Archive for the ‘Email List Management’ Category
Posted by George Palatine on July 13th, 2009
When is the last time you reviewed your email opt-in form(s)? Are you still asking visitors for their birth date even though your birthday promotion was canceled months ago?
It is a good idea to periodically review/update your company’s opt-in strategy to align with current business objectives. Marketers love having access to gobs of data, which can sometimes work against them. The key is finding the right balance of what to request and what you actually use in your program. Planning for the future is not necessarily a bad idea but asking users to complete multiple fields for data that you currently do not use can lead to lower opt-in rates.
If you are in doubt, use the formula below as guide to determine how much is too much. Your PI, or Personalization Index, is determined by dividing the number of elements (data sources) you use in your email marketing strategy by the number of elements you collect (data fields on your opt-in form). The rule of thumb is that if your PI is less than .3 you are collecting too much. In other words, you are asking for far more information than you actually use in your email marketing efforts.
Let’s take a look at an example of this. Say an online retailer requests 14 fields on their opt-in form. In addition to name and email address they are requesting items like birth date, HH income, zip code, marital status, etc. These are all great demographic data points and can be used to segment and personalize messages, but is it too much? If this retailer only uses first name, email address, zip code and household income in their program then it is too much.
PI = 4/14 = .285
By eliminating just one or two of these fields the ratio would move above the .3 measurement. Understand that this is meant to serve as a rule of thumb and is more of an exercise to get you thinking about the data you collect and how you use it. So take a look at what your PI ratio is and remove any unused/unnecessary elements from your forms. You may soon see an increase in quality and volume.
Tweet This Post
Posted by George Palatine on March 9th, 2009
Email newsletter sign-up… triggered welcome message… hard bounced email. What just happened? The cause is most likely an email address input error by the user. Anyone who has been involved in email marketing has probably seen typos in their database, the question is what did you do to correct/prevent it?
Now this topic is not a new one in the email marketing best practices handbook. Unfortunately however even as validation technology improves the statistics have not. A 2008 FreshAddress study of leading internet retailer’s email validation practices reveals that email registration errors have shown little or no improvement from a similar 2006 study.
According to this research, 6.6% of email addresses are input incorrectly but suggests that it could be as high as 25% if no validation methods are used at all. Think about that, if your business collects 100,000 emails a year, 6,600 or more of them are wrong! Aside from the obvious economic implications of a lost opportunity there are additional concerns.
- Customer dissatisfaction with your company/brand because you did not perform as expected.
- Negative impact to your company’s digital reputation due to a significant amount of hard bounces in your list. This is a real problem because this will likely affect your email deliverability rates.
- Wasted marketing dollars due to bad list data.
Worst of all, just taking a few steps to insure accuracy could prevent this.
Many of these bad addresses are a result of simple syntax or misspelling errors. Some of the most frequent include;
- Using a comma instead of a period in your email address
- The @-sign mis-keyed as “2” (shift key not pressed)
- An accidental space within the email address
- Transposition of .com to .cmo
- Misspelling of Yahoo or Hotmail
So how do you fix these before they make it into your database? Here are a few simple/less technical suggestions.
- Make sure the size of the text entry box on your website form is large enough. The average email address is 26 characters long. If your form can only display 15 characters before the text scrolls out of view then customers could make a mistake and not even see it.
- Double entry of email address on a web form is a simple method but in most cases users will just cut and paste the first line into the second so it does not significantly improve your results.
- Reaffirm your offer and ask that people take a second look at their email address before they submit.
Some additional methods that require a bit more technical implementation but can be highly effective include;
- Email validation code on your web form. This can be a simple low-tech test for syntax errors to very sophisticated real-time validation/correction software. Which you use should depend on the value of each missed opportunity within your organization and your observed email failure rate.
- Confirmation page before posting the data to your database. For example, after a user clicks submit, a page can display asking them to take another look at what they just input. Be sure to allow them to make changes on that page or to confirm accuracy and continue.
The moral of the story is that you should monitor the email error rate within your organization and take the appropriate steps to reduce it. In this economy every little bit helps.
Tweet This Post
Posted by Dave McCue on December 11th, 2008
A typical foray into my personal email account involves one strategy and one strategy only; deletion with reckless abandon:
“10% off…” – Get back to me when it’s 50. Delete!
“Fwd:…” - No time for forwards. Delete!
And so it goes—sometimes even emails from my mother accidentally get caught up in the carnage.
But today I actually took a moment and looked at the many unread email messages waiting for me, all boldfaced and hoping against hope that today would be the day, and it occurred to me; at one point, I really did ask for all of these.
That email about getting my credit report sure looked spammy, but I was the fool who signed up on one of those free credit websites a few years back out of curiosity (tip: they aren’t free). Did I really ask to receive email updates from a site that sold posters? Yes, upon further reflection, I did—because I used to give really lame Christmas presents.
Signing up for emails has become a very “shrug-and-move-on” sort of transaction, similar to swiping a debit card to make purchases. Not until the inbox begins to reach the brim (or the bank statement arrives) does it become clear how quickly such things add up.
I don’t think I’m much different from the typical email user in this regard, which is why the issue of crowded inboxes is such a challenge to overcome for email marketers. While I—unlike many email users—only use the “Mark as SPAM” button in obvious cases of abuse, I do tend to delete messages in bulk rather than go through the unsubscribe process for each one. Somewhere out there, an email marketer is racking his/her brain trying to figure out why I haven’t been opening the emails I’ve been receiving for so long.
Of course, this is where the issue of list cleansing comes into play. Am I currently a source of revenue for these people? No. Was I at one point? Yes. Taking me off their list, when I could theoretically be thiiiiis close to making my next purchase, is a tough call in light of how inexpensive it has been to keep in contact with me all this time.
Much like the sign-up process, deleting unread messages rather than unsubscribing is the type of action I (and many other email subscribers) perform without much thought. But if, one day, I received a “We Haven’t Heard From You in Awhile” message, it would likely flip the switch in my head reminding me that I don’t want this email, and I can end this wicked game once and for all by taking a few extra seconds to unsubscribe.
By pushing me to take action in order to stay on their mailing lists, these marketers would only risk losing an uninterested subscriber—increasing their open and click-thru rates in the process—and my mother’s next email might go unscathed. Everybody wins.
Tweet This Post
