If you're an email marketer, you're probably wondering how you're going to make your budget numbers this year, what with financial-market turbulence, credit crunches and gloomy holiday spending predictions.

If you think the answer is just to shoot out more email to your list and hope something sticks, you probably should see some data from Silverpop's new survey measuring consumer attitudes toward spam:

• When asked how they define spam, over half said it meant email they didn't sign up for, while 40 percent said it was any email they didn't want to get, and 35 percent said it was email from any commercial entity, presumably even from companies whose brands they otherwise trusted.
• More than 75 percent said they limit the number of emails they subscribe to, even from companies they trust, in order not to get more spam.
• Three in 10 clicked the "report spam" button on email they didn't want because they didn't trust the unsubscribe link.

In a recent Email Insider column, I talk about why building trust is so important for email marketers no matter what condition the economy is in, but especially now, when email users are likely to become more particular about which sender they choose to do business with.

I also list five touchpoints in your program where you can build trust with your recipients or make them more distrustful of you and your messages, along with seven questions that test your trustworthiness. How well can you answer them?

Did I leave out any trust-building opportunities or trust-measuring questions? Post your comments below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of email marketing, particularly in an environment of growing customer control, emerging communication channels and the current global economic environment. I come to only one conclusion: Marketers' "batch-and-blast" approach and mentality must evolve to one that endeavors to speak as directly as possible to each recipient in a voice that resonates with each individual on their lists.

This means replacing, or at least supplementing, the usual deal-of-the-week email with messages that recognize the relationships and interactions you have with your customers, moving beyond the usual selling mentality to incorporate a healthy focus on communications and retention.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels that companies are falling short in their communications. A recent Opinion Research Corp. poll found 46 percent of bank customers and 42 percent of mutual-fund investors don't believe their financial services companies are communicating enough with them in these turbulent days.

We are in a period where customers are more sensitive to price and value for their dollar and more likely to shop around and compare features and benefits, looking for the best deal. So, it becomes critical that marketers communicate trust and value with every message.

One way to increase relevance and loyalty is to create messages that provide additional value, including emails that:

• Update
• Remind
• Educate
• Simplify
• Listen

Have you recast your email program to align with your customers' needs, or do you have other functions that email can provide aside from the ones I listed here? I would love to hear about them.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the last few years, many pundits have written articles and blog posts about the death of email. Yet, starting earlier this year we’ve had a plethora of industry folks (including yours truly) declaring that email is, in fact, alive and well.

In a small but poignant example of why I continue to be bullish on email's future, I look no further than the October 2008 issue of the AARP Bulletin. (Okay, you 20- and 30-somethings please refrain from any jokes—and if you didn’t know, AARP stands for American Association of Retired Persons, and you only need to be age 50 to be a member.)

On the cover of AARP's most recent monthly paper bulletin, it prominently promoted the option to read the bulletin online and receive notices via email.

The headline on the bulletin and landing page was "THINK GREEN," but my hunch is this: In addition to the "green" benefits, AARP wants to seize an opportunity to reduce printing and mailing costs and to provide channel options for their members.

But, it is also a recognition that a large percentage of the Baby Boomer generation and beyond is extremely comfortable in a digital world, and, in many cases, prefers to receive communications in an electronic format.

I know what you are thinking. My 14-year-old daughter, who seemingly spends half of her waking hours texting her friends, will not adopt email the way we no-hair/gray-hair types have. For personal communications, I couldn't agree more. Texting, social networks and IM are replacing email. But, various studies still show that email is the number-one preferred method to receive communications from businesses, even for the Facebook generation.

Check back in 10 years, when my daughter hits the workforce, and we'll see if this remains true.

Now, I need to check my email and then take a nap <grin>. Oh yes, and anybody who snickered at me for belonging to AARP, trust me on this… your invitation to join is a lot closer than you think.

Until next time…

Posted by Loren McDonald at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rosetta just came out with an interesting study covered by DMNews that really caught my attention.

According to the interactive marketing agency, 59 percent of the top 100 U.S. online retailers now have a page on Facebook. And, that’s nearly twice as many just since April.

Rosetta attributes the rush to social media sites to a desire by marketers to connect to customers in the myriad ways that social media provide—from updates, to promotional offers to customer service forums, etc.

But the agency cautions that if you decide to create a presence on a social media site, you must be committed to maintaining it and using it as a real forum for communicating with customers. For social media to work, you must be candid and open, and let people post negative comments as well as positive ones.

Along those lines, another study by Universal McCann found that 29 percent of Internet users surveyed had commented on a product or brand on a blog, and 27 percent had posted an opinion on a social networking profile.

According to the report’s author, the Internet age has given consumers a larger voice, and the ability of a single person to publish opinions of a brand has given rise to an “influence economy” where brands must become more transparent.

Posted by Elaine O'Gorman at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Email Experience Council (eec), an email-industry trade and education organization, has a great series of blog entries called "Double Dog Dares" that challenge marketers to break away from business as usual and try something fresh and new.

I dared marketers recently to blow up their email programs and start over from scratch. Okay, not to throw out the whole program, but to write down what they would stop doing out of habit or because everybody else is doing it, and what they would start doing if they had the budget, resources and support from management.

Want to take my challenge? Think how you would change the way you work on these issues:

• List growth
• List churn and inactivity
• Design and format
• Welcome program
• Message type
• Batch-and-blast vs. targeted emails
• Metrics
• Incentives
• Preference centers

Even if you can't throw out your whole email program and start over, is there one change you could make right now in your email program? Tell me what it is in the comments section below.

Posted by Loren McDonald at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of us at one time or another been forwarded a great email campaign, or have passed one along ourselves. But as email marketers, we know that creating a successful viral campaign is actually pretty tough to do. Email forward rates are low; recipients find forwarding to large groups time-consuming, or they worry that you’ll spam their friends if they use your form. For marketers, forwarding can break your HTML, and it can be difficult to track actions on the forwarded message.

But what if it suddenly got a whole lot easier for your campaigns to spread? If your recipients could quickly and easily share their favorite email messages, so that your message could reach not only your customers, but their friends, and their friends, too? And what if you could identify which recipients shared your content, and how many views and clicks each piece of shared content generated? Imagine what you could do with that kind of information.

By integrating social networking and email marketing, you can do exactly that. We at Silverpop have developed an exciting new “share-to-social” feature that allows email marketers to quickly turn emails into social-enabled viral messages. By clicking a button in their email message, recipients can quickly post the email to the profile page on their social network page—Facebook and MySpace for now, with more to come.

Branching out into social networks is a natural evolution for email. After all, social marketing is first and foremost about relationships, and successful email marketers have learned to engage customers in timely and relevant relationships. Social email marketing’s success rests on the ability to reach the right people with the right message—one they’ll want to share with others.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)