that were once entirely disparate, but it is a reality retailers need to face.
Second, I encouraged marketers to find ways to engage and capture customers via inbound SMS promotions. By “inbound” I mean triggered first by the end-user, not the marketer. Per our 2008 Channel Preference Survey, we learned that consumers, and especially teens, hold their mobile phones to be a very personal space and not right for outbound, pushed promotions. Honoring permission is critical and for the short term, outbound SMS messaging should be primarily the realm of opt-in alerts (your plan is late) and not marketing. Yet technology exists for marketers to leverage the ubiquity of cell phones as a new tool for building an opt-in list of email subscribers. This can be done in similarly to a traditional SMS call to action “to receive alerts, text JOIN to (shortcode #)” – but now also can build an opt-in email database by adding text that says: “to join our email newsletter list, text your email address to EJOIN to 74746.” The marketer can then respond to the address via email to confirm the opt-in, and if the subscriber confirms it, begin to send them email per the opt-in.
There was a lot of confusion about this, perhaps because the idea is so new and cross-channel. Most comments focused on concerns about sending outbound SMS messages….which misses my point entirely. Morgan Stewart, however, did touch on the concept a month ago in his blog on list growth ideas: http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/morgan-stewart/0/0/mobile-boarding-passes-inspire-new-list-growth-ideas
Again, what I recommended was opting into “email” via “SMS text message.” This is no different than having an opt-in sheet of paper near the checkout register, except it is way friendlier. In fact, think of the power of having a band promote the fact that all audience members can opt-in immediately to receive “tour updates and special band updates” by texting their email address and confirming the opt-in. In a concert hall of thousands, imagine the impact on list growth in a few minutes….and legitimately captured via double opt-in.
The difference between doing email appends right and doing them wrong involves changing one significant step… the outbound message. Instead of the outbound message containing a link to opt-out, the outbound email marketing message should have registration as the primary call to action. This approach to email appends is called "opt-in" email append.
ExactTarget was one of the early proponents of this approach and we have now real life experience with this approach under our belts. Opt-in email appends have been very successful in delivering highly responsive subscribers without the headaches and pitfalls associated with opt-out appends. However, the challenge is in getting a significant number of people to convert on these outbound email invitations.
Success in converting opt-in email appends involves defining your value proposition. It involves having a compelling reason for subscribers to register--selling your program to the prospective subscriber. All of which is based in the bedrock of marketing success... a good strategy combined with strong campaign execution.
Once you have your strategy for enticing prospective registrants, follow the steps outlined in my previous post about opt-in email campaigns.
The thing that clients like about this approach is that they only pay for emails that are likely to perform. It can take a while to get past the reality that this is not going to add a million email addresses to your list, but that shouldn’t be the point. There are only two business models that can drive revenue from an unresponsive email address—list brokers and email append vendors. By working with these providers on opt-in programs, you eliminate waste and ensure that you will get email addresses of real, live people that are likely to respond.
Yes, this puts a premium on the associated costs and makes pricing more complicated. Don't expect to pay $0.50 per email address acquired through an opt-in append. Things like the loyalty of people on your house file, the strength of the call to action, the size of the input file, and anticipated conversion rates may be considered in determining costs. But at the end of the day, this is in the best interest of the client as it avoids the issues typically associated with opt-out email appends and the overall quality is much, much higher.
The Silver Bullet?
Companies looking at email appends are typically looking for a fast and efficient way to grow their lists. Don’t buy into the promises of a quick and easy solution to grow your list. To be completely cliché “If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.”
Done right, email appends can be effective—but they still take time, careful planning, good execution, and financial resources. It is not the silver bullet that most people imagine when they latch on to email append as the solution to their list growth woes.
- Done wrong, as is the case with opt-out email appends, we have found that these initiatives are more time and cost intensive as other list growth tactics.
- Done right, in the case of opt-in email appends, we have found these initiatives to be at least as time and cost intensive as any other list growth tactics.
Given this reality, 9 out of 10 times, I prefer to invest the same time and resources into other proven list growth methods. A couple consistent winners are:
- Make sure that there are compelling opportunities to register for email throughout your website. This is basic, basic stuff… START HERE.
- Integrate search campaigns with email registration. Search campaigns should be integrated with email registration efforts. Capturing email addresses on landing pages is the first step. Aligning the call to action on your landing pages with specific search campaigns is the second step. For example, visitors from brand keywords should get a different call to action than visitors from direct in-category keywords or competitive keywords.
- Integrate with offline efforts. Provide an incentive as part of your existing direct mail or print advertising efforts to register with your company online.
- Partner co-registration. Find like minded companies that you can cross promote. You include a signup space on their page and vice versa.
- Tradeshows are huge for B2B marketers. This is no secret, but there is often a significant effort involved in collecting all those business cards and then getting those contacts to opt-in to your program. Do the due diligence and get these systems in place.
The idea of sending an opt-in (or “re-opt-in”) campaign to subscribers to verify email permission is not new, but the frequency with which we deal with these campaigns is increasing. Over the course of the past year, I would estimate that I have personally worked with over 20 email marketing clients on these types of campaigns… and ExactTarget as a whole has run many, many more. Here are a few interesting things we have learned about how to run these:
1) Be clear in the subject line. Email subject lines like, “Verify your subscription continue receiving [XYZ]” or “Your subscription will end soon” tend to work well. Often these campaigns are targeting subscribers who have not responded in a while, so breaking the mold with this type of concise and straight-forward subject lines help get people to open the email.
2) Restate your value proposition. This is a simple reminder of what your email program offers. A concise restatement of what your subscribers can expect reminds them of what you are all about… and what they will miss if they do not confirm their email subscription.
3) Use YES and NO options. This is huge (read this part carefully)! The misconception is that if you only offer a “Yes, please subscribe me” option that more people will react positively by opting into the program. We have tested using a single “Yes” option vs. the “Yes and No” options for at least 6 different clients. In every instance the “Yes and No” option resulted in significantly more opt-ins! There is something about seeing both options that drives more people to respond. Maybe these emails seem like less of a gimmick, more genuine, or more serious. Whatever the reason, the reality is that by including that NO option, you will actually get more people to click YES. (See the Peppermill Example below)
In addition, this approach to email opt-in campaigns provides you with clear answers. There are three resulting groups: 1) Those that opt-in, 2) those that opt-out, and 3) those that did not respond (even if they opened the email). This third group of non-responders will be your target for a second request.
4) Try sending a second request. There are situations where a second request is not appropriate. For example, if you are trying to clean a list suspected of containing spamtrap addresses. However, if you have used the YES and NO options cited above, the non-responders are a prime target for a second request for email permission. We find that these second requests consistently get nearly the same number of opt-ins as the first, so failing to do so could have a material impact on the success of your campaign. We have worked with organizations that have tried a thrid request using the same logic, but the dropoff at this points has been substantial in our experience--two appears to be the right number.
Peppermill re-opt-in email example
The Peppermill decided to conduct a re-opt-in campaign to these subscribers and tested the following two emails:
Version #1
Version #2
Which version do you think resulted in the most affirmative opt-in responses? (Keep in mind that the only choice in Version #1 is “Yes”, while Version #2 has “Yes” and “No” displayed with equal prominence.) Given the context of this example, I hope you picked Version #2. It was the winner and the results are statistically significant.
ExactTarget Feed
Powered by Compendium Blogware