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| Customers want to get e-mail from you. Really. |
July 9, 2002 |
By Paul Lima
You’ve done everything you can think of to drive traffic to your web site.you’ve optimized for search engines, and even paid for priority listings. And yes, visitors are coming. But how do you keep them coming back?
One word: e-mail.
Believe it or not, Canadian Internet users are receptive to e-mail marketing, but on one condition: they only want what they ask for.
This approach, called opt-in or permission-based marketing, means people agree up front to receive messages. And they are agreeing in big numbers.
Ninety-two per cent of connected Canadians using e-mail receive an average of 22 messages per day, according to a study by Canadian market research firm Ipsos-Reid. And here’s the crucial bit: nearly four out of five Internet users have opted-in to an e-mail marketing campaign.
The same Canadians who loathe unsolicited e-mail—or spam—will give organizations permission to send them email.
But send it too frequently, or send overt marketing messages instead of the informative newsletter you promised, and they will react to your opt-in e-mail the same way they deal with spam: cursing you as they pound the delete key.
Canadians can be fickle when it comes to e-mail loyalty, according to Ipsos-Reid. Of those who join e-mail lists, 77 per cent eventually unsubscribe because the information is not of interest or is sent too frequently.
“There is no doubt that this medium can be effective when used appropriately,” said Marcie Sayiner, senior research manager at Ipsos-Reid. “Marketers simply need to be more in tune with the needs of Canadian Internet users to avoid diluting the marketplace with ineffective or unsolicited e-mail messages.”
Organizations as small as the Toronto Chapter of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) and retailers as large as Future Shop use email marketing effectively.
At one time, PWAC Toronto volunteers phoned, faxed or mailed news to its 110 members. Now, PWAC sends an electronic newsletter. Since seminars and workshops for writers and journalists are open to the public, non-members can subscribe to a public version of the newsletter.
Almost 350 people have signed up for the newsletter in two years, said Leslie C.
Smith, a freelance humour and lifestyle writer and president of PWAC Toronto.
“People don’t have to attend events to sign up. They can do it online.” People who want off the list can unsubscribe. “That’s happened maybe five times,” Smith said.
PWAC Toronto sends out its electronic newsletter twice a month and keeps information brief, often directing subscribers to its Web site for full details. One volunteer manages the list, currently a manual process. Even so, the e-mail newsletter has reduced promotional costs and saved countless hours phoning, faxing and stuffing envelopes.
Automate for efficiency
Future Shop has a much more sophisticated subscribe/unsubscribe and delivery system managed by the electronic retailer’s information technology (IT) department in Burnaby, B.C. But when you have more than 100,000 people opt in, you want the process to be as automated as possible, said Rick Lotman, senior vice-president, merchandise and marketing with Future Shop.
Future Shop Web site visitors can sign up to receive the FutureFlash newsletter. To avoid the s-word (spam) Future Shop makes it easy for people to unsubscribe using a link in the newsletter or at its Web site. Subscribers receive a weekly newsletter that contains product news, how-to articles and information on in-store and online specials (with hot links leading directly to them).
FutureFlash is “getting a little less retail and a little more informative, based on feedback from customers,” Lotman said. In a recent issue, the newsletter offered up the first of two articles on the origins and applications of wireless networking. Lotman admits the company is trying to find a balance between promotional information and articles that customers will find useful as they conduct product research.
The information-heavy approach works because customers frequently use the Web to gather information about products and prices before they shop online or at stores. That means a hard sales approach is both unnecessary and may indeed alienate some customers.
Even small businesses can automate the process. When a visitor to the BestFit Solutions Web site signs up for a free newsletter on customer relationship management ( CRM) systems, the results are e-mailed to BestFit’s GoldMine contact management system. GoldMine then responds with a personalized email thanking the subscriber.
“All this and we don’t have to be in the office,” said Scott Gingrich, president of the Waterloo, Ont.-based company.
“Mailing lists can become cumbersome to manage,” said Gingrich, whose company has developed GoldPump, an application that automates the subscription process. For instance, GoldPump takes subscribe and unsubscribe messages from the Web and pumps them into the GoldMine database.
“GoldPump also works like a receptionist, independently sending one message at a time to list members,” Gingrich said.
This is an important function as Internet service providers move to curb spam. To conceal subscriber email addresses, electronic newsletters are usually sent using BCC (blind carbon copy). However some ISPs, like Sympatico, bounce back messages with more than 100 BCC addresses.
“The trick is to send the same message to multiple mailing lists, each with fewer than 100 members, or let an application like GoldPump handle it,” Gingrich said.
Consider your workload
“Small businesses can handle e-mail lists of up to about 500 people on their own,” said Sharon Tucci, president and CEO of Sling Shot Media in Cornwall, Ont.
More than that and the process starts to become time-consuming and you can experience problems with your ISP.
That’s when outsourcing the mailing list makes sense.
Some companies keep list management in-house until something goes wrong: a message is sent CC (carbon copy) to the list, making all the e-mail addresses public, or a server crashes and the latest list is lost because the company doesn’t back-up often enough.
Tucci and others said e-mail marketing can actually drive traffic and sales, but even opt-in e-mail can damage a company’s reputation if it’s not handled carefully.
Plain or fancy?
When it comes to sending electronic newsletters, there is a debate in the industry as to which works better: plain text or formatted messages, which use hypertext markup language ( HTML) and look like Web pages. PWAC Toronto uses plain text because its readers aren’t impressed by fancy graphics. As long as the links to the Web site work, they can get the information they need. Future Shop uses HTML messages, complete with logos, headlines, different typefaces and images.
“Some firms offer both formats and let users select the one they prefer,” Tucci said. But many Internet users are on limited-time connection plans, so they download e-mail and read offline so as not to burn up connection time. E-mail messages that contain images and graphics will not display properly unless the reader is online because such messages pull information from the Web. HTML messages also take longer to download and simply do not display properly in older e-mail readers.
As far as Tucci is concerned, formatted newsletters do not necessarily lead to a better rate of return.
Through http://www.listhost.net, Tucci hosts e-mail lists for almost 5,000 clients, from Fortune 500 companies to small operators. And she measures click-through rates—the rate at which recipients click from e-mail to a Web site. She said there is little difference between the click-through rate of people who agree to receive formatted messages and those who receive plain text. However, when not given a choice, the click-through rate for HTML e-mail drops by eight per cent.
On the other hand, formatted e-mail lets companies engage in branding because logos and colour are supported.
However, messages are more costly to create and the return on investment may be lower than with plain text. “It’s a time for response, not branding,” Tucci said. “If people have signed up, they know who you are. You want to build a relationship, get a response.”
Web e-mail
BestFit Solutions http://www.bestfitsolutions.com
Future Shop http://www.futureshop.ca
Goldmine Software http://www.frontrange.com
ListHost http://www.listhost.net
PWAC Toronto http://www.pwactoronto.org
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