Every week the EEC adds new content to its Whitepaper Room. Here are the latest additions:

The 2007 Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study
Email marketing trends & best practices among the largest online retailers for making the most out of that first impression

*Have a whitepaper you’d like to contribute? Email it to whitepapers@emailexperience.org.

Welcome emails have historically had significantly higher open rates than regular emails. These messages are key to setting expectations with new subscribers and communicating the brand promise. Yet, only 72% of major online retailers send out welcome emails. That’s the top line finding of the Email Experience Council’s second annual Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study, which is a follow-on to our 2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study, which examined the subscription practices of 122 of the largest online retailers. In this Welcome Email Study, we looked at the welcome emails that were sent as a result of those subscriptions.

“Welcome emails should set the tone of the program and the expectations of the recipient from an aesthetics and content standpoint,” says Kara Trivunovic, director of strategic services at Premiere Global Services Inc., the sponsor of this study. “It is said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression—and that adage holds true to the email channel as well. Properly executed welcome messages actually create anticipation in the recipient for the next message.”

In 2006, only 66% of major online retailers sent welcome emails. With 72% sending welcome emails this year, it appears that more retailers are recognizing the value of these critical emails.

This report shows that many retailers are still missing out on the opportunity to use those emails as a selling vehicle and relationship-building vehicle.
Instead of engaging subscribers with incentives and links to products, departments, loyalty programs, catalogs and other shopping-related material, a great number of the largest online retailers simply say hello and leave it at that.

However, there was some improvement on this front over the past year. In 2007, 98% of retailers’ welcome email now containing a link to their shopping site (up from 88% last year), 33% containing store locators (up from 31%) and 14% containing links to catalog information (up from 6%).

Over the past year, more retailers have also made their welcome emails CAN-SPAM compliant. This year 58% of welcome emails were CAN-SPAM compliant in terms of including both a mailing address and unsubscribe method, versus 52% last year. While non-promotional emails are not required under the law to be compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act, we believe that all emails should be compliant.

This year, for the first time, we also tracked the passage of time between subscriptions and the delivery of welcome emails. The good news is that 61% of retailers deliver their welcome emails within 10 minutes of sign up, with most of those delivering within 3 minutes. The bad news is that 19% take more than 24 hours to deliver their welcome emails, with nearly a third of those taking more than a week to deliver. In the world of digital communications, that’s an eternity to wait for a welcome email.

Other key findings from the study include:
• 32% of welcome emails include a discount, reward or incentive, down from 34% last year. That’s in line with the results of our subscription study, which saw a move away from incentives during sign-up.
• 62% of welcome emails asked the subscriber to whitelist them by adding an email address to their address book, up from 49% last year.
• 79% of retailers sent out HTML welcome emails, up from 69% last. The remainder sent text-only welcome emails. That said, most of the HTML welcome emails were HTML “lite,” making extensive use of HTML text.
• 53% of welcome emails included links to the retailer’s privacy policy, up from 45% last year.
• 75% of the welcome emails include the retailer’s brand name in their subject lines, on par with last year. Including branding here helps the subscriber recognize the email as one that they requested.

Get the Full Report
Visit the Whitepaper Room to download the full 30-page report, which is free for eec platinum members, available at a discount to eec gold and silver members, and available for $179 for non-members. Not a member? Learn more about becoming a member of the Email Experience Council.

News last week that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’s latest edition dropped hyphens from about 1,600 words provides further proof that the time has come for marketers, publishers and dictionaries to drop the hyphen from the word email.

Show your commitment to adopting the 21st century spelling of the word email by signing our 'Hyphens Equal Disrespect' petition. So far, more than 160 people, representing companies both large and small, have signed the petition, signaling that they would spell the word sans hyphen in their emails, press releases, whitepapers and other publications. If you’d like to add your name to the list of supporters, just click here, let us know your name and the company you represent, and we’ll add your name (but not your email address) to the petition. As the number of signees grows, the EEC will use this list to convince publishers to change their spelling of the word.

Reacting to the news from the Shorter OED, Rob over at the Serial Comma blog has a great examination of the email vs. e-mail debate. He also quotes Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, as commenting to the BBC that e-mail—with the hyphen—is ’starting to look like something your grandmother might write.’

We couldn’t agree more. Spelling email with a hyphen is antiquated and adds extra length to the word without adding clarity. As we pointed out in our May 8 ‘Hyphens Equal Disrespect’ Petition Update, the majority of references to email on the web are spelled without a hyphen, proving that people aren’t confused by the word sans hyphen.

Help us honor email’s evolution into a ubiquitous and rich form of communication and sever its connection to its less evolved text-only ancestors by dropping the hyphen. Sign the petition today!

—Chad White

Every time someone says they don’t believe in email, an email fairy dies—and another one just bit the dust. Why? Because Susan Hallenbeck is losing faith in email to reach college students.

Recently, in a post on her blog, Refracted Higher Education, Susan bemoans that “younger GenXers and Millennials…seem to be relying more heavily on text messaging, Facebook, and other forms of social networking to communicate with one another.” She links to a Pew Internet report from July that said, “Email, once the cutting edge ‘killer app,’ is losing its privileged place among many teens as they express preferences for instant messaging and text messaging as ways to connect with their friends.”

She also links to an iMedia Connection article by Tiffany Young, who says that “While 89% of teenagers have email addresses and check their email regularly, it seems they've collectively decided ‘email is for talking to old people, like parents and teachers’,” quoting from the Pew Internet report as well.

Tiffany correctly says that keeping email viable among teens is all about having relevant messages. Give teens a reason to read your email and they will, and that includes tailoring content to their individual interests by allowing them to indicate their preferences.

I’d also say that you should play to email’s strengthens, which are that it handles HTML so you can have rich messages and it also handles longer form messages better than IM and texting. It makes me think of EB Games’ email newsletter, which I’m sure has many teen subscribers. The newsletter includes blurbs about new releases and several lists, including one about upcoming releases—all of which wouldn’t render well via other communication methods.

Susan points out that teens (as well as everyone else) have multiple email accounts that they use for different purposes, and that because of that teens many not check all of their email accounts super regularly. EB Games deals with this reality by only sending two emails per week generally and not including any “today only” deals, which are so popular among retailers. Having deals that are good for the week are probably much more appropriate for teens who might be checking their email less frequently.

Of course, with the media splintering, you have to reach out to teens through new mediums by launching blogs (like Neiman Marcus just did), by setting up shop on Facebook (like AllPosters.com just did), and by tapping into YouTube (as TigerDirect just did). And, of course, email can support and be integrated with all of these other communication tools.

So don’t give up on email, Susan. Email has reinvented itself several times already and is constantly morphing to fit in and maintain its standing in the web 2.0 world.

—Chad White

A debate raged in a meeting last week that I'd love your ideas and feedback on. We were talking about the duplicity found in so many permission practices—particularly in ecommerce sites.

Yes, I know that duplicity is strong word. But consider that most retailer email programs are opt-in—until you buy. Then, it's either a pre-checked box on the checkout form—easy to miss and decidedly opt-out—or worse, it's a notice buried in the fine print. Since these folks are buyers, they are by nature pretty active with the brand and products, so there isn't a huge penalty for this practice in ISP complaints or unsubscribes. In many cases, these buyers are sometimes the most active folks on the file.

So what is wrong with that? I say nothing, if the marketer is clear about it. They no longer have an opt-in permission file. Don't claim it in your promotions or when dealing with ISPs on deliverability. Worse, subscribers have no input into the frequency, content or value of the program—which is easily corrected.

I'd feel a lot better about these practices if marketers also sent a very clear welcome message and gave these buyers some control over their inbox. There was some heated debate that these buyers should be permissioned in via a double opt-in mechanism after the purchase. Personally, I feel that is not necessary if the marketer follows best practices for confirming the subscription with a welcome message that arrives instantly and provides both clarity around the program pace and content and a chance for subscribers to quickly unsubscribe or change preferences. The welcome message is also a great opportunity to encourage another purchase.

Double opt-in (sometimes called confirmed opt-in) is the highest level of permission. Double opt-in will ensure that your subscribers are more actively aware of your program (but not that they will be active—you still need to create relevant, compelling subscriber experiences), but it also pretty much guarantees that you'll have a smaller file. Small but active is a pretty good deal, but it's hard to sell internally. And I think many marketers still resist anything that reduces the size of the file. If you offer any marketer a million records that are untargeted vs. 100,000 very targeted records, most of us will go for the million every time.

We are ever hopeful, we marketers. Someday, we think, that person just might want my product! I can't let go of the opportunity to remind them I'm here, even if they will ignore my email messages.

So what do you think? Is it important or a mandate that marketers double opt-in these buyers?

For purposes of discussion, here is what I'm using to define the four permission levels:

1. Opt-out: The assumption is that you are on the file, until you unsubscribe—usually a pre-checked box or use of a customer file/
2. Single opt-in: The subscriber actively requests to be on the file—usually an un-checked box.
3. Confirmed (or validated) opt-in: After requesting to be on the file, a confirmation email is sent.
4. Double opt-in: After the initial request, a confirmation email is sent requiring a second action to be placed on the file.

—Stephanie Miller