E-mail marketing remains one of the chief ways that e-commerce sites can acquire new customers, promote sales, and retain existing users. But with CAN-SPAM, anti-spam crackdowns by major ISPs, and ever-more-aggressive spam filters, it's getting harder for legitimate marketers to promote their wares.
"Three or four years ago, [e-mail marketing] was quick, easy and cheap," said Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at e-mail service firm EmailLabs, speaking during the recent InternetPlanet Conference and Expo in New York. "Now, it requires a lot more sophistication, knowledge, and dedication ... CAN-SPAM took a lot of practitioners by surprise ... some large companies actually put their e-mail projects on hold."
Fortunately, plenty of strategies remain that e-tailers can utilize to promote traffic and sales on their sites. Speaking on a panel at the conference, McDonald and other e-mail experts outlined tactics that can help legitimate marketers successfully avoid some of the pitfalls caused by spammers.
One area in which online merchants can see potential improvement in their e-mail marketing is through list segmentation. Although it may seem difficult at first, the experts said list segmentation can prove easier than it at first seems, and that even small efforts pay off handsomely.
"I understand why marketers aren't going down the path of segmentation -- it is hard, it is an investment," said Melissa Shaw, principal of strategic services at e-mail marketing firm Responsys. "I try to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces. It's even as simple as taking a single demographic attribute -- men vs. women, geography, age group or asking one or two questions per age group -- and using that as a basis to get started."
Added McDonald, "It's just as simple as having different subject lines, different targeted subject lines based on some demographics."
Once merchants have gained some experience in segmentation, they should be able to ramp up their efforts and reap serious rewards using more advanced techniques, such as segmentation by user behavior.
"Segment your list based on the links people clicked on," McDonald said. "You can look [at user behavior] over a period of time. The end game is to do dynamic content -- create single templates and based on peoples' demographics, build e-mail on the fly offering them specific news or products specifically where they live."
"We've seen over 10 times' increase in click rates" using behavioral targeting, McDonald said. "Targeting definitely works if you have the data."
Additionally, Shaw suggested that mailers examine their e-mail copy to avoid being misidentified as spammers.
"There are all sorts of tools out there to evaluate your campaign before you send it," she said. "It definitely adds more steps to your campaign development process, but I think it's definitely worth the risk ... It gets down to looking at your copy and seeing that we've said the word 'free' four times, if we reduce it to three, that improves our score."
Additionally, McDonald said that senders ought to ensure that they have properly communicated how often they plan to send e-mail to the customers who have signed up for mailings.
"One mistake people make is they don't manage that expectation of how often they expect to receive that e-mail," he said.
And, of course, lists should be fully permission-based.
"You need full permission, preferably double opt-in," McDonald said. "E-mail, more than any marketing medium, the customers have more control over that relationship than any other sender."
Some speakers also said some companies have been avoiding list rentals. That's because list rentals can expose mailers to the possibility of customer confusion at receiving offers from an unfamiliar company -- or even can have been wrongfully harvested, leading to poor response rates, accusations of spam, and potentially, legal fallout.
"I've seen most of my clients are not touching those e-mail lists at this point," Shaw said. "We're still pursuing different acquisition techniques, like partnerships. But I don't have anybody using list rental as their primary, or even secondary or tertiary acquisition technique."
For click-and-mortar e-tailers, Shaw recommended gathering e-mail addresses in-store or at the point-of-sale.
"I've been finding that's the best single source as far as ROI," she said.
All in all, speakers said e-mail marketing remains a useful and viable tool for promoting sales, winning new customers, and keeping top-of-mind with existing buyers. But as the difficulties of doing so have increased, so, too, must the efforts of legitimate mailers.
"There's just been an extra onus put on legitimate marketers to compete with spammers, and there's such an increased risk of getting lost in the clutter," said Lauren Robinson, director of outbound marketing solutions at CNET Networks. "We've had to spend a lot more resources -- money, time, effort, energy -- to increase our knowledge base and have a dedicated team just purely focused on deliverability."
Christopher Saunders is managing editor of eCommerce-Guide.com.
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