Live from New York: Panel Explores Building Opt-In E-Mail Lists

The image of cyberspace as the final frontier was reaffirmed yesterday at a panel discussion on electronic prospecting. Among companies that would provide e-mail marketers with prospect names there is ” a land-grab mentality,” with each attempting to build its database and hammer out opt-in protocols, said SmartReminders.com CEO Rich Maradik.

At “Permission-Based E-mail – The Internet’s Tool for Profits and Sustainability” , a forum hosted by Winterberry Group LLC, several online industry figures offered their views on concerns facing e-mail marketers, as well as techniques to improve e-mail efficiency.

The steps marketers need to take before considering an e-mail address as viable provided some lively debate. ” Companies should be explicit about what they intend to do” when gathering e-mail addresses, said VarsityBooks.com vice president, user experience Patrick Hunt. ” If customers understand, all other questions become moot.”

But Advaya’s executive vice president of strategic planning David Levitsky, whose resume includes a stint with direct marketing firm Columbia House, said that when offline marketers gather e-mail addresses of existing customers, the customers need to be re-opted in. Some of the more effective arguments marketers can make to persuade their customer to enlist include the environmental savings, and the fact that electronic catalogs allow for better targeting of relevant messages. According to Levitsky, marketers that do this well can anticipate unsubscribe rates as low as 0.5% a month.

This figure may be even lower in the business to business arena. According to NetCreations president and COO Mitchell York, customers in the tech arena are hungry for information, which often reflects their passion as well as their occupation. ” The open rates are huge,” he said. By contrast, consumers are more likely to open e-mail from sources they learn to trust. A good experience in the past will lead to them opening a targeted e-mail in the future.

There are tactics e-mail marketers can employ to improve open rates. Levitsky suggested testing mid-day message delivery, as opposed to relying on overnight broadcasts. An e-mail that is not part of a stack of 50 waiting for a customer first thing in the morning are more likely to get read, and those most frequently opened are the ones delivered during lunch hours.

The panel also touched on creative approaches within e-mail messages. In debating text-based pitches versus HTML image-laden offers, York felt that one third of the outgoing messages he has encountered used HTML. Response rates, he said, were not as heavily influenced by image use, relying more on the attractiveness of the offer.

But Hunt felt that response rates for e-mail that used HTML images generated between two and three times the responses of non-graphic-enhanced messages. The problem, he noted, was that AOL, the online industry’s major player, does not accept HTML images through its e-mail system, although it does permit colored text and electronic links.

The session, held yesterday at the Williams Club in New York City, was moderated by Winterberry Group CEO Mike Petsky.