Astonishing: Marketers Fail 'Welcome' Test

A shocking 60% of companies in a just-released study by e-mail deliverability firm Return Path did not send "welcome" e-mails to new subscribers.

Are the IT guys so painful to deal with that it’s worth missing such an obvious sales opportunity? Apparently so.

Even worse, a third of the companies studied failed to send any e-mail at all to new subscribers in the 30 days during which the study was conducted, according to Return Path.

Companies that fail to immediately engage new subscribers take multiple risks, according to Bonnie Malone-Fry, director of strategic services at Return Path. For one thing, subscribers may forget having signed up for the merchant’s mail, making them more likely to hit the "report spam" button.

"With list-growth being such a key priority for so many, why wouldn’t you mail them as soon as you possibly could?" said Malone-Fry. "Instant gratification is so prevalent that if you wait an extended period of time to contact them, they will likely either have completely forgotten that they subscribed, or worse, will have already engaged with a competitor, made that key purchase and you’ve completely missed the boat."

And in another a sad statement on the current state of e-mail marketing, Return Path found that while 70% of companies asked for more than an e-mail address at sign-up, three quarters of those who collected the additional information failed to use it to personalize or customize their e-mail messaging.

Asking for the data and failing to use it is worse than not asking for the additional data at all, according to Malone-Fry.

"It really damages your brand because you’re not living up to the expectations you’ve set," she said. "You’ve already stated your intentions of making the program more relevant to the subscriber. By not implementing them, there’s a huge disappointment factor."

Malone-Fry added she thinks some of the lack of basic e-mail marketing best practices may be due to under-resourced e-mail marketing departments.

"There’s a perception out there that being more targeted is an insurmountable abyss," she said.

But what about the simple act of sending welcome e-mails? How hard can that be?

"A welcome e-mail is the easiest place to start because once you set it up it’s trigger based and can run continually without losing its effectiveness," said Malone-Fry.

Maybe so, but implementing a welcome e-mail does require marketing-department interaction with IT, two groups that don’t always see eye-to-eye.

"Definitely, there’s this love-hate relationship between marketers and IT where they have to have each other but neither likes the other," she said. "I hear it echoed over and over: from clients I’ve worked with: ‘Oh, it’s on IT’s list and hopefully I’ll get it before 2010.’"

Looks like it’s time for a bunch of marketers to suck it up and spring for some beers for the folks in their IT departments.