We're mad as heck and we're not going to take it anymore. At least, that's what the results of our recent study, "Spam: What Consumers Really Think," seem to show.

To find out why people report messages as spam and how much they know about what happens when they do, Silverpop conducted an online survey of 400 email recipients age 18 to 55, and the results were eye-opening: If people don't like a message, they won't hesitate to get rid of it. And they don't care who gets hurt in the process.

While most people (76 percent) said they hit the spam button because they had not subscribed to the sender's message, 30 percent said it was because they didn't trust the unsubscribe link. Another 7 percent acknowledged they had subscribed to the message, but simply didn't want them anymore; and 7 percent said they hit the spam button because of message frequency.

Another interesting finding was how people define spam. While most respondents (52 percent) defined spam as any email they haven't subscribed to, 40 percent also said it was any email they no longer wanted to receive, and 35 percent said it was email from any commercial entity.

Aside from the obvious negative brand implications of having your messages thought of with the same regard as Viagra ads and stock market picks, use of the spam button poses very real deliverability concerns for legitimate marketers. If even a tiny portion of your recipients hit the spam button, Internet service providers may decide to block all your messages from delivery.

Interestingly, the study found that 83 percent were unaware that clicking the spam button could cause a sender's messages to be blocked from other people who wanted them. And, here's the kicker: two out of three said they would continue to brand unwanted emails as spam even after learning that it could block senders' emails from reaching others who had requested them.

Regardless of whether you have permission, all the necessary technical configurations in place and a sterling reputation at the ISPs, in the end good deliverability ultimately boils down to whether your recipients perceive your message to be worthwhile.

To learn more about our findings, and to get tactics for reducing spam complaints and making sure your messages remain welcome in the inbox, you can download our study free on our Web site here.

Posted by Ted Roberts at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jeff Dernavich, Silverpop's director of product management, told me some great news today that I wanted to share.

Email deliverability provider and Silverpop technology partner Pivotal Veracity this week announced that users of its pioneering inbox rendering tool will now be able to see how their messages will look when recipients view them in the Firefox Internet browser.

The first solution of its kind, unveiled earlier this year, Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer shows how messages will look when viewed in the leading desktop email software, Web-based email platforms and mobile clients. The addition of Firefox is another first, according to the company’s November 11 announcement.

“We are thrilled to now offer our clients access to every major platform, email client and browser combination in the market,” said Michelle Eichner, vice president of client services.

We at Silverpop are likewise thrilled. Earlier this year we integrated the company’s offering into our email marketing platform, naming it Inbox Preview. We’ve confirmed that our implementation is Firefox-ready, and we are proud that our clients are among the first in the industry to be able to identify and address email rendering issues in the number 2 browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last month, we rolled out a shiny new feature we dubbed “Share-to-Social,” which enables email recipients to click a button in an email to share their favorite messages with their contacts/friends in their social networks. Not only that, but we made sure the marketers using this feature could track the results. (You can check out my blog post about it here.)

Well, we didn’t stop there. This month we added the same capabilities to our Landing Pages application, which enables marketers to easily create landing pages coordinated with their emails.

Also, we’ve added a few new social networks to the mix. We’re up to five and counting: Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

After email, landing pages are a natural next step for sharing marketing content into social networks. Think about it. MarketingSherpa estimates that up to 50 percent of visitors to a landing page will abandon it in the first eight seconds. So, for people who stick around, we’re talking about either: the most highly engaged visitors and/or the very best landing pages, able to grab attention and keep it. Either way, these are pages with a high propensity for going viral. They yielded the first click. They can yield the next. And the next.

If you’re taking the time to create fantastic, thoughtful landing pages that recipients are most likely to share, then this is one capability you definitely want to consider adding to your email toolkit.

Posted by Scott Voigt at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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) | TrackBacks (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 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (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) | TrackBacks (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 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (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 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (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 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While on vacation recently, I had one of the best hamburgers I've ever eaten: a Kobe beef Havarti cheeseburger with ripe red tomatoes, caramelized onions, wild arugula and, of course, Havarti cheese on a premium beef patty. As I stared at my freshly served gourmet burger, with a bottle of ketchup and jar of Dijon mustard in the background, I faced a critical decision:

Should I do what I and many fellow Americans do, which is to pour a liberal amount of ketchup on the burger and add some mustard on the bun, or should I bite in to the burger first to enjoy its various "natural" flavors?

It wasn't a decision on the magnitude of whether to loan $700 billion to U.S. financial institutions, but this gorgeous burger's appearance made me rethink a near life-long habit of automatically adding a dose of Heinz ketchup to my all-beef patty.

Later on, I realized, as I often do, that my dilemma paralleled a common situation in email marketing. Most marketers also automatically add "ketchup" in the form of discounts, free shipping and other common incentives to their emails, when what they really need is a better-tasting burger.

Now, marketers deploy these tactics for a reason. Incentives and sweeteners produce results, and, in most cases, still deliver a great return-on-investment. But what if you didn't need ketchup—er, incentives?

So, here's my challenge to email marketers: Rethink your $6 email burger and serve up a $15 version instead.

Remember, the success of my $15 burger (with garlic fries) rested on the quality of the ingredients: homemade (or homemade-looking) buns, fresh produce, gourmet cheese and high-quality Kobe beef.

Now, these are key ingredients that will turn your fast-food email burger into a mouth-watering gourmet burger that will generate a higher ROI and improved margins because you need fewer incentives:

• Messages tailored to individual recipients based on their demographics or behavior
• A welcome program that sets expectations and creates value for new subscribers out of the gate and confirms that their decision to opt in to your email program was a good one
• Creative subject lines that motivate people to take the action they (and you) want, not just open the email
• Emails designed to render well on multiple environments and platforms—PC, Web and mobile
• Creative and compelling copy that motivates people to want to know more and act
• A competitively positioned email program, which serves a clear need to recipients relative to your competitors’ offerings
• Emails with genuine personality that provide a reason for subscribers to anticipate your next message
• Emails designed from a user perspective, making it easy for subscribers to find the information and links they need to take the action they want, anything from changing their preferences to buying your latest widget.

I'd love to hear feedback from readers who have been able to decrease their reliance on incentives and offers simply by improving the quality of the elements in their email program.

And, if you are ever in Laguna Beach, Calif, I recommend you stop at the Sapphire Laguna restaurant and order the Kobe beef Havarti cheeseburger. But, hold the ketchup!

Posted by Loren McDonald at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)