Last November I wrote about The Forgotten Pages of Email Marketing, those lonely and neglected pages in your email processes that haven’t been updated in two years or more or—gasp!—haven’t been altered from the default template set by the vendor. Unless you routinely subscribe to, unsubscribe from, forward, etc. your emails or manually check those pages, these lapses are difficult to detect—that is, until they’re pointed out to you by one of your subscribers. That’s what happened to us recently, courtesy of Benjamin Fitts of CustomCardGuy.com, who emailed me saying:

“I’ve been enjoying your blogs and plan to join the eec later this week. The funny thing was as I signed up for your email from the emailexperience.org blog I realized you guys are committing a faux pas! When subscribing I get a nice page that tells me I should be expecting a confirmation from you shortly. The problem is that when I get the confirmation email and click the link, I get the exact same message letting me know I should be receiving a confirmation email shortly. ;) I’m sure this is just a mistake on your part but I wanted you to know how silly it seems for an organization helping us with email standards who can’t get the basics right.”

We immediately checked things out…and he was dead right. Our sign-up confirmation page and subscription confirmation page for our confirmed opt-in process were the same, which was definitely confusing. Because of the duplication we also missed out on the opportunity to confirm that they were subscribed and to tell them to expect a welcome email. While reviewing the process, we decided to make a few other changes as well.

Hoping to inspire you to review your own subscription processes, here are the improvements that we made:

1. Sign-up Confirmation Page. After signing up for our newsletter, you’re taken to a sign-up confirmation page. It originally said:

“A confirmation email has been sent to your inbox from enews@emailexperience.org. To confirm your subscription please click on the link enclosed in that email.”

We made some minor tweaks to make it clear more quickly that the subscriber needs to take an additional action. The new wording is:

“To confirm your subscription, please click on the link in the confirmation email that we just sent to you from enews@emailexperience.org. Thank you.”

2. Subscription Confirmation Email. The only change we made to this email, which is triggered by a sign up, was to change the subject from “New subscription to Email Experience Council Email List” to “Please confirm your subscription to the Email Experience Council newsletter”. The previous subject line seemed like it was intended for the email administrator, not a new subscriber. Plus, the new subject line again reinforces the message that an additional action is needed to complete the subscription process.

3. Subscription Confirmation Page. When you confirm your subscription by clicking on the link in the subscription confirmation email, you’re taken to the subscription confirmation page. This was the element that our previous process lacked. Here’s the wording we devised for this page:

“Thank you for subscribing to our weekly newsletter. A detailed welcome email has been sent to you from enews@emailexperience.org. Please add that address to your address book to ensure that you receive future emails in a timely fashion. Thanks and welcome to the Email Experience Council community.”

It thanks them for subscribing, tells them to expect a welcome email and asks that they whitelist us—very concise and to the point.

4. Welcome Email. We had redesigned the body copy of our welcome email many months ago, so that copy was fine. However, we hadn’t scrutinized the subject line enough. It said, “Welcome to The Email Experience Council,” which was very misleading because while all eec members are eec subscribers, all subscribers are not members. So we changed that subject line to “Welcome to the Email Experience Council community!” which echoed the final line of the subscription confirmation page.

Thanks again, Ben, for helping us do a better job of practicing what we preach.

—Chad White of the Email Experience Council

A recent review of practices by top brand email marketers makes me think that there is something really wrong with our collective ability to follow best practices when it comes to creating compelling subscriber experience for new subscribers. Return Path just released the results of a study of 61 companies on this topic, and I tell you, the findings were pretty disappointing.

Below are some highlights from Great Email Experiences - Is Your Brand Relationship Worthy. I’d love your feedback. Does this synch with what you find in your own inbox? In your own marketing programs?

The biggest shocker for me is in the depth of the missed opportunity. Relatively simple and firmly proven best practices were NOT followed by some pretty large brands—Best Buy, Nike, Sony, and Disney, to name a few—all with smart email marketers in house. Does that suggest we have the wrong best practices? Or that sending relevant email really takes THAT much more work than just spitting out broadcasts? It shouldn’t, right? Yet, maybe it is that much harder, which is why so few of us actually spend the time to do it well.

We were rather surprised by the findings:

1. A majority (60%) of the companies in our survey did not send a welcome message. Of the 40% that did send a welcome message, only 33% sent it within 24 hours. The remaining 7% took anywhere from two days to three weeks.

2. The shock of the missing welcome messages was compounded by the astonishing number of companies—30%!—who didn’t send any email within a month of sign up. While the majority did start sending email soon after subscribe, engagement—which is key in the first 30-days—was lacking.

3. 70% of companies asked for a lot of data (name, address, birthday, and so on) at subscribe, and the bulk of them (75%) never used it. This “just in case” mentality is not a good experience for subscribers that are forced to complete long forms and preferences when the potential benefit is never realized.

4. Even across four very different industry verticals, the marketing offers (Free Shipping! Discount! Sweepstakes!) were surprisingly the same. Often these types of offer strategies are self-fulfilling and addictive. Why not use valuable content to drive readership and stand out from the crowd?

Look forward to your comments!

—Stephanie Miller of Return Path

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

eROI: The Cradle and The Grave
Opt-In, Opt-Out & Feedback Loops

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

Since moving from Rochester, N.Y., to Durham, N.C., almost three years ago, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the month of March. March Madness in the Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) is just that—absolute madness. From the Duke-Carolina rivalry, to the ACC Tournament to the Big Dance, this is truly basketball country.

When the email to join “Bronto’s Online NCAA March Madness Bracket Group” landed in my inbox, I immediately went to CBSSportsline.com to register. CBS Sports made me work a bit to actually register as a new user (not good). Fortunately, as one who spends their day advising clients on best practices, I knew where to look.

Once I clicked on the super-small link “Register Now,” I was redirected to the registration page. I absolutely love this landing page.

1. An appropriate number of fields. Too many scares subscribers away, too few and you get a large list of uninterested subscribers.

2. Tips. Mousing over the lightbulbs provides clear instructions on how to fill out that particular field and/or a brief snippet of why they are asking for it.

3. Opt-in. Yes! Someone did it the “right” way. I say “right” because there is not really a right or wrong way, just a bad/good/better. What I love about this opt-in is that none of the boxes are pre-checked (a true opt-in), there is a brief description of what to expect (content, frequency), and a preview of an example. Brilliant!

That said, this is what happened when I clicked on “Preview an example” for the Product Updates. After hitting refresh three times, it eventually brought me to the intended preview page. I know what you are thinking...temporary hiccup with the connection. I thought the same thing, so I tried it the next day. Same result. (not good).

4. Optional Special Offers. Partner/third party/co-registration emails are always tricky. Personally, I think they have no business in the world of “best practice email marketing,” but I understand why they are used. If you are going to offer them, let subscribers opt-in and keep them separate. Well done.

Once I hit submit, a flurry of emails from CBS Sportsline began to fill my inbox (email #1, email #2). A bit of overkill if you ask me, but I forgive them. Anyway, that’s fodder for another post.

By the way, I’ve got UCLA winning it all in one bracket and Kansas in my other (neither are popular picks in my office).

—DJ Waldow of Bronto Software

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

Chad White: Reportlet - The Quick and the Dead: Sending that First Email
Too many retailers are slow or fail to process subscribers.

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

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

2007 Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study
Best practices, emerging best practices and subscription practices that have fallen out of favor.

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

The Direct Marketing Association’s Email Experience Council recently signed up for the email newsletters of 118 of the top online retailers tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot. What we found was that there’s a clear trend toward subscription processes that are quick and easy, and increasingly transparent.

“The old adage ‘you only get one chance to make a good first impression’ transcends to an email marketer’s efforts in creating a good opt-in experience,” says Elie Ashery, president and CEO of email marketing software and services company Gold Lasso, the sponsor of the study. “The opt-in process sets the tone of how a future email relationship between a company and customer will unfold.”

Along with this shift toward greater ease of subscribing, the confirmation page is rising in importance. Rather than making customers complete long subscription forms, many retailers are now allowing people to subscribe with just an email address and then allowing them to express delivery and content preferences on the subscription confirmation page.

Also, addressing privacy concerns is a best practice that’s seeing adoption approach the 50% mark, and providing a sample newsletters is a clear emerging best practice that should help reduce opt-outs, with nearly 12% or major online retailers doing that.

Ashery adds, “Lasting impressions taken from the opt-in process can be directly linked to the ease of subscribing, relevant subscription choices available, the speed that a confirmed opt-in email is delivered, and most importantly, information on what the subscriber should expect from their email relationship such as content, frequency and format.”

On the content front, 28% of retailers offer more than one content selection, with it ranging from two all the way up to the 50 content options offered by Amazon.com. Nearly 6% of retailers offer a local store update.

When it comes to transparency on frequency, however, retailers do a poor job. Not even 7% of retailers give subscribers any kind of idea how many emails to expect. And only one retailer, Coldwater Creek, allows subscribers to opt to receive a monthly only email.

Format-wise, nearly 12% of retailers offer plain-text versions of their newsletters during the sign-up process. Because of the superior responses from HTML emails, retailers may be hesitant to give subscribers this option.

Here are some other findings from the study:

• Only 3% of major online retailers use a double opt-in subscription process.

• Only 92% of retailers have an email sign-up form or link on their homepage.

• More than 43% of retailers allow customers to sign up for email with one click from their homepage.

• The subscriber’s name (31%) and zip code (18%) were the two most often required pieces of information.

Get the Full Report
The full 37-page study presents a range of best practices and emerging best practices for your consideration, as well as a formerly popular practice that appears to be falling out of favor. It also includes numerous examples of creatives to help illustrate each point.

Visit the Whitepaper Room to download the full 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.

—Chad White

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

DMA: Email Marketing Council Best Practice Guidelines
A practical ‘hands on’ guide that gives users useful advice on how to maximize return on investment in the email channel.

Chad White: Reportlet - Unique Subscription Practices Among Retailers
Eight one-of-a-kind subscription practices worth taking note of.

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