Silverpop's "Retail Email Marketing Study," reviews the email practices of 175 companies that attended last year's ACC. The full reports for all three phases are available now, if you would like to register to receive them. There's a tremendous amount of data to review, and solid information can be gleaned from the findings. Most marketers need to make only a few simple changes in their email programs in order to leap ahead of competitors.

For example, key findings from Phase I include:

• 75 percent of companies studied don’t use customers' names in emails responding to requests.
• 25 percent failed to offer any reason to sign up to receive emails from the company; of those that did, 45 percent offered notices of sales and promotions, 14 percent offered news and 11 percent offered catalogs .
• 23 percent failed to include email registration requests on the home page.
• 78 percent offered only one choice of communication such as notices of sales, newsletters or information bulletins.
• 37 percent asked customers only for an email address when they registered to receive information; 24 percent required a more extensive profile that included phone numbers and demographic information.
• 57 percent didn't send confirmation emails following registration; 24 percent of those that did failed to include the company or brand name in the "subject" field of the email.

Key findings from Phase II include:

• 95 percent of email messages studied had no form of personalization.
• 25 percent of retailers included discount offers in their emails, while slightly more (27 percent) offered no special discount.
• The single most-used format for commercial messages reviewed in this study was the postcard layout--long a staple of traditional direct mail marketing programs because of its lower cost, but dangerous to implement in the email medium due to the increasing prevalence of image blocking.

Key findings from Phase III include:

• Despite the fact that marketers regret losing contact with potential customers, few work aggressively to hang on to those considering leaving.
• 73 percent of the companies studied didn't take recipients wishing to opt-out to a preference page to allow them to change their profiles in order to enhance the relevance of the offerings and possibly maintain the relationship.
• 97 percent of companies reviewed failed to ask people why they wanted to unsubscribe.
• 93 percent made no attempt to reengage the customer by asking the recipient to reconsider before completely severing ties.

More details and data can be found in the full reports of Phases I, II and III. Click here to register to receive the full reports.