There once was a time when correspondent communication was done with three things: pen, paper and stamps. I used to write several letters a week. When I was living in El Paso, working in refineries there cleaning oil spills and digging ditches, I was writing two and three letters a day.
But that was back in 1993.
Although I continued to put pen to paper, by 1995 I was using email almost exclusively to communicate with people. It is still my preferred form of communication with most human beings.
Over 51 percent of the adult population in the United States uses email regularly, with 45 percent of the population using email every day, according to MRI Spring 2003. This makes it second only to the telephone as the most used form of mediated communication.
This means that email has also become one of the most significant marketing tools on earth.
Marketers could not pass up the opportunity to use the vehicle of email to get their messages out there. All manner of product and services have been offered to the digital masses, their electronic inboxes so full with marketing messages that if these pieces of advertising correspondence were paper, you would have to put an addition on the house just to receive it all.
But it is effective. Open rates for marketing email messages average 37.1 percent (according to DoubleClick Q3 2003 Email Trend Report released in December, 2003) in spite of email’s diminished novelty, our acclimation to it as a communication device, and our instinctual habits of deleting messages from unfamiliar sources.
Not only are more than one-third of all people who receive marketing email opening it, but almost one out of 10 are clicking through to wherever it is these messages are leading them. The average click-through rate on marketing email for Q3 2003 was 9.2 percent, according to DoubleClick’s 2003 Email Trend Report.
Billions and billions of pieces of marketing email are sent every year, and that number continues to increase. Although there is a lot of legitimate marketing email being sent on behalf of advertisers in an attempt to either introduce themselves to consumers or maintain a relationship with existing consumers, the overwhelming amount of spam being sent on a daily basis threatens to undermine the efforts of legitimate marketers using email as a method for communicating with an audience.
In the course of a month, individuals, companies and marketers send hundreds of millions of emails, but an ever-increasing bulk of them are coming from spammers set on inundating as many inboxes as possible, no matter the implications.
Based on data from the California Business and Professions Code Division 7, Part 3, Chapter 1, Article 1.8 Restrictions on Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Advertisers, roughly 40 percent of all email traffic in the United States comprises unsolicited commercial email advertisements. And industry experts predict that by the end of 2003, half of all email traffic will be spam. According to Ferris Research Inc., a San Francisco consulting group, spam will cost United States organizations more than ten billion dollars this year, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.
California is roughly 12 percent of the United States population, with an emphasis on technology business, and it is therefore estimated that spam costs California organizations well over 1.2 billion dollars. In response to this assessment, in September of 2003, California passed one of the most aggressive anti-spam laws in the country. Penalties for violating the law range from $1,000 per email sent up to $1,000,000 per incident.
Even the federal government has decided to get involved with President Bush passing the CAN-SPAM bill into law in December 2003. Although most critics believe this will actually make it easier for spammers to carry out their tasks without fear of recourse, it demonstrates just how serious the phenomenon has become to the public.
Be that as it may, online email marketing continues to be popular regardless of laws passed and protestations made.
The vast majority (91 percent) of consumers receive some form of permission-based email with 57.2 percent receiving special offers from online merchants, 55.4 percent receiving them from traditional retailers, and 48.5 percent receiving them from catalogers, according to the October release of DoubleClick’s 2003 Consumer Email Study.
Using E-Mail Today for Marketing
In spite of the ongoing problem of spam, the implementation of filters and laws, and the human being’s relationship with digital correspondence, email marketing remains effective and can still be carried out with the utmost integrity and be well received by those to whom your messages are sent. Following are issues to address with email vendors you are considering working with:
Ensure Double Opt-In
Having a permission-based list alone is not sufficient. A list owner needs to be able to document the user’s acquisition by that list in time and space. The provider of a list should be able to tell you the day, time, place, and IP for each member of a list added should you ask. If they cannot, be suspicious.
Do They Generate Fresh Lists?
Make sure the list owners refresh their lists regularly. There is nothing worse than sending a big batch of emails to a bunch of defunct addresses, except maybe sending them all to the wrong list. It used to be that a lot of list vendors would clean their rolls once every six months. Make sure their rolls are being cleaned monthly, as turn-over on addresses can be high. If the frequency of list cleaning cannot be confirmed, see if they will only charge you for emails delivered rather than sent; a no-charge for bounce-backs is a way around potentially dead addresses.
What’s Their Philosophy on Creative?
All creative is not equal, but it should be approached with the same sort of diligence and seriousness as creative is for other media. Copy and images need to work just as hard as they would in other media, so be sure that your best foot is put forward when designing messaging strategy for email marketing.
Can They Run Form-Supported Creative?
Don’t make consumers go anywhere if you don’t have to. Use form-supported email creative when running a marketing program using email. There’s no reason to ask a user to stop what he or she is doing and go some where else if you don’t need to. It is possible now to run form-supported creative such that a user can provide you with information, look up more information, or even commit a transaction.
Beware the CPA
If you approach a CPA network that uses email as part of the acquisition effort, realize the quality of those leads is questionable. Also, if you find that it is necessary to increase the CPA you are offering a particular network vendor, specific members of other CPA networks you might be using will abandon whoever they are with and go to the new highest bidder.
With email marketing, it is essential to be sensitive, creative and vigilant. The medium still can perform terribly well for marketers and advertisers, provided they put the appropriate amount of thought into how their audience behaves and why they use the medium. By designing your effort against an understanding of how and why, the closer you can come to being a part of that, and thus, the overall user experience. There’s no better time to present a message to an individual then when you’ve become a part of his or her life.
