Relevance: don't underestimate it, measure it.

Ken Magill has an article today about a new service from e-Dialog called the Relevancy Trajectory. This product

identifies the specific factors that enable you to customize and time messages properly, encourage interactivity, and maintain flexibility in your e-mail campaigns. The six factors are:

  • Segmentation
  • Lifecycle management
  • Triggers
  • Personalization
  • Interactivity
  • Testing and measurement

Relevancy should be the new buzzword in email marketing. As ISPs have gotten better at blocking spam and identifying non-spam email, they are also getting better at measuring their users reactions to email. Once they measure the reactions, they can then put those reactions to the email into context and make decisions about the likelyhood that the email is wanted by their users.
In Spring of 2006, a representative of a very large consumer ISP reported at MAAWG that one of the measurements they were making when looking at classification of email was who the mailers were sending email to. By examining the population of recipients, they were able to make some very educated judgements about the quality of the sender’s email list.
What does this have to do with relevancy? While recently attempting to troubleshoot a client’s problem with this very same ISP the person I was speaking with told me that the recipients didn’t seem very interested in the email. Mail that was put into the bulk folder was not being marked as not-spam in any significant number. This led the ISP to judge that the email was not wanted and could be safely filtered into the bulk folder.
I took a look at the client’s program. They are not your standard bulk mailer, they are a petition and advocacy site. The emails they send out are to people who have signed petitions on their site in the past, asking them to sign new petitions. Because they send mail irregularly, recipients do not know when to expect the mail and do not look in the bulk folder to recover it. My client is always asking for something from users, but giving them very little feedback on what happens after the user takes action.
Based on my recommendations my client is now looking at sending a scheduled weekly email. This email will be short, just a couple paragraphs. It will contain a summary of the action emails sent in the past week, and a reminder for the user to check the bulk folder if they have not received the email. Additionally, it will provide feedback to the user on how effective their efforts have been at effecting change.
By making the email expected and engaging the user, the client and I expect that not only will their delivery be improved, but their users will be eager to participate in future petitions.
Email recipients are not mindless automatons, they are people. In order to motivate people to respond to an email by making a purchase, signing a petition, adding the sender to their address book or clicking ‘this is not spam’ the email must be relevant and expected. Senders must never forget that recipients are real and have their own needs and agendas.

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Permission, Part 2

Permission Part 1 I talked about the definition of permission as I use it. Before we can talk about how to get permission we need to clarify the type of email that we’re talking about in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about marketing and newsletter email, not transactional email or other kinds of email a company may send to recipients. Also, when I talk about lists I include segments of a database that fit marketing criteria as well as specific list of email addresses.
There are two ways that recipients give permission to receive newsletters or marketing email, explicit permission and implicit permission. Recipients give explicit permission to receive marketing email when they sign up for such email. Implicit permission covers situations where a user provides an email address, either during the course of a purchase, a download or other interaction with a company. There may be some language in the company’s privacy policy explaining that recipients may receive marketing email, but the recipient may not be aware they will receive email.
The easier situation is explicit permission. There are two basic ways a company can gather explicit permission to send marketing email: single opt-in and double (confirmed) opt-in.
Single opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email.
Double (or confirmed) opt-in: Recipient provides an email address to the sender for the express purpose of receiving marketing email. The sender then sends an initial email to the recipient that requires a positive action on the part of the recipient (click a link, log into a web page or reply to the email) before the address is added to the sender’s list.
There can be problems with both types of opt-in, but barring fake or typoed email addresses being given to the sender, there is an social contract that the sender will send email to the recipient. I’ll talk about single and double opt-in in later posts.
Implicit permission covers a lot of situations where email is commonly sent in response to a recipient giving the sender and email address. In these cases, though, the recipient may not be aware they are consenting to receive email. This behavior may annoy recipients as well as causing delivery problems for the sender. Common cases of implicit permission include website registration, product purchase and free downloads.
More responsible companies often change implicit opt-in to explicit opt-in. They do this by making it clear to users that they are agreeing to receive email at the point where the user gives the company an email address. Not only is the information about how email addresses will be used in the company’s privacy policy, but there is a clear and conspicuous notice at the point where the user must provide their email address. The recipient knows what the sender will do with the email address and is given the opportunity to express their preferences. If users do agree to receive email, the company will send a message to that recipient with relevant information about how their email address will be used, how often they will receive email and how they can opt-out.
Explicit opt-in is the best practice for building a list, however, there are still companies that successfully use implicit opt-in to build marketing lists. Companies successfully using implicit opt in usually are collecting emails as part of a sales transaction. There is very little incentive for their customers to give them an email address not belonging to the customer.
Outside of purchasers, however, implicit opt-in leaves a company open to getting email addresses that do not actually belong to the person providing the company with the email address. This most often occurs when the sender is providing some service, be it software downloads, music or access to content, in return for a “payment” of a valid email address. In order to protect against users inputting other, valid addresses into the form, the sender must verify that the address actually belongs to their user before sending any sort of marketing email. The easiest way for senders to do this is to send a link to the recipient email. This link can be the download link, or the password to get to restricted content. Because the recipient must be able to receive and act on email, the only addresses the sender has belong to actual users of the site.
In some rare cases, implicit opt-in can be used to build a list that performs well. However, senders must be aware of the risks of annoying their customer base and the recipient ISPs. Mitigating these risks can be done, but it often takes more effort than just using explicit opt-in in the first place.

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