Email Marketing Done Right

To use email effectively, marketers must know and follow the rules. One of the first rules of the game is to get permission from your recipients to send them messages.

Permission Drives Email Marketing

You can use opt-in, double opt-in or confirmed opt-in, but for heaven's sake, don't use opt-out. Permission is a best-practice requirement for email marketing, and it is crucial for success. Marketers who send email without permission can expect a triple whammy � low deliverability, negative brand experience and lower ROI.

Major ISPs require that all bulk email for their users be permission based. Don't send unsolicited mail. Make sure that all your email addresses are confirmed with an opt-in process that ensures your recipients have agreed to receive your messages.

Permission Gives a Better Return on Investment (ROI)

It is commonly known that permission-based email lists outperform unsolicited mailings. While permission-based lists are shorter, the longer lists built by unsolicited means get lower response rates.

Permission-based email lists yield more conversions, leads and desired actions than unsolicited email lists. Firms that send permission-based email to house lists will receive 5 to 15 percent click-through-rates (CTR) or higher. The best that non-permission based email lists can generate is 1 to 2 percent.

Clickstream-Based Email

A clickstream-based email is a message based on a recipient's clickstream data, which is used to formulate the message and the offer. For instance, if a user has recently searched for digital cameras on Amazon or other electronics vendor sites, that information is available and can be used to formulate a highly personalized email message with an attractive offer.

Because privacy is an issue, smart implementation of this technology must allow users to opt out of being solicited based on their site usage. Filters can be used to avoid using the behaviors that users do not want reported. User control is paramount to the success of clickstream-based email campaigns to avoid privacy concerns.

Clickstream-based email campaigns have excellent relevancy as well as immediacy because they are based on what the user is doing now rather than what s/he did on prior purchases. This gives these campaigns high conversion rates.

Open Rates, CTRs and Conversions

Clickstream-based email is more effective compared to emails using other forms of personalization or segmentation. The following data from JupiterResearch shows the various metrics of mass email, life-cycle email, targeted email, and clickstream email. Clickstream wins in every instance:

E-Mail Type	Open Rate (%)	CTR (%)	Conversion Rate (%)
Mass	20	9.5	1.1
Life-cycle	27	14.0	2.8
Targeted	30	12.9	2.7
Clickstream	33	14.0	3.9
Source: JupiterResearch, 2006

JupiterResearch also measured the monthly net profit and revenue of each email type, as shown below.

E-Mail Type	Net Income ($)	Revenue ($)
Mass	5,155	45,600
Life-cycle	76,668	222,970
Targeted	83,419	228,754
Clickstream	162,631	401,942
Source: JupiterResearch, 2006

Clickstream-based email gives email marketers a new way to increase relevancy. The new technology is not cheap but yields more effective results while building customer loyalty

Next: Opt-Out vs. Opt-In