E-mail Protocol

Do Your Homework with Email Marketing

By Janet Cross, Founder Lorien Marketing

Recently, an overzealous retail salesperson took a Columbia County Chamber of Commerce membership book and created his own email list from it. He put together a colorful promotional flyer and attached it to an email that he titled “ Attention: Columbia County Chamber of Commerce Member. ” Within moments after he hit the “SEND” button, alert Chamber members were contacting the Chamber to advise them of the renegade email – also known as “spam.”

The incident actually offers a great opportunity to review some of the basic rules of email marketing, which is rapidly becoming an important component in the modern business' marketing strategy. Email outreach can be cost-effective, impactful, and fast. For businesses, it's a powerful tool for developing relationships with customers and prospects, and for alerting them of time-sensitive offers. For non-profits, it's an essential way to keep constituents and supporters informed of events and needs, to manage fundraising and membership renewal campaigns, or to mount political or philanthropic action campaigns.

But email marketing takes know-how. You have to get permission from your constituents to email them, and then make sure that your messages are relevant and deliverable. And those who really want to use the medium's power must ultimately learn how to segment their audiences by interest and customize email communications accordingly. Such personalization, prohibitively expensive in printed matter for the small to medium-sized business, is completely do-able online.

Five Rules of Email Marketing

What follows are my 5 fundamental rules for email marketing:

1. Get permission to email—and keep it!!!

2. Gather email addresses everywhere

3. Know how to get your message delivered

4. Offer only relevant messages

5. Track and measure results

Rule 1. Get permission to email—and keep it!!!

Email demands a new kind of contract with your constituents. It is not acceptable – ethically or legally – to blast emails to your constituents — whether they're members, customers, or prospects — without first obtaining their express consent.

Ethically: Your care for your customers' and prospects' privacy demonstrates respect, which is critical for a good relationship.

Legally: The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 spells out the laws governing acceptable email marketing behavior. Its intent is to protect the privacy of individuals online by making it illegal to capture and use their email addresses, or other personal information, without their consent.

It's crucial to know what's allowed and what's not. The Council for Responsible E-Mail of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) recommends the following:

• Invite individuals to join your email mailing list on your website, in a direct mail piece, or over the phone, and be sure to inform them at that time about the nature and frequency of the emails you'll be sending.

• Create a clear privacy policy that is easily accessible to recipients on your website. It should explain what data is collected, how it will be used, and if and how it will be shared.

• Track and record customer permission with the date and time received in order to expedite response to inquiries.

You have four basic levels of permission to choose from:

• Opt-Out: This is the least potent permission, as it does not require any action on the part of the recipient and therefore may yield the highest number of inactivate recipients, bounce-backs, and later opt-outs. When the user first is invited to be on your email list (while they're registering for something on your Website, for example), you give them an option to remove themselves from your mailing list. If they don't click it, they're automatically added. The Council for Responsible E-Mail recommends that the opt-out option be included at the point of initial email capture (with a pre-checked box) and in subsequent communications (not pre-checked).

Opt-In: The user actively chooses to receive email from you by clicking a permission box. No confirmation email is sent and the user is not required to take further action.

Confirmed Opt-In: The user here elects to receive one or more of your communications. You follow-up with a confirming email, but do not require the user to take any additional action.

Double Opt-In: The highest level of permission, double opt-in produces an email list of individuals who are highly qualified prospects and customers, and who tend to be more responsive to subsequent email campaigns. These users elect to receive your email messages, and then have to confirm that choice upon receiving a confirmation email by returning to your Website and clicking a confirmation box.

Over time, you want to continue to give the individuals in your email marketing list the opportunity to change their permission. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 again spells out the requirements for ensuring that email recipients can recognize your mailings and can opt-out:

• Provide clear and conspicuous notice at the top of the email if it is a solicitation. Also provide an opportunity in every email you send for the recipient to opt-out of future mailings (through an “UNSUBSCRIBE” link to your website or by sending back an email).

• Be clear and accurate in your Subject line about your content.

• Include your physical address and contact information in the body of the email.

• Be attentive to any feedback or complaints. Handle them immediately. If you use an email service to send your emails, ask if they have a feedback loop so you can be notified immediately of any complaints.

Rule 2. Gather email addresses everywhere

There are many ways to gather email addresses from your existing customers and prospects. Here are some starter ideas:

• Add a field for email collection on your Website. Don't miss opportunities to ask for emails on order forms, special promotional reply cards, and bills (or, for nonprofits, on membership signups, renewals, and fundraising appeals). Be sure to have an email sign-up sheet at your events.

• Provide an online registration mechanism for capturing name, address, and email information. Offer a compelling incentive, such as a newsletter or special notice mailing list, so recipients see a benefit to providing their email information. Better yet, offer consumers a range of communications, and ask them to select the ones they are most interested in. Provide clear explanations of how the individual's email address (and other data) will be used and protected, and offer easy opt-out choices.

• In all of your offline communications, drive people to your website registration process.

• Build your list through viral marketing. “Tell-a-friend” email campaigns should include a request to forward the email to friends, family, and colleagues. When a new prospect o(or nonprofit supporter) clicks through to your website to register, ask for their permission to include them in future communications.

Rule 3. Know how to get your messages delivered

It's crucial to keep your email list clean. Internet Service Providers (ISPs)—the companies like America Online, Yahoo, and MSN/Hotmail, that actually route all of the emails we send and receive every day—now collectively maintain a rating system for email blasts using the source email from which they're sent. So, if you regularly send out an electronic newsletter or electronic coupons, or whatever, and have a lot of bouncebacks from your list, the ISPs are likely to suspect you are spamming and decrease your rating. Get enough reductions in your rating, and they'll blacklist you, meaning you won't be able to email again.

Here are some suggestions for keeping your list clean:

• Every time you mail, track and remove all bouncebacks from your list (and try to find a correct address!). If you're using a third-party service to send your emails (an Email Service Provider, or ESP), instruct them to send all bounce-backs through to you so you can remove them from your list.

• If some of the bounces were “soft,” meaning that they were returned as temporarily undeliverable, you can try to email them once or twice more before you give up and remove them from your list.

• Because email addresses deteriorate more rapidly than physical addresses, you should mail every four months to ensure that your names are still good.

• Instruct your email service provider to match your email list against available suppression files, such as the DMA's e-Mail Preference Service, Deceased Do-Not-Contact List, wireless blocker, and other sources (see Related Links at the end of this article).

• Know the Wireless Domain rules. Even if you don't intentionally engage in messaging to wireless devices, you may inadvertently do so and run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act. To avoid this problem, run your email list against the Federal Communications Commission wireless domains suppression list (see Related Links at the end of this article).

Another huge problem for email marketing is getting your emails through filters. Spam filters are built into popular email managers to enable recipients to screen out unwanted mail. Filters use multiple criteria for this screening, most of which you can control with the right know-how:

• Always use substantive subject lines in your outbound emails. For example, if you regularly send out an e-newsletter (or ezine), always identify it by name in the subject line.

• Always identify your organization in the “from” line of your email, and always send the emails from the same email address.

• Always advise anyone joining your email list to add your email name to their filter's white list (specific instructions work best).

• Most email marketing software and email service providers offer a spam checker function, so you can identify any potential spam violations and correct them before sending your email out. Use them!

The new emerging standards for deliverability, however, go much further. Because spammers so easily can get around filters and spam blockers, ISPs are now developing Authentication, Accreditation, and Reputation solutions to better protect their customers. The Direct Marketing Association now requires all of its members to employ one of these standards. See the links at the end of this article for more information.

4. Send only relevant messages

Along with the growing challenge of getting your message into your recipients' inboxes is the equally vexing problem of getting them to open it!

The best way around this is to gather enough information about each recipient so you can send them only the information they've asked to receive. A series of check-boxes on your email registration form, for example, lets them choose at the outset. Offering a password-accessible PROFILE on your Website lets them return over time to change their selections.

Even if you're not yet ready for this level of customization yet, there are other steps you can take to personalize your email communications:

• Focus each communication on one message, one offer, and one simple action.

• Use the recipient's name in the body of the email. Even this simple form of personalization yields higher open rates and click-throughs.

• Segment your mailing list by recipient demographics and by user behavior, such as the age of the record and activity history.

• Test campaign elements, such as how often recipients respond when you change the frequency of your communications, and whether certain days of the week and times of day improve open and click-through rates.

Segmentation is a lot of work, both online and off. But it's worth the effort. Segmentation of email lists increases the number of recipients who open your emails, and can double the rate at which recipients click through to your website.

5. Track and measure results

As implied in Rule #4, successful email marketing requires constant and ongoing testing, measurement, and revision. This is true of any good marketing campaign offline or on. Luckily, in email marketing, some statistics are readily available that you can't get in other media.

For example, good Email Service Providers (ESP) can monitor and report back the number of recipients who opened your email. They're also able to track how many recipients clicked through to your website.

At your end, you have to then measure click-throughs and conversions. It's pretty easy to do this by creating individualized landing pages for each version of your email, and then measuring response to each. Each landing page must be relevant to the offer you make in the email and must allow the individual to easily complete the action step requested.

Also plan in advance to have an immediate follow-up confirmation go to the individual's email after they have completed any registration, purchase, donation, or whatever other step was required of them at the website. And before you mail, create a plan for the frequency and content of follow-up messages you'll send to both non-respondents and respondents.

Easier as You Go

If all of this sounds daunting, it is at first. There's a lot to know about effective email marketing. But if you've ready this far, you already know enough to avoid egregious mistakes that could alienate your constituents and scuttle your email marketing returns. Start where you are and run some small tests to learn your way. Think about ways you could use email marketing to make all of your other marketing tactics work even better. Use email strategically, as part of an integrated go-to-market plan to build customer relationships and loyalty.

Janet Cross is co-author of Customer Bonding: Pathways to Customer Loyalty (NTC Business Books, 1994), and has written numerous articles on marketing technologies, strategies, and techniques. She founded Claverack , NY agency Lorien Marketing to be the local communications subsidiary of Cross World Network, Inc., a global marketing consultancy. She can be reached at 518-851-9074.

Do Your Homework with Email Marketing

Five Rules of Email Marketing

Rule 2. Gather email addresses everywhere

Related Links

Direct Marketing Association E-mail Preference Service