New Study: The Email Experience for Online Buyers

I’m proud to announce the launch of a new study on email experience: Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers. You can download it now and also sign up for our March 19 webinar.

For this study the Professional Services Group bought merchandise from 45 retailers to see what type of promotional email they would send to us as buyers. Then we also signed up for the same retailer email programs using a different email address and not making a purchase. This allowed us to compare the first promotional message sent to a buyer with the first promotional message sent to a prospect – would it be different? Would the retailer use purchase and demographic data to target the buyer promotion and make it more relevant, or would buyers and non-buyer be treated the same?

In most cases we found that the email wasn’t different and wasn’t targeted based on that initial purchase. The study also reveals interesting findings about …

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THIRTY-ONE PERCENT OF ONLINE RETAILERS SIGNED UP CUSTOMERS TO THEIR EMAIL LISTS WITHOUT REQUESTING PERMISSION, ACCORDING TO NEW RETURN PATH STUDY

STUDY CONDUCTED BY RETURN PATH’S NEW PROFESSIONAL SERVICES GROUP

For Immediate Release — Online retailers have spent years optimizing their digital marketing and customer retention strategy. However, many online retailers still struggle to maximize the numerous sales opportunities available through more effective email marketing, a new study from Return Path reveals. The Increasing Revenues By Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers report conducted by Return Path’s newly revamped Professional Services Group discovered that while basic transactional email practices are excellent, many well-known brands missed opportunities to maximize sales and up-sell potential by better targeting messages to buyers and including promotions in transactional messaging.

Return Path’s Professional Services Group conducted the Increasing Revenues By Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers report by purchasing items from 45 online retailers, monitoring the transactional and promotional message streams, and comparing those emails messages with messages received by registering for the same email programs without making a purchase.

The new study discovered that …

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Unwanted Email = Missed Opportunity

Return Path friend and investor Fred Wilson has a post on his blog today about his recent mission to unsubscribe from unwanted email. He mentions the oft-cited myth that clicking unsubscribe links will result in more spam. While this was never true of legitimate companies, it was, and still may be true of scammers, phishers and other bad actors.

Those of us in the email space just get this, right? But Fred’s blog is a good reminder that most consumers don’t. They don’t have the time or the inclination to decide – on the fly, with hundreds of messages stacked up like jets over LaGuardia, demanding attention now! – if this email is from a legitimate company, and therefore safe to unsubscribe from or not.

How did we get to this sorry state of affairs? A few ways, actually. …

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The State of the Email Marketing Economy: Whistling Past the Graveyard?

I spent much of last week at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Work Group (MAAWG) meeting in San Francisco.  As usual, MAAWG was a great chance to catch up with the folks we work with both at Email Service Providers and ISPs.  Here’s the conversation, I heard several times over at the conference between folks from ESPs:

ESP A:  How is business?
ESP B:  Great, we had the strong fourth quarter and Q1 is looking good
ESP A: Yep, us too.

The other thing I’ve heard from a lot of email marketing sources is that they are seeing a lot of customers that are new to the market – that are just starting their email marketign programs. …

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Charting A New Path: Focus is Our Friend

When Return Path turned six years old a few years ago, I wrote a post on my personal blog (OnlyOnce) titled You Can’t Tell What the Living Room Looks Like from the Front Porch. The essence of the post is that flexibility is a key success factor in starting and growing a business, and sometimes the business turns out different than what you thought when you wrote that business plan. At the time, I was commenting on how different Return Path turned out – operating five businesses – than we did when we started the original ECOA business in 1999.

Today, the message rings more true than ever. On the heels of our recent announcement that we have acquired our largest competitor in the deliverability space, Habeas, we announced a series of moves internally that chart a very new path forward for the company. We are:

• selling our ECOA business to FreshAddress, Inc., our long-time esteemed competitor in the email list hygiene and updating business;
• spinning out our Authentic Response market research business and our Postmaster Direct lead generation, list rental, and online media brokerage business into a new company called Authentic Response; and
• combining our Strategic Solutions consulting business in with the consulting portion of our Sender Score deliverability and whitelisting business to form a new, powerful global professional services team inside of Return Path

The title of this post says it all. …

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Making the Case for Email Marketing

I’m on a plane, and the gentleman next to me on the plane is the CMO of a large multi-brand retailer. After exchanging introductions and pleasantries, I ask him if he’s happy with his email marketing program. The resulting conversation was fascinating, and typical of those we have with our clients while trying to help email program directors make the case to executive management about investment in the channel. I’m hoping that this particular CMO goes back to his team and engages.

That would be just one small step for email marketer-kind.

SAM: How is email marketing working for you?

CMO: Well, it sure generates a lot of revenue for us. I can think of three or four months this year where we doubled up on email messages and that helped us make our month.

SAM: So it’s a really important part of the marketing mix then, eh?

CMO: Sure. It’s in there.

SAM: And, you have a lot of people working on email to optimize all that revenue, then?

CMO: Oh no. (Laughing) We have one junior guy. He reports into my head of ecommerce. I think his name is Steve. Yeah, that’s right, it’s Steve. …

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Report from Shop.org #2: Are You Brave Enough to Abandon Batch & Blast Email Marketing?

One of the key issues for retailers looking to move to a lifecycle-based approach to email marketing is gathering data from the disparate systems that allow us to send triggered messages based on subscriber behavior. Typically this means sending abandoned shopping cart messages or recommendations based on browsing or follow ups after purchase.

In a great panel discussion that I led at Shop.org’s Annual event last week (see last blog posting here), Angela Caltagirone of Williams-Sonoma and Anne Ashbey of Harry & David both talked about the need to manage the data across many product SKUs in order to mail a significant number of subscribers each month. When each segment performs at 5x-30x higher than a generic promotional message, the ROI value is clear. But if you can only reach a small number, say 5,000 subscribers with each mailing, the revenue contribution is small. Automating these triggers is key – so that you can get enough scale and reach across your file to make it worthwhile. Even Rob Gallagher of Overstock, with a large file and detailed segmentation, has challenges with data integration.

Several retailers lamented the lack of ability to access website browsing data at all. And all the speakers acknowledge that …

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Recession Buster Ideas for Email

The news these days from Wall Street and the Halls of Congress could not be worse for marketers already worried about the recession and consumer and business spending in Q4.

Can email help? I think so. In fact, I think now’s the time to prime your email program into a powerful revenue channel, before the news gets worse. Come on, we were the “killer app” of Web 1.0. It’s well past time we proved our worth in the Web 2.0 marketing mix

Here are three ideas to test now – and use the data to build your program success for Q4 and into 2009. If email doesn’t contribute more now, then we can’t expect to remain at the center of the marketing mix, or budget.

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Asia Diary Day 3: Reviewing Spam Laws in Shanghai

During our APAC tour (previously written about here and here), we became more aware of interesting local laws attempting to legislate against spam. Please don’t interpret this as an official legal position (we aren’t lawyers, international or otherwise), but check out these policies:

Singapore: Marketers must mark their messages with the letters “ADV” for advertisement to make it easier for a consumer to direct unwanted mail to the electronic trash bin. Singapore supports “opt-out” mailing – a generally lower bar than requiring “opt-in.” If a consumer opts not to receive …

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Asia Diary Day 2: Meeting Receivers in Beijing

Last week I wrote about a deliverability seminar in Singapore with some of APAC’s top senders. During our Asia tour we also had a roundtable session with many of the top ISPS in China and Yahoo & Microsoft. The spirit of the session was a chance to improve communication and collaboration in the ISP community.

This is a brief summary of some of the comments expressed by these members of the Chinese ISP community:

• They have general problems with communication outside the region. Most of their interest is finding contacts and opening channels of communication to resolve network block issues. They want to know internal blacklist criteria and urge transparency. …

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