Less Is More

E-mail marketing is under siege again, with new moves by spammers clouding the medium's prospects as a trusted information resource for consumers.

Spamhaus, an e-mail monitoring group, reported in early February that software available now can send spam directly over providers' mail servers rather than from hijacked PCs, thus bypassing the Internet service providers' filter systems. According to the agency, America Online was reporting that more than 90% of its incoming spam came straight from the mail relays of other providers. And Spamhaus itself notes that at its current rate of increase, spam might constitute 95% of global e-mail traffic by the middle of this decade.

It's a disturbing trend, given the ISPs' role as a first line of defense against unauthorized or illegitimate e-mail. Authentication standards may help alleviate the problem, but so far those measures are being applied sporadically and unilaterally, with no sign of agreement on a single unified protocol. And when it does arrive, authentication alone may not clean up the spam pollution. A September 2004 study from security software firm CipherTrust found that spammers were adopting one leading protocol, Sender Policy Framework, even faster than legitimate e-mailers.

But spam is in the eye of the beholder, and e-mailers need to think Can Spam to get through the most important filter of all: the beleaguered recipient dealing with a cluttered e-mailbox, who may not even remember having given permission to be e-mailed in the first place.

This final gate can be tricky because the definition of “spam” is more fluid for consumers than for mailers — and after all, it's their determination that counts. A study of consumer e-mail behavior by DoubleClick last October found that the average person reported receiving 308 e-mails per week. About 62% of them were spam, while 8% were permission-based e-mails (PBEs).

When asked how they judged a message to be spam, more than 90% of respondents named the usual suspects: offensive material, unknown senders and the appearance of trickery. However, 58% also said they considered spam to include PBEs that came too frequently from a company, even if they had once done business with it; and 57% cited “irrelevance” as another spam characteristic. Even with PBEs, a third of those polled by Double-Click said they opened less than 61% of those messages.

Dave Lewis, vice president of market development at StrongMail, says some of the most efficient e-mail marketers handle the “spam/not spam” problem by offering customers who want to rescind their permission a chance to personalize the e-mail channel by choosing their own frequency or content.

“These marketers take a customer's wish to unsubscribe as a signal that their current e-mail campaign is not hitting that person's hot buttons,” says Lewis. “So they offer to restrict the subscription to certain product lines, or to change the cadence at which the consumer is e-mailed. That way, you're tailoring not just the message but the frequency with which it's delivered to the customer's wants and needs.”

Let the Customer Choose

Eagan, MN-based Junonia is one e-commerce marketer that's comfortable with letting customers have more say about its e-mail campaigns. The online retailer of women's plus-size apparel has cultivated customer relationships that emphasize the personal touch virtually since its founding as a catalog in 1995. President Anne Kelly's e-mail address and phone number is featured on the Web site, and she makes it a practice to write personal answers to the e-mail she receives from shoppers at her company's site.

Last holiday season, Junonia tried something new to raise its profile above the Christmas mailbox clutter. Instead of a standard e-mail promoting gift specials and discounts, the company sent its house list a special holiday “Letter from Anne,” telling a personal anecdote about an acquaintance. The moral of Kelly's e-mail was that in a hectic holiday season, Junonia's customers needed to take the time to do something nice for themselves. The letter also included a special holiday offer, but several paragraphs down in the copy — not in a lead position.

The special communication was a success in terms of sales conversions, resulting in clickthroughs and purchases among 1.9% of the names mailed. That encouraged Junonia both to increase the frequency of its mailings to two a week and to substitute a letter from Kelly for one of those promotional e-mails each month.

The problem was, that accelerated mailing schedule also produced a spike in e-mail opt-outs. So Junonia introduced another innovation and started giving customers the choice to cut in half the frequency with which they got e-mailed by the company. A line at the bottom of each mailing instructs customers that ticking off a check box “will reduce the number of mailings by 50%.”

Giving customers that option has had equally beneficial results for Junonia: namely, a 35% reduction in unsubscribes, according to e-commerce director Tom Lindmeier, who admits that making the offer was a bit of a gamble.

He adds that while Junonia had some trepidation about the offer to e-mail less, it also had confidence that the policy could be abandoned quickly if subscribers cut back en masse. “The Web moves so quickly that we were able to see results right away,” he says. “It's easy to tell on the Internet when the numbers work — and right now the numbers are working for us.”

The option was carefully positioned within the e-mail message. “We put the check box down at the bottom of the e-mail, above the unsubscribe box,” he says. “The aim was to catch people right before they were going to unsubscribe anyway and retain them with a middle solution.”

Lindmeier says his team is still debating whether to offer the option of less-frequent e-mails on Junonia's main Web registration page. After all, the idea is to start recipients out at full strength and then allow those who wish to back off to do so; making the offer up front might be a bit too encouraging.

“It's important for customers to find out what the frequency of our e-mail program is first,” he says. “If we simply offer to e-mail less often from the start, too many people might choose that option. After all, everyone thinks they get too much e-mail.”

A Counterintuitive Slant

To be effective in their marketing campaigns, more and more merchants will have to incorporate some form of the same type of customization that Junonia offers, says David Hallerman, senior analyst with online consultant eMarketer.

This approach goes somewhat against the grain for the many e-mail marketers that are grounded in the direct mail world. Direct mail really faces only one hurdle in reaching customers: transport into the targeted home. Once it's there, chances are the message will be scanned, if only for a moment, and its offer evaluated. Then it's destined either for action or the wastebasket.

Still, as DoubleClick's survey showed, consumers tend to evaluate e-mail even from trusted vendors on additional grounds of relevance and frequency. And those added criteria should force e-mail marketers to think in broader terms about the nature of the “permission” they're given by customers.

Instead, effective e-mail merchants consider what they have permission to offer and how often. A customer who's bought a dining room set from a retailer may consider weekly e-mails about other furniture offers to be irrelevant spam. Instead, he should be allowed to specify that he only wants to be notified of special offers on rugs, for example, from that merchant.

Customizing e-mail campaigns in this way means more integration among an e-merchant's various data elements and therefore some added cost, but it will increase the chance of conversion once a customer is contacted.

“Your customers have said they want to hear from you, and now you're telling them about something they're interested in, while respecting their time and wishes,” Hallerman says. “Fewer, more tightly focused e-mails, with more of the marketer's time and energy behind them, will make for a more effective e-mail campaign.”

According to StrongMail's Lewis, many marketers are not facing up to the fact that the power dynamics of their customer relationships are changing, and that those changes are having an impact on their communication channels.

“We're no longer in an environment where the marketer controls the medium,” he says. “Control is shifting from the sender to the recipient.” In television advertising, the rise of TiVo and the diversification of cable are making their presence felt. In e-mail, too, marketers need to recognize that the medium is designed for one-to-one communication on a large scale — “mass customization,” as Lewis calls it — and that consumers are going to feel increasingly entitled to expect more relevance in e-mail messages, both in content and timing.

“The number of e-mail marketers who feel comfortable with this is still a minority of the total,” Lewis says. “There's still a feeling that if we allow customers to determine how often they get e-mailed, they'll tend to unsubscribe to the whole thing.” But he recommends that marketers enroll in the glass-half-full school of e-mail philosophy.

“They thought well enough of your product or service to sign up for e-mail in the first place,” he says. “Now they're saying their needs have changed. And your message has to change to accommodate those new requirements.”