Do your e-mail campaigns often go unopened? Are low response rates getting you down? Here are five surefire tips to deliver e-mails that earn your customers' respect.

By Tricia Robinson-Pridemore

In a report released in February 2007, JupiterResearch found that 43 percent of e-mail users believe signing up for permission e-mail from retailers leads to more unsolicited e-mail. So almost half of your customers think you sell them out by allowing others to spam them. Somewhere along the way, customer trust has eroded. Whether through negative e-mail practices, lack of customer education or over-mailing, the e-mail channel is at risk for retailers. Considering the low cost and high sales effectiveness of e-mail, now is the time to implement five best practices to regain trust, continue revenue growth and take advantage of new technologies.

1 Ensure and communicate privacy
When providing an e-mail address to a retailer, customers need to know that the retailer will be the only one using their address. In addition to providing the necessary data collection fields at sign-up, include a simple statement such as "We Value Your Privacy" or another affirmative privacy statement. You can even take it a step further and make it link to your site's privacy policy. If your privacy policy does not include responsible e-mail language--it should. Customers should understand what a retailer is going to do with their e-mail address before they provide it.

2 Set frequency caps
Determining how much is too much is a matter of testing. Look for signs of inactivity when mailing volumes are at their peak. Besides the obvious "unsubscribes," look at spam complaints and non-opens. When inactivity occurs, you know you've crossed the threshold and sent too often. Simply setting and maintaining organizational frequency caps can avoid over-mailing.

Be sure to score different e-mail types separately so caps do not apply to transactional messages. If you're using multiple e-mail systems, which is quite common, instituting frequency caps is impossible. Consider standardizing on one platform for all outbound customer e-mail. All transactional and marketing e-mails maintained and sent from the same system will guarantee that frequency caps can be instituted and enforced. Plus, there are definite deliverability advantages to centralizing.

3 Coordinate e-mail across departments
A centralized e-mail system will also help you coordinate and standardize your customer communications across departments--marketing, customer service, website, etc. Each message you send should have a consistent look and tone, but more important, it should reflect other interactions your customer is having with your company. A marketing message that promotes a product your customer just bought will not go very far in convincing your customers you understand their wants and needs. Similarly, sending a marketing message to a customer who is currently complaining to customer service can have a much worse effect.

Without a centralized solution that provides visibility and control across departments, this coordination can be difficult--especially considering survey data from a September 2007 JupiterResearch study titled "The Maturation of E-mail: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization." The industry study states that only 38 percent of companies have a centralized solution, and 24 percent have six or more departments managing e-mail separately. However, providing a true one-to-one communications experience to your customers pays long-term revenue dividends.

4 Seek opportunities to cross-promote
The same JupiterResearch study found that 54 percent of e-mail marketing executives cite "increasing sales" as their number-one reason to send e-mail. In terms of how e-mail marketers use e-mail, the study also found 74 percent use it to send customer service communications, while a lower 59 percent send promotional marketing messages.

Standard sale or promotional e-mails are great for driving added site traffic and increasing sales, but these broadcast messages must provide deeply relevant content to get opened, clicked on and bought from. On the other hand, transactional e-mails contain 100-percent relevant content. A mainstay of outbound messaging, transactional e-mails include order confirmations, shipping notifications, password change reminders, reservation confirmations, billing reminders, registration confirmations, and the list goes on. These messages go out to customers 24 hours a day, one-at-a-time.

Although the purpose of the transactional e-mail is to inform the recipient about a transaction, you should use a portion of it for cross-selling or promotion. By investing a little time in updating the message and including promotional content, retailers open a new sales channel and solidify the importance of outbound e-mail in their marketing mix. However, if you commit to only sending customers one type of message--stick to it. Too many marketers get greedy and consolidate lists to maximize the number of messages sent. If a customer provides you with an e-mail address for a purchase confirmation only and you use it to send your e-newsletter too, you've violated their trust.

From a legal perspective, CAN-SPAM does allow companies to add marketing content to transactional e-mails, as long as they follow certain guidelines for keeping the transactional content front and center. The CAN-SPAM guidelines and rules for transactional e-mail, along with helpful tips for implementing your own marketing program within transactional messages, can be found on the Federal Trade Commission's website at www.ftc.gov. However, before you get started, keep in mind that adhering to CAN-SPAM only satisfies legal requirements; you also have to satisfy your customers' expectations--and that means providing relevant content in a way that doesn't violate your customers' trust.

5 Be worthy
With so much chatter about "relevant e-mailing," it's easy to forget what that really means to the customer. Relevance really comes down to being valuable. Is your content valuable and worthy of your recipient's time? Much of the retail customers' e-mail trust erosion comes down to marketers not sending content worthy of their customers. Ensure that your offer is strong, the copy is short and effective, and that messages are programmed for your customers' e-mail device of choice. You have less than seven seconds to capture their attention once a message is opened, so make the most of that experience.

Commercial-grade e-mail technology provides easy within-message segmentation tools so message content can differ within the same campaign. Again, testing offers and message content helps you drive closer to providing an e-mail worthy of your recipients' time and attention. Keep in mind, relevance builds upon itself, too. One positive e-mail experience will beget another. Offer and copy testing should be done prior to every promotional e-mail campaign sent. There are no "magic bullets" here. Best practices change all the time and what works for one audience may not work for another.

With the highest return on investment of any digital marketing channel, e-mail is here to stay and is a valuable channel retail marketers use to communicate and sell. However, the time has come for us all to increase the trust our customers have in our use of e-mail. As we seek other methods for increasing sales through e-mail, matters of privacy and address use will be more important than ever. Tell customers what they should expect from you, set guidelines for how often you e-mail them, look for ways to incorporate promotional content into other messages and ultimately, be worthy of their time and attention--do so and e-mail trust will begin to grow.

Tricia Robinson-Pridemore is vice president of market and product strategy at StrongMail Systems. She can be reached at (650) 421-4200.