E-mail is evolving. As you lay the groundwork for your 2008 plans, here are questions that might challenge and affect your planning.
Q. How do I know if my list growth is on pace with my competitors’?
A. List growth is defined as all new additions to your housefile minus bounces, opt-outs and any spam complaints received from ISPs. Your bounces are the largest negative factor. Remove all hard bounces immediately and retire soft bounces after three or four separate campaigns (or move them to a separate file for periodic recontact).
Research firm MarketingSherpa recently conducted a survey of several thousand marketers on net list growth. It reported consumer marketers enjoy 37 percent net list growth per year, while business-to-business marketers see 22 percent annual file growth. Use those figures as a benchmark for your program.
Q. My list growth is on target. Is it simply a numbers game?
A. Absolutely not. A good list is built on quality and not quantity. Quality starts with good permission practices, a plan to build a relationship with sign-ups and an execution strategy that delivers on the intention. Examine the list sources that contribute to the makeup of your list. You’ll see the best quality from e-mail sign-ups on your Web site, opt-ins collected during online checkout and those solicited by your inbound customer representatives. The majority of your list should come from these sources. Addresses collected from e-mail appending, co-registration offers, and from contests and sweepstakes will not be as productive.
Don’t forget to make use of all channels available to you. If you have retail stores, be sure to capture e-mail addresses at these locations. Your print and direct mail order forms should ask for e-mail addresses. In the past, marketers worried that e-mail address capture on these forms would depress response. Today, many marketers find no response difference; although a few marketers still report lower results.
Another factor that improves list quality is to collect additional information about the recipient. While you do want to keep the registration process as short and easy as possible, you need to balance that with the ability to learn more about your sign-ups. At a minimum, be sure to collect first name, last name, ZIP and/or postal code. You can use this information for personalization and to match against your customer records. You’ll also benefit if you can ask one question about their interests and preferences.
Q. What’s e-mail authentication and why do organizations like the DMA require members to use this technology?
A. Today, the prevalence of spam and phishing makes it important that recipients trust that the e-mail they receive is legitimate. Authentication technology was developed as one method to fight the deluge of unsolicited commercial e-mail and has been accepted as an industry standard. As one example, the Direct Marketing Association requires all members to authenticate.
