Silverpop Survey Shows Best-Practices Gap

It sounds dumb, but some marketers are failing to give people a reason for signing up for their e-mail newsletters. And too few are asking for opt-ins on every page of their Web sites. Those are two findings of a new list-growth survey by Silverpop.

Of the e-mailers surveyed, 11% do not offer an “explicit value proposition” when asking people to opt in. And that includes e-zine mailers, says Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy for Atlanta-based Silverpop.

“It’s astonishing the number of folks who don’t offer that when getting to get people to sign up for their newsletters,” she adds.

How would they do it?

One way is to “give people samples of things they’re going to see when they sign up,” O’Gorman says. Another is to “talk to them about what types of information they’re going to get.”

And what are companies offering?

Of those surveyed, 27% are pitching news/notification updates as their unique value proposition. Another 21% are doing product news and 13% how-to/best practices. Further down the list are discount/sales notifications and contest/sweepstakes.

Another worst practice is to limit your opt-in request to your home page. Only 20% of the respondents follow the best practice put it on every page.

Why bother? Because search engines often deliver consumers right to the inside pages. And people who are get there might prefer to have the content pushed to them. There’s value in “having it right there, ready to go,” O’Gorman says.

The survey also shows that marketers are using the e-mail mostly as a relationship-building tool.

Forty percent of the respondents send e-mail mostly to customers, and 22% only to customers. Only 15% send to prospects, and another 17% split their mailings between the two groups.

And what are their strategies for e-mail list growth, an important issue given that up to one fourth of a marketer’s e-mail list will go bad in a year, according to Forrester Research?

Almost two thirds cited offline advertising/direct marketing. And over half listed trade shows or online marketing and search. At 18%, the least-used tactic is list appends.

What’s this mean for e-zines?

“It’s important that firms carefully inform customers through every touchpoint about their ability to deliver these newsletters,” O’Gorman says. “Some of the most successful channels are the traditional ones—for example, direct mail and catalogs are a very affective way to get people to subscribe.”

There’s also a gap between planned list-building tactics and those seen as successful.

For example, 24% plan to use viral marketing. But only 10% now see it as successful. Similarly, 21% want to do online marketing/search. But 17% see it as successful.

“There’s a bit of a disconnect,” O’Gorman says. “But is it the technique or the way the technique is being applied?”

Silverpop surveyed 321 e-mail marketers, almost two thirds of which are located in the U.S. The participants are roughly split between B-to-B marketers (36%) and B-to-C (34%). Another 30% market to both.

As might be expected, firms with five years of e-mail experience under their belt are more likely to have lists with more than one million names.

What explains the fact that some firms get it right and others don’t?

“There’s two competing trends,” O’Gorman says. “Lots of people getting it right and making the transition to using best practices. At same time increasing number of people entering the channel. E-mail still fundamentally an immature medium.”