No man is an iland

Well, no man is an iland (or even an island). The end of the year sees me take a few days to recharge those creative batteries with the family, and warm myself with a cup of mulled wine at Vienna’s Xmas markets.

I’ll be back blogging in the New Year. In the meantime, you’ll find some holiday-themed email marketing fun below…to keep the festive cheer going.

Thanks so much for blessing me with your attention in 2010. Thanks especially to all those who’ve left a comment or spread the word about the blog through a social network or elsewhere.

Thanks also to my main 2010 sponsors (Campaigner, VerticalResponse, StreamSend, EmailReach, GraphicMail and emarsys) for their support.

Thanks to all the marketers, bloggers, writers and vendor staff in the industry: your work and writing inspires and teaches me.

Thank you, and have a super and successful 2011!

Mark

Holiday fun

1. Santa’s inbox (by yours truly over at FamousInboxes.com)

2. ESP Bronto produced a whole album of popular songs rewritten with an email marketing theme. Very clever, very brave!

3. L-Soft also took a musical route, with their permission-based rendering of Verdi’s Celeste Aida aria.

4. The staff at ESP Pure also faced a musical challenge with their rendition of We Wish You a Merry Xmas.

5. Journalist Ken Magill destroys a couple of Christmas carols in the interests of deliverability. (I did something equally terrible to Winter Wonderland a few years ago).

Happy Holidays.

Find related articles:

• Channel: None: just a friendly update.

1. Nobody would get any presents unless they wrote to Santa explicitly asking for them.

2. The gift wrapping would have a little transparent preview window in it, so you could see the contents of the parcel without having to open it.

3. He would pack each gift twice. Once in colored gift wrapping and once in plain brown paper.

4. The message on the gift tag would be limited to 50 characters and always feature first-name personalization.

5. In roughly 10% of houses, Santa would emerge from the chimney to find himself in the trash can and not the fireplace. This despite a squeaky-clean sender reputation.

6. He would always get 99% open rates, despite the fact that his delivered content is often low-value or irrelevant.

7. The 1% who don’t open their parcels would get a new parcel around December 30th: same gift, but different gift tags and wrapping.

8. If they didn’t open the second parcel, Santa would write and ask them if they still want a parcel next year, otherwise he’ll stop delivering.

9. He would have spent all year arguing with Facebook Santa and Twitter Santa over who should get the biggest slice of (mince) pie, before deciding they would all benefit if they worked together to make the pie bigger.

10. He wouldn’t get many people reporting his gifts as unwanted (even though some of them are) and opting-out of future deliveries.

11. His detailed tests on the “best time and day to send” would have very conclusive results.

12. The content of each parcel would be determined on a one-to-one basis, using an analysis of each recipient’s prior behavior.

13. He would encourage you to share your gifts with your social network.

14. He’d send a follow-up message over New Year asking you to write a review of the gifts.

15. You would be able to sort presents into piles based on importance. One pile for important gifts, one pile for not-so-important gifts and a special pile for gifts from Great Aunt Mildred.

Add your own suggestion in the comments…

[With thanks to all those who commented on the original 2007 version]

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing humor

The previous post explained why testing is so valuable for email marketers…and described ways you can overcome some of the technical and psychological barriers to starting your own testing regime.

Which begs an obvious question: just what parts of an email are best tested? (And don’t anybody say “all of them”).

Once again, email marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn of emailmonday and email marketing strategists Kelly Lorenz and Kristen Gregory of ESP Bronto Software are here to help find answers…

What are the quick testing wins? What should we start with?

Subject line tests are an obvious candidate as they’re very simple to do. Kristen says:

“Testing on subject line is a perfect example of a simple test that doesn’t necessarily involve as much work as, say, a content split on offer type where you’d need two different pieces of creative, possibly approval by certain individuals to do so, set-up for different promotion codes, potential training of customer service, etc.”

Kelly agrees, citing subject line and time of day/day of week testing as typically the quickest and easiest tests to perform.

“I also like to recommend to new email marketers to test creative elements like adding call to action preheaders, call to action buttons and language, as these often provide big, immediate wins.”

Jordie’s also a fan of CTA and button design tests, adding:

“Also test (product) images: those can produce a big lift and are easy to do.”

While subject line tests are probably the easiest, Jordie warns us to be careful with them: winning concepts may not always transfer from campaign to campaign.

“If you are making a plan, look for easy to do tests with a high potential gain. If you combine this with high re-usability, you’ve got the winners!”

“The easiest test is subject line testing, but usually those are not (totally) re-usable unless you are doing a drip campaign.”

The “reusability” of test results is a big issue, of course. It’s no good doing email tests and then drawing the wrong conclusions through a flaw in your analysis or test setup. So are there any common mistakes to watch for?

What common mistakes should you avoid?

There are, of course, technical testing errors that you can make, such as using too small samples or testing two email versions where there’s too many differences between the two to meaningfully interpret any result boosts.

But our experts identified various analysis and management errors that even the lay tester can (and should) easily avoid.

1. Lack of preparation

One common mistake is alibi testing with no real goal or purposeful analysis of the results. Kelly says:

“Don’t test just to test and look good for your boss – doing so wastes your time and provides no benefit to subscribers. Go into every test with a set plan, test multiple times, analyze your performance and implement the key takeaways.”

2. False attribution and generalizations

On the surface, test results seem pretty good pointers to what works better and best. If a green button pulls more conversions than the red button, then you know which button to feature in future email campaigns.

Unfortunately, it’s not always as simple as that.

First, there are many factors affecting email response. So, as Kristen points out:

“…you can’t just assume that this email test performed this way because of the one variable you changed. That’s why you have to continue to test your theories.”

Kelly adds:

“Looking at the test in a silo may cause you to miss the point. As an example, I tend to caution clients that test in the fourth quarter to be cognizant of the seasonality impact.”

Second, it’s too easy to take a test result and assume the result is universally applicable. Or as Jordie puts it, you can’t…

“…take the outcome of one test and declare it holy for all e-mailings.”

He adds:

“That often makes me kind of upset, because you know that that company is making an effort, but doesn’t yet have the insight…what works at Christmas might not work in summer. What works in marketing emails might not in service updates. Re-test and keep it going, it’s a constant process.”

3. Things change

The point about generalization applies to time as well. Subscriber reactions and responses change with time, so what worked before may not work forevermore.

Kristen says:

“…testing is never done! It’s not uncommon to see what works best become stale and need to be replaced with something new and shiny. You can’t get complacent and say that this approach works best even though you last tested it a year (or more) ago.”

4. Not digging deep enough

Perhaps the hardest mistake to avoid is simply not paying close enough attention to the nuances of the results. Analytical skills grow with time and experience and can turn a failed test into a success. Jordie gives us an example:

“…one client didn’t get any positive results by tweaking the current design. Or so it seemed, because after some analysis it was clear that some tweaks had worked for a part of the subscriber base, but other segments cancelled out the effects. Now they are optimizing design for each of those segments.”

Tales from the front line

Testing is usually praised by experts because of the improvements it brings to your success metrics.

One argument against testing is that many such improvements can be made anyway by anyone with a solid understanding of email design, copywriting and subscriber behaviors.

This just isn’t true.

One thing that every marketer eventually comes to learn is that personal experience and intuition is not a flawless predictor of how subscribers behave.

To illustrate the point, I asked our experts to give us some examples of surprising or impressive test results. So to finish this mini-series, here are their stories:

Jordie:

“We were doing a continuous subject line test, testing four subject lines against a control each month. The control [Newsletter company name month] won or was equal every time.”

“So after 5 months a team member said “Let’s just face it, people want the boring subject line. We can’t improve results like this.” The next month one of the subject lines outperformed the control by +30% clicks. It just goes to show that you should stick with testing.”

Kelly has three examples for us:

1. “One client that’s a large clothing retailer had been sending one big image emails when we decided to test splitting the email into a hero image and a corresponding copy section that was plain text to combat ISPs images-off default.”

“It turned out after testing multiple times that the big image email won across the board! Our best estimate on why was that their subscribers wanted the main point only; they wanted to click through right away based on seeing the clothing and headline.”

“We kept a preheader call to action to help combat deliverability and image-suppression issues and continue to test adding other elements to the emails (like social and mobile), but the results of this one were certainly surprising.”

2. “With an educational goods client, we’ve tested a number of creative elements and subject lines focused on boosting response rates from opens through conversions and in a number of the tests the results were completely deadlocked – no winner to be found!”

“What that said to me was that their audience was responding or not based on variables beyond the content of the emails, which caused us to take a step back and look at the email program as a whole.”

3. “I love doing tests on behavior-based triggers like abandoned cart messaging to determine the best time and incentive to achieve the highest lift. ”

“One client I work with tested sending 24 hours post-abandonment against 3 days and actually saw higher conversions and revenue sending 3 days later, which is contrary to best practices.”

Kristen:

“One of my favorite testing stories involves a gourmet food company that I work with regularly. They were only sending their emails on specific weekdays. I think this is typical for a lot of companies – only sending on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for example.”

“This gourmet food company decided to try an A/B split on send time, pitting their normal weekday send against a Sunday send. They were extremely surprised to find that Sunday’s send totally crushed the weekday send!”

“Ultimately, this result isn’t too surprising as people may have more time to browse and shop on a Sunday. To top it off, getting more orders on Sunday enabled the company to get a head-start on packing and shipping these orders first thing Monday morning. I highly recommend marketers try out some weekend split tests to see if they get better results as well!”

“Another interesting testing story relates to a beauty product client of mine. Every week they have a sale at a specific time and were sending out a generic email reminder to check out the sale on the site. I recommended that they actually try highlighting the sale item in the email and subject line to see if they got more interest that way.”

“They have been running a series of tests and, so far, by simply looking at the opens and clicks, you would determine that the generic approach has been more successful.”

“A closer look, though, shows that the messages featuring the products have brought in more revenue!”

“Think about it: the generic email requires subscribers to open and click in order to find out if they are interested in the product in the first place, while recipients of the product-specific message don’t need to open if they don’t like the item in the subject line.”

“You could also hypothesize that the specific email catches the attention of those readers who might not bother to click to see this week’s product in the generic version. This client plans on continuing to test these two versions and gather more data before deciding which path is best.”

If you’ve any testing surprises or insights for us, let us know in the comments!

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing testing

Testing is like exercise.

Everyone agrees it’s a jolly good thing to do.

Most people never get round to it.

But those that do are immensely grateful they did.

So how do you overcome the barriers and inhibitions to testing? What should you test? What traps should you avoid? And what benefits can you expect to get?

All questions I’m uniquely unqualified to answer. So I asked some specialists to help tackle the issues.

In Part 1, we’ll look at what’s stopping you testing, how to overcome those constraints (even if you’re short on resources and technology), and the benefits testing brings.

In Part 2, we’ll explore what exactly you should test, highlight mistakes to avoid, and reveal some surprising test results.

Our guides are Jordie van Rijn, Kelly Lorenz and Kristen Gregory.

Jordie has over 10 years of hands-on experience as a loyalty and email marketing consultant. He’s also co-founder of Emailtestbox and author of the European email vendor guide.

Kelly and Kristen are both top email marketing strategists at ESP Bronto Software, working with major corporations to optimize their campaigns. Kelly recently spoke about email testing on eMail Radio.

So why don’t we test? Do you recognize the excuses?

There are three common reasons we don’t test:

• no time
• lack of skills/tools/resources
• limited understanding of the benefits of testing

For many of us, there’s a thin line between a reason and an excuse. But the overriding problem is often simply the work that testing demands. Because there is a real time/resource cost involved.

As Kristen notes:

“…a lot of marketers don’t test because it can take extra effort, especially if the technology they use to send email is limited or if processes are cumbersome. Marketers are often wearing so many hats, testing gets put on the back burner.”

Kelly adds:

“…effective testing is not easy and can be time-consuming. In addition to time and resource constraints, I think many times marketers don’t test at all because they’re not sure where to start: it can often be ignorance on the importance of testing and what to test.”

Jordie says many marketers view testing as a later step in the evolution of their email marketing efforts…something that comes after segmentation, for example. But:

“…you can start testing the day you start sending your first newsletter.”

Testing is ultimately about improving the quality and results of your campaigns. So it has an important role to play in a digital environment where standing still means going backwards. Kelly tells us:

“You can’t improve by doing the same thing in perpetuity. In fact, I’ve seen firsthand that staying with the status quo actually hurts in the long run. Results decline, subscribers stop responding and revenue is depressed.”

Jordie agrees:

“The thing is, average performance with your email marketing will get less and less results. The public is (directly and indirectly) demanding you be awesome in the things you do.”

…and testing is one way to move from average to awesome.

So how do you overcome the constraints standing in the way of your testing efforts?

Breaking down the testing barriers

The best way to encourage or justify testing is to understand the benefits it brings.

I’ve published lists of inspirational test results for emails and calls to action, and here are some examples:

• A subject line test doubled clickthrough rates
• A sign-up test lifted opt-ins by 1300%
• A call-to-action test led to 67% more clicks
• An email design test lifted conversions by 200%
• An email copywriting test raised clicks by 51%

As Jordie confirms:

“You can get staggering effects. Some clients have doubled their clickthrough rates by testing CTAs or added €30,000 in revenue by testing different offers.”

A side-benefit also comes from the mental flexibility that testing encourages. Kelly explains:

“I think the biggest lift comes from removing all preconceived notions and being open to testing everything. Clients that consistently test and push the envelope have seen consistent incremental growth in performance.”

Of course, not every test produces spectacular gains. Jordie warns:

“There are no guarantees in testing…You should be able to say, ‘I think this and this version can outperform the current version’, but your test versions might just perform somewhat the same.”

…and Kelly adds that, inevitably:

“…some tests don’t work, but trying different ideas always pushes the needle.”

To get more out of testing, Kelly also recommends getting a general education in email marketing innovations and best practices:

“Marketers should be reading blogs and articles on email marketing to help inspire and get the ball rolling. Taking just 10 minutes a day to read a post or two should help get marketers on the right track.”

While the prime reason for testing is the associated performance improvements, Kristen suggests it can also be…

“…a great way to try something new that others may not be fully comfortable with or to settle an issue that divides coworkers. Don’t argue over who is right and who is wrong or which is better – let the subscribers (and the corresponding data) tell you!”

An understanding of the potential benefits typically smooths the path to finding time and/or resources to actually conduct tests. Then it’s a question of commitment and planning. As Jordie says:

“Make a plan, that is all that it takes…get commitment from management for testing for an extended period of time and just do it! If you run into a problem, there is always an answer, but commitment is mandatory.”

Kristen adds:

“Build time into your schedule where you can brainstorm subject lines or offers – even consider creating friendly competitions in the workplace for the best subject lines/offers/time of day for your business.”

But what about technical barriers? What if you have a small list or no access to the kinds of automated testing tools offered by higher-end email marketing software and services?

Coping with technical barriers and small lists

First off, you may be surprised at how many email marketing services now have easy-to-use tools that support testing.

Even traditionally value-priced services commonly offer the ability to split your list into two random groups and send a different version of your email to each to see which performs best.

If that’s the case, then it’s just a question of using the available tools to implement your new-found testing enthusiasm.

If not, says Kristen:

“The only thing you really “need” to test is the ability to arbitrarily split up your list. If your email platform isn’t advanced enough to do some simple split-sends for you, then go ahead and send out two separate sends manually.”

Kelly adds:

“It’s more work and you may not be able to test as often, but it also draws focus on prioritizing goals.”

Kristen reinforces the last point, advising businesses with resource constraints to:

“…tackle less complicated tests, such as subject line splits, changing only the wording of your main call-to-action in your email, and so on.”

Of course, to do so easily means you need to be able to modify your emails or templates yourself. Kristen’s recommendation for small organizations is NOT to rely on a third party to create emails that are image-based and/or require dedicated help to make tweaks:

“Instead, send more html-text-based emails and, ideally, have easy-to-use templates created so that anyone can make changes on the fly without wasting a lot of time.”

A bigger concern for many is list size. The alternative versions of an email need to be sent to enough people to make the results statistically valid. Otherwise you end up making decisions based on flawed data.

So those with small lists wonder if they have enough subscribers to make testing meaningful, even if they use a big chunk of the list as a test group.

We’ll ignore the definition of what list size is “too small” for the moment and look at ways to compensate for this problem and ensure you get meaningful test results.

Three suggested approaches are:

1. Flip testing

Jordie suggests splitting the list into two, doing the test, then reversing the groups and repeating the test on the next send:

“That doubles your test group size.”

Of course, the email element you’re testing needs to be one that carries over sensibly from one email to the next, like a button color test.

2. Deployment testing

If you can’t split a list at all, then Kelly says an imperfect alternative is to vary your email from deployment to deployment rather than within a single send. So the weekly email might feature a red button in Week 1 and a blue button in Week 2.

The problem, she says, is that results are then affected by factors other than the tested element, but:

“…testing multiple times will help reduce this concern.”

3. Retrospective testing

Insights can often fall out of a simple review of past email campaigns to pick up on any elements commonly associated with particularly good or bad results.

Do you always get an open and conversion rate boost when you mention “free shipping” first in the subject line? Do long articles pull more clicks than short ones?

You can see an example of such a review exercise here.

In Part II, we’ll get our experts’ opinion on what tests get you a quick win and what common testing mistakes you should avoid. And they reveal some surprising test results to whet your appetite for your own testing efforts.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing testing

Spam is now simply email people don’t find relevant.

Customers are clearly interested in you.

So as long as you send them relevant messages, you can ignore whether or not you have an actual opt-in from these people.

Their interest (as expressed through a prior purchase) + relevancy = wanted email = not spam = “permission” marketing.

Nobody is going to complain about relevant email, regardless of whether they asked for it or not.

The above argument excites interest because it promises much greater returns for your email marketing, without the downside of being called out for spamming.

But does the argument hold up in theory and practice?

There are three questions to cover:

1. Is relevancy/value the only issue at stake for subscribers?
2. Can you be relevant without an opt-in?
3. How can you send more email safely? (which is really what this marketing debate is all about)

Is it all about relevancy/value?

The definition of spam has shifted broadly from “email not asked for” to “email that is not wanted”, implying that relevant/valuable email will not be considered spam.

This shift is reflected in statements made by the big webmail services in their bulk sender guidelines. For example, Gmail says:

“To increase the inbox delivery rate of your messages, make sure that all recipients on your distribution lists actually want to receive the mail”

Though this is a trend, it’s only true of a portion of any customer email list. There are still plenty of people who see email they didn’t explicitly sign up for as spam, regardless of any pre-existing business relationship:

• A May 2010 survey of 1860 UK consumers asked “What is most likely to prompt you to mark email as spam?” 18% said “Don’t remember signing up”.
• An April 2009 study of 4000+ global consumers found 34% agreed spam was “emails from companies I have a relationship with offline, but to whom I never gave permission to contact me via email.”
• A 2009 channel preference study asked people to rate the acceptability of promotional messages on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Permission-based email scored an average 4.1, email with no permission but a prior business relationship scored a 2.5.

It’s important here not to think in absolutes: do not assume all subscribers think alike. Any collection of customers covers a spectrum of attitudes to commercial email.

At one end are those who see any marketing email as spam.

At the other end are those who never see marketing email as spam (there aren’t many of those).

Most people are somewhere in between.

The more you move away from the permission optimum (explicit opt-in), the greater the proportion of your list who will see your emails as spam.

Improving the relevancy/value of those emails will compensate in part for permission sacrifices, but it clearly won’t eliminate all “this is spam” reactions.

Permission still matters when it comes to customer perceptions of your emails. Chad White, for example, describes permission as an ethical imperative:

“…the vital element that separates us from spammers.”

Dylan Boyd also sees permission as recognizing that the inbox is a private place, unsuited to email blasts designed to gain attention and reach in the way that a TV campaign might be carried out:

“I believe that working with people that want your communications works multiples better than the gather, spray and pray method some marketers use.”

So you can move away from the permission ideal, but it’s a gamble.

As Ken Magill notes:

“No, explicit permission is not necessary. Marketers who don’t get explicit permission are playing a dangerous game, but, no, it’s simply not required.”

The “dangerous game” is hoping that the value you deliver compensates for the lack of permission (though the above statistics suggest it can’t ever compensate enough for at least some of your list).

Now two more points.

First, although the definition of spam has shifted to mean “unwanted email”, no ISP or blacklist looks favorably on bulk email that isn’t opt in.

Google, for example, says:

“Each user on your distribution list should opt to receive messages from you” (and says pre-checked boxes don’t count)

Yahoo! says:

“To avoid being perceived as a spammer, use an opt-in method of subscription for your mailing list”

…and…

“If a customer entrusts an email address to you during a transaction or for a particular newsletter, they do not expect to receive unrelated messages, such as extraneous marketing emails, in the process.”

Second, local privacy and/or anti-spam legislation also controls the kind of permission needed to send emails to customers, prospects and others. It’s not just a marketing decision.

Is permission needed to be relevant?

We know that relevancy/value affects how recipients perceive your email. If your email is really valuable, many (perhaps even most) recipients will forgive the lack of an explicit opt-in.

That’s a great theory that commonly falls down in practice.

Why?

Relevancy/value is actually quite hard to achieve, even when you’re not trying to compensate for a lack of permission. It’s often a guessing game using cues, clues and assumptions that can never hold up across a list. Even when you have a lot of data at your disposal.

The UK DMA’s digital tracking study revealed that almost two-thirds of consumers consider no more than 10% of the promotional emails they receive to be interesting or relevant.

Just look at benchmark open and click rates for opt-in email to see how interesting most email is.

Some senders accept that argument but, of course, their emails are different: we are an above-average sender that really does send highly relevant email all the time. This is usually self-delusional.

We are all very bad at distinguishing between what we think is relevant/valuable and what recipients think is relevant/valuable. Here’s a made-up graph to illustrate the point:

Of course, one route to more relevancy is simply to get the customer to say if they want the kind of emails we’d like to send them.

Oh.

Um…that’s permission marketing.

An opt-in allows recipients to self-select for relevant/valuable email. In the words of Loren McDonald, permission…

“…lays the groundwork to create engaged and empowered users”

And as Al Iverson writes:

“…the only people that can get into the inbox are the ones that get invited there. Without that, the inbox dies, becomes useful for no one, marketer or consumer.”

Relying on relevancy/value to “trump permission” is a touch utopian.

How do you send more email safely?

So, softening permission requirements so we can send more email is an option, but one fraught with risk. Permission is tied up closely with both spam and relevancy issues. And being relevant/valuable enough to trump permission is a tough, tough job.

So why don’t we look elsewhere for ways to “send more email” without taking gambles on permission? Ways that benefit the recipient, too.

Here are some examples and references worthy of exploration…

1. Send more email to people who have opted-in

We worry – rightly – about the negative consequences of overmailing recipients: higher unsubscribes, spam reports, recipient fatigue, potential blacklisting etc.

But overmailing does not mean “sending more emails than you do now”. Overmailing means overmailing.

You may also be sending too few emails. For more on that concept see here and listen to Dela Quist here.

2. Increase frequency to an opt-in list to match seasonal subscriber expectations

Seasonal emails are timely and thus more valuable. If your emails are more valuable then all things being equal you can send more of them (as many retailers do with their holiday email marketing).

3. Invite existing subscribers to opt-in to higher-frequency messages

If you’re worried about increasing frequency across the board, then consider standalone emails, sidebars and/or secondary calls to action that invite existing subscribers to sign-up for more mail.

You might, for example, solicit opt-ins to a new newsletter, a sister newsletter or a closed-end series (like “12 days of Christmas” specials). Chad White has a report explaining how retailers can cross-promote sister brands ethically in their emails.

4. Send more email to your “best” subscribers

Again, if you’re worried about sending more email to everyone on your list, consider segmenting out your most engaged subscribers and increasing frequency to that segment.

How do you identify those subscribers? Find advice in these articles:

Find your best subscribers: why and how
Identifying engaged subscribers: repeat opens
Identifying engaged subscribers: unique opens, clicks, lateral thinking

5. Think in terms of transactional and service messages

As marketers we think all-too-often in terms of marketing emails as opportunities to get something from recipients (sales, downloads, registrations, etc.).

Transactional and service emails typically resonate better with recipients, because they provide a benefit, often with no strings attached. Examples include order confirmations, shipping notices, thank you and welcome messages, subscription reminders, account updates, etc.

These emails are also inherently more relevant than traditional marketing mails, since they are triggered by a well-defined recipient action or characteristic.

For marketers, such messages provide indirect benefits (by delivering value) and can provide a vehicle for secondary marketing messages. Permission issues also play a lesser role than with marketing emails: how many people mark an order confirmation as “spam” (some, believe me, but not many).

For more on transactional and service messages:

Marketing through admin and transactional emails
Post-Purchase Emails That Drive Higher Revenue, Engagement

6. Optimize address acquisition

Before gambling with marketing emails to people who didn’t explicitly ask for them, it’s worth exploring whether customers have enough opportunity to join your opt-in list.

Essentially, does the customer have enough obvious opportunities to opt-in to your marketing emails before and during any transaction and in post-purchase transactional messages? And do these opportunities present the benefits of opting in clearly?

If the answer to both those questions is yes, then you might also argue that customers that do not opt-in have “implicitly opted out” of marketing messages…making it even more of a permission gamble should you ignore that implicit wish.

(Not to mention the enormous no-no of sending to those who explicitly opted-out, for example by unchecking a pre-checked opt-in).

In summary

Can you send bulk marketing emails to customers who didn’t explicitly opt-in to your marketing messages? Yes.

Should you? Probably not.

Why would you want to when there are other less-risky options available? Exactly.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Permission issues | Email frequency