Comparison - emails
Everything with email depends on the reliability and responsiveness of the data. To try and make some sense of these general terms we set up two definitions that seem relevant:
VALIDITY. The validity of the data measures whether the email addresses actual real live addresses of the people the list owner purports them to be. In other words is the address spelt correctly, and is it a real person. Or has the data gatherer simply spotted that Hamilton House Mailings Ltd has a website www.hamilton-house.com and so assumed that the email addresses of staff in that company all end @hamilton-house.com And then made the further assumption that there might well be a Gerry@hamilton-house.com and so added him to the list.
In this case Gerry@hamilton-house.com (having appeared here) is now on a number of mailing lists automatically built by programs touring the internet looking for email addresses. But it has a Validity of zero since Gerry does not exist.
WILLINGNESS. This measure represents the chance of the individual recipient opening the email and reading the content. Willingness varies depending on a variety of factors, including the name of the sender, the text on the subject line, the lifestyle of the recipient, the number of emails the recipient receives, and whether anyone actually remembers that there is an email account with this name. To use my usual examples, an email from AWenger@arsenal.com will have me opening it at the speed of light. An email with the subject line Arsenal Sign New Striker gets me there just as quickly - unless I read that news on another email 10 minutes earlier.
MEASURE OF RESPONSIVENESS
Taking it that an invalid email address gives a rating of zero. and a valid email address is rated as 1, and that the willingness of the recipient to open and read likewise ranges from 0 to 1, we can have a measurement of the responsiveness of an email database as being the result of multiplying validity by willingness. Write to me at my business email address and put the subject line "help needed on direct mail campaign" and you'll get a MEASURE OF RESPONSIVENESS close to 1. Send the same message to Gerry at Hamilton House and the result is zero.
One interesting issue that became apparent as I looked into this area of work with my colleagues was the number of organisations that set up web sites, put an "enquiries@" or similar web site address on the site, and then forgot about it. Looking at some lists we found around 12% of the addresses which were perfectly valid, bounced back to us with the message "Mail box full". The owners had forgotten all about them.
ACHIEVING A RESPONSIVENESS OF 1.
Leaving aside my penchant for reading emails about Arsenal FC, my colleagues and I set out to find how we could create a complete database of addresses with a responsiveness of 1. The most likely source comes from opt-in mailing lists - for surely here we have people who have agreed to be mailed.
Certainly such lists (assuming they are kept clean) should have a Validity of 1 in almost every case. But that does not suggest a willingness of 1. Apart from watching the Arsenal I also go to the theatre quite often - particularly enjoying the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. I'm on their mailing list, they send me emails, and I rather suspect that when I first signed up, I ticked the box saying that they could pass my details on to other organisations who might occasionally send me relevant information.
In fact I think I have done this quite a few times - each time perhaps naively thinking that I would get information that was relevant.
Now I make no accusation against the RSC - an organisation I love and admire nearly as much as I love and admire Arsenal - but I seem to get a lot of junk addressed to my personal email address which has nothing to do with my interests. Some of the people I've given permission to have sold my address on and done nothing to check who was using it.
And of course I should not expect anything else. But the result is I get loads of emails that are irrelevant, and so I delete them. My responsiveness has shrunk.
Thus the problem arose - how could a person such as myself be reactivated and taken back to a higher responsiveness?
In fact we were already sitting on the answer, for on January 2, 2001, we had launched Direct Mail Secrets - an email news group which was totally opt in, and from which one could opt out at any time. Since the moment of the launch the group has grown and today it has over 1000 subscribers.
This group is easy to experiment with - we are able to put up notices about free articles (such as this one), special offers, various services etc, and in each case measure the response rate. For free articles the take up rate (where the reader has to send an email to request the article) can often be over 20%. Items for sale can get a 2% response rate (a rate that is very much in keeping with what one might expect in direct mail).
We have since replicated our experience by working on other groups in the field of marketing, and setting up two groups for teachers. These latter groups require a special mention, and give further insights into this area of seeking maximum responsiveness.
We chose teachers as our second experimental group for two reasons. First because we have a specialist division within the company that deals with education, and second because our experience is that teachers are particularly difficult to reach via email. Most teachers do not have easy access to email facilities through the day, and so success in reaching them would be (we believed) harder to achieve.
Our two teacher groups each had subscription levels by mid-2007 of over 1000 members. As with the marketing groups the subscribers received regular emails containing relevant news items written in a style which seemed to generate the highest approval levels. Occasional advertisements written as advertorials were also included. In this case once again items for sale could get response rates of 2%, sometimes higher, while offers of free information could reach as high as 30%. Requests for information (of the type, "which department in your school handles the topic of healthy eating?") could get response rates at over 30%.
Even more exciting was the fact that both the marketing and the teaching groups generated commentaries from the members. With the marketing groups the subscribers are able to post messages back to the group, commenting on any topic, or (more commonly) asking questions. Teachers do not have access to this feature, but even without being invited so to do, they regularly write in, in significant numbers asking for further information, passing a comment, or simply saying thank you for the service.
What this shows is that these news groups have members with a willingness quotient of 1, or very close to it, while opt in groups might have members with a much lower willingness quotient. Thus the key issue with email lists in terms of their ultimate use in selling something is nothing to do with double opt ins, but rather to do with the nature of the information that comes from this particular email address.
Let me conclude with a final simple example. I subscribe to a service run by Transport for London, in which every thursday they send me a note telling me about engineering disruption on the Underground for the coming weekend. Because part of my journey to my football venue of choice is by Underground, I read this information ahead of weekends when I am going to watch a football match in London. I doubt that this mailing list has been sold to anyone else - but if it had, the chances are I would not read the incoming emails. I read the ones that have the sender's name and subject line which indicate their relevance to me.
That is the key to email marketing. It is not the list, nor its source, the number of levels of opt in, or anything else like it. It is simply whether it reaches a reader who is wanting to read that information.
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