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Archive for December, 2009

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Come in 2009, your time is up

Just a final post for 2009 to wish you and all those dear to you a happy holiday period and a safe and successful 2010.

I’ll be back blogging in the New Year.

Below is a holiday message from me and the stars of “the future of email” together with some outtakes from that video.

Take care and thanks for blessing me with your time and attention this year.

Mark

(View on YouTube)

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Channel: None (just a friendly update)

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Channel: None (just a friendly update)

The future of email: the kids speak out

As the year draws to a close, it’s time to provide a definitive answer to the big question of 2009: does email have a future in a world of social networks?

And that answer comes from those who represent our future: the kids. Prepare for some surprising insights…roll the tape:

(View on YouTube | More email marketing humor)

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Channel: Marketing humor

What email users say: Part 3 (managing perceptions and discontent)

survey Parts 1 and 2 of this series looked at attitudes to commercial email, definitions of spam and reasons for unsubscribing.

But how do people make a judgment call about an email? What do they do when they’ve decided it’s spam or they don’t want it anymore?

And how can you use that knowledge to improve your email success?

Focus on the headers and preview pane

The message is clear: recognition drives perception and action. For example:

The MAAWG consumer study asked respondents how they distinguish between spam and legitimate email. 67% said sender name, 45% subject line and 22% cited visual indicators
Asked what compelled them most to open permission email, North American respondents to the Epsilon Global Consumer Email Study cited the from line (68%) and subject line (26%) tops

Core factors are clearly your headers and what appears in the preview pane. It’s all about recognition. And training people to recognize your emails as legitimate begins well before you send the first email, as explained here.

It might also be worth testing adding recognition elements (like a brand name) to your subject line, even if the sender is already clearly identified in the from line. It worked for this company, nearly doubling clickthroughs.

Manage how people treat unwanted email

Even the very best email programs are going to lose subscribers. The key is managing how those subscribers choose to handle email they no longer want (what many of them would now call spam).

So what do people do when they’ve decided you’re sending spam?

According to an informal eec survey, 71% use the delete button, 39% hit the spam or junk button and 39% unsubscribe
Around two-thirds of North American respondents to the Epsilon Global Consumer Email Study were prepared to use the “mark as spam” button
The MAAWG survey also asked what action people take on receiving spam: 78% delete without opening, 35% move to junk folder and 8% report the message to their email provider

Critically, the options for dealing with spam (delete, move to spam folder, report directly as spam and unsubscribe) also apply to “legitimate” emails that people no longer want:

ExactTarget examined how people on a quality, permission-based list unsubscribed. 60% did so via email or using the unsubscribe link in the email. A significant 40% “unsubscribed” by clicking the “This is Spam” button.
The Emailcenter study of UK consumers asked what people do when they don’t want to continue receiving marketing email. 14% use the spam button, 77% unsubscribe and 40% just delete the messages
The European survey conducted by ContactLab also asked what people do once bored with a newsletter. 66% said “I delete them without even opening them”, 36% said “I put them into the spam folder so I do not see them any more.”

The above stats show that people will consider more than one way of dealing with unwanted email.

Spam reports, junk folder filtering and “delete without reading” all hurt engagement metrics, drag down your sender reputation and reflect badly on your brand or image.

An unsubscribe is a much better choice from the marketer’s perspective. It gives you the chance to make a clean, positive impression when people leave the list.

Unsubscribe pages also allow you to present alternatives to the would-be leaver: other ways to hear from you, alternative content, reduced email frequency etc.

So the challenge is to influence people away from the bad options, towards the good one. For example by:

Building trust
Making unsubscribe links more prominent
Unsubscribing inactives from your list (only after trying a reactivation campaign)

Bonus 1: perception also drives sharing

Perception, of course, drives much more than unsubscribing behavior.

For example, Blue Sky Factory interviewed students about social media and email habits. Asked if they would share commercial emails, most responded as if that was an entirely hypothetical situation. But consider some of the quotes:

“If it was entertaining enough and actually cool”
“If it was interesting”

…not “if it has a share on Facebook link”.

“Share with your network” links facilitate sharing, but the motivation to use them comes from your content/offer. An obvious concept we forget in the rush to add “Tweet this” links to password notification emails.

The recent Email Insider Summit also featured a panel of college graduates talking about email. Watch the video here.

Bonus 2: words drive perception

A common marketing trap is to assume those reading a message speak the same specialist language as those sending it. Email marketing has its own vocabulary, but it’s not one shared by the people who actually get the emails.

If you want people to take the right action, don’t use jargon they can’t understand. The informal survey of 65+ people outside the industry by the eec Consumer Education Roundtable, for example, found that most did not know how to define an “email service provider” or an “email client”.

Even basic terms can be an issue. And Darrah MacLean recently asked if subject lines and email copy should really use expressions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other forms of retail-speak.

Bonus 3: what ISPs say

That concludes our 3-part journey through consumer email attitudes. But there’s a third partner in our email love triangle: the ISPs and webmail services that sit between sender and subscriber.

What do they say about all this?

Delivery and anti-spam blogs have recently covered this topic in some depth, with a definite sense that ISPs are:

1. Looking to user interaction with your emails as a better guide to determining whether that sender’s messages are worth delivering.

2. Looking to make email service providers more accountable for the actions of their customers.

To find out more, here some of the latest links:

Word to the Wise blog: e.g. The coming changes and ISPs are speaking, is anyone listening?
Spamtacular.com: Barry speaks
AOL Postmaster blog: Permission vs Request
ExactTarget blog: Why does Yahoo hate me? (see also the comments)
Annalivia Ford: Why is my window fogged up?
Cloudmark blog: Permission
Internet and e-mail policy and practice: Just make it stop
Spam Resource: Did you catch that?

The shift to subscriber empowerment is good for good emailers: if your subscribers want your email, they’ll get your email.

The challenge, therefore, is not (just) to master the intricacies of email deliverability, but to produce email that subscribers want.

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Channel: Email user research

What email users say: Part 2 (spam, value and branding)

survey Part 1 of this series examined user attitudes to email and commercial email in general. Now let’s explore the distinction they make between commercial email and spam.

This distinction is obviously important.

Nobody should want to send spam, and not just for ethical reasons: if you send spam, expect a hit to your brand and image. And expect people to report you as such, which leads to blacklisting and other problems.

It’s all about individual perceptions here, so let go of your own opinions. Everyone has their own definition and what matters is what recipients think: they’re the ones with the finger on the (delete) button.

So what criteria do users apply to define spam? Let’s begin with the obvious…

Spam is unsolicited

Spam is…email I didn’t ask for. (surprise!)

73% of North Americans surveyed in the Epsilon Global Consumer Email Study defined spam as “Any email I receive that I did not ask for or subscribe to”
60% of those questioned by a MAAWG consumer study defined spam as “email I did not request”

Don’t look away. This definition includes email you think you have implicit permission to send, because they know you:

ExactTarget’s 2009 Channel Preference Study asked people to rank the acceptability of promotional messages on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Permission-based email came in at an average 4.1, email with no permission but a prior business relationship scored a 2.5 and email from businesses they’d never interacted with just 1.7
In an informal survey by the eec Consumer Education Roundtable, 76% of respondents defined spam as “Any email I didn’t ask for, even if it’s from a brand I know.”
…and 34% of those Epsilon respondents agreed that spam was “emails from companies I have a relationship with offline, but to whom I never gave permission to contact me via email.”

So you can argue about prior business relationships as justification for emailing, but know that this will not prevent some people seeing that as spam.

If you’re not focused on delivering value, you’re a spammer

Spam is…email I don’t want.

And here’s the rub. It’s email that users don’t want, even if they asked for it.

In the Epsilon study, for example, 39% agreed that spam was “Any email I receive that I don’t want, regardless of whether I subscribed” and 39% also agreed that it was “An email from a company I may have given permission to send me mail at one time, but that I no longer wish to receive.”

Equally important, the people who run email at ISPs and webmail services agree. Note the wording used by Gmail’s anti-spam czar:

“Some of you already use the “Report Spam” button on all kinds of unwanted email, and for that we’re very thankful.”

…which explains why ISPs have added engagement metrics to the list of factors contributing to your sender reputation.

We all know that we should deliver value through email.

Except we don’t.

Because even a low response rate is enough to make email marketing profitable.

So we’re happy to send email that gets responses from a few recipients, not realizing the poor impression we’re making on the rest.

And it’s not just about perceptions. Many consumer surveys highlight “lack of relevancy” as a top reason for unsubscribing.

In Merkle’s 2009 View from the Inbox, 75% gave relevancy as a reason to unsubscribe
67% of the North Americans surveyed by Epsilon cited “irrelevant content” as a reason
In a UK study by Emailcenter, almost 70% mentioned “no relevant products”
…and a recent survey by the CMO Council and InfoPrint found 46% unsubscribing because the emails “are not relevant to me”

And no, most emails aren’t relevant, whatever senders might think. That UK study also asked consumers what proportion of the marketing emails they get are of interest. Over 70% said a quarter or less.

Deliverability is a branding issue, too

Spam is…email that lands in the junk folder.

45% of those Epsilon respondents agreed that spam was emails that are filtered into the junk mailbox
41% of those in the MAAWG study said it was “email in spam folder”

Well, duh! But hang on…think about the reverse philosophy.

If you have delivery issues and land in the spam folder, will people start to think of you as spam, even if you’re not?

Yikes. We tend to evaluate delivery in terms of positive responses. As long as our success metrics are good enough, we can tolerate the odd missing email.

But that missing email isn’t having a neutral impact. It’s hurting your image. It’s another reason to focus on improved delivery, even if you have a successful program.

It doesn’t stop there, either.

Bad email has a cost attached to it

I’ve talked before about the hidden costs of lazy email marketing. Here’s the evidence:

In Merkle’s 2009 View from the Inbox, 32% of respondents declared they’d stopped doing business with one or more companies due to the latter’s poor email marketing practices
The CMO Council/InfoPrint survey found 22% of respondents had stopped purchasing from a company because of the overwhelming impersonal clutter caused by irrelevant email or direct mail promotions

Again, focusing only on immediate success metrics (opens, clicks, conversions) disguises the true impact of your email efforts. This works both ways, of course. For example:

The Epsilon study also found a significant number of respondents purchasing offline in person or via phone as a result of opening permission-based marketing email
50% of respondents in Merkle’s View from the Inbox said good emails influenced their decision to do on- or offline business with a company
In the same study, 35% said they were more likely to “…spend more money with a company who sends them email they read regularly than a comparable one who doesn’t communicate via email”

Keep tabs on frequency

Spam is…email that comes too often.

As with the relevancy/value issue, too many emails can induce a “this is spam” response and drive unsubscribes.

31% of North Americans surveyed by Epsilon described “emails from a company I have done business with but that come too frequently” as spam
The same survey found 64% saying they unsubscribe because emails come too frequently
Merkle’s 2009 View from the Inbox found 66% describing frequency issues as a reason to unsubscribe
Emailcenter’s UK survey found just over 62% saying that “they send too many emails” was a factor causing them to want to stop receiving marketing email
The CMO Council/InfoPrint survey found 23% citing too many emails to manage as a reason to unsubscribe

A key point here is, again, perceptions. Emailcenter also found that over half of those surveyed said companies send them more emails than they expected.

There’s a difference between “too many emails” and “more emails than expected”. The latter issue might be solved by setting appropriate expectations during the sign-up process. The former by giving those who wish to unsubscribe the option to stay on your list but get fewer emails.

A user’s perception of email overload is intimately tied to the perception of the value delivered by those emails. It’s a concept you can exploit to let you send more email and keep the subscriber happy.

Part 3

So we now understand the different ways users define spam and why they unsubscribe from marketing emails.

How do they make the judgment call? What action do they then take to tackle spam or unsubscribe? And how can you ensure your emails are treated positively? Part 3 has some answers…

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Channel: Email user research

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