Responsible Email Marketing: Managing Complaints

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Today’s marketers have the world at their fingertips—literally. The advent of modern online marketing solutions has created a brave new world of opportunity where the streets are paved with personalized content and inlayed with image gold. By leveraging the immediacy and wide-ranging reach of the Internet, online solutions greatly expand an organization’s marketing goals and possibilities. In this new universe, everyone, in every corner of the earth, is a potential customer.

Why People Complain

The benefits of online marketing are legion yet like every good solution, when used improperly, it ends up alienating and irritating the very people it was meant to attract. In researching this article, lack of user education and/or scruples seemed to surface time and again when looking for reasons why people complain about email marketing. Ultimately, lack of user integrity and a shortage of responsible internal resources topped the vendors’ own list of why good marketing solutions go bad.

“I think that small businesses have been using the wrong tools for email marketing, mainly Outlook or the email client of their ISP. I think that more small businesses should be using an Email Service Provider (ESP) that helps them with best practices on how to more effectively communicate with their customers,” says Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse. “Serious ESPs, like VerticalResponse, manage complaints and unsubscribes from recipients that don’t want their email. We do this as a service to customers and won’t allow spammers to use our services. But let’s face it; everyone gets a complaint now and then, even customers with the best intentions. The difference is that serious ESPs want to help their customers learn best practices about email marketing. Specifically, it’s as crucial to understand the bounce and unsubscribe rates of your list as it is to understanding the click and open rates. Really getting a handle on these two things will help every marketer use email marketing solutions more appropriately.”

Eric Groves, senior vice president of worldwide strategy and market development at Constant Contact looks to his own inbox for lessons in what works and what doesn’t. “When I opened up my inbox this morning, I had a number of email messages from businesses that I know, that I opened and read. There were others that fell into one of two buckets: people I don’t know (complete spam) and messages from people that I do know that I didn’t care to open. The businesses sending the email that I opened are doing it right.”

According to J.D. Peterson, director of product management for Lyris, technology and systems can do a lot to protect end-users, but ultimately it comes down to the sender. “The type of content and how often it is sent are decisions that ultimately rely on an individual,” he says. “That said, I think as a technology vendor, we can and should continue to do more to help users understand best practices and see how following these impact value (read: greater ROI) for marketers.”

David Daniels, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, believes that marketers want to do the right thing, but they are burdened by a lack of insight into their customer data and a lack of staffing resources. In a recent JupiterResearch executive survey on the top challenges facing email marketers, 40 percent of respondents cited not having enough customer data, 37 percent said lack of adequate staffing resources and 34 percent stated email delivery and list/subscriber turnover. “Outside of addressing staffing challenges, these hurdles can be addressed through better data integration and analysis tools, as well as list hygiene,” says Daniels. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Forrester Research acquired JupiterResearch in July.)

Good Email Marketing Gone Bad

What happens when good email marketing goes bad? There are definitely repercussions for misusing online marketing solutions—from loss of reputation to loss of a vendor. Responsible email marketers care deeply what their recipients think. Popick explains that it is not unusual for people who abuse email marketing to get blacklisted by ISPs, which is why VerticalResponse takes so many precautions, “If we feel customers are taking advantage intentionally, we won’t let them email through us anymore.”

Constant Contact has a no-tolerance spam policy and invests significant resources in its enforcement, “We only allow customers who comply with consent-based list collection methods to use our services,” Grove says. “If it is determined that a Constant Contact customer is in violation of this policy, its services are subject to immediate termination.”

Peterson feels that the first thing the marketer loses when they have irritated a recipient is a golden opportunity to have a conversation with the subscriber, who might be a customer. Users, he adds, are quite reluctant to give brands a second or third chance if they feel abused or misled. Peterson notes there are several types of repercussions for mailers that do not follow the industry’s standards and rules, “ESP’s will block your mail from getting through and most maintain the rights to remove clients off of its servers if caught violating rules. It can become very difficult for a company to send mail if they have been flagged or blacklisted within the industry.”

So what’s a marketer to do to keep from ending up on the bad side of an email blast recipient? According to Groves, reputation is everything and it is important for organizations to build their reputation through consistent email behavior and a good permission-based list. “Your recipient’s behavior (whether or not they report your email as spam) is important to your reputation with them and with the ISPs. Anything out of the ordinary may convince recipients that they have been spammed: even opt-in mail becomes spam if a recipient labels it as such. Therefore, organizations need to make developing trust and recognition a priority.” Groves believes that the first step to achieving this is to organize the contact database. Keeping the distribution list updated and the email relevant will help to ensure a good reputation.

Educating their users about how to avoid damaging their reputation is part of the ‘onboarding process’ for Lyris and is something that remains an ongoing part of the relationship with clients. “Your reputation is everything in email marketing and it must be maintained in order to reap the benefits of this high-ROI marketing vehicle,” says Peterson. “We maintain a staff of experts along with a toolset that specifically helps clients not only understand the best practices, but monitor their programs to ensure compliance.”

Remember Who You’re Talking To

Daniels believes the primary reason consumers unsubscribe from messages that they opted into is because they are no longer relevant to them, followed by the frequency of their receipt. “Marketers must move to more relevancy enabling tactics—such as click-based segmentation and the use of dynamic content to speak to similar pockets of their clients as groups of individuals rather than marketing the same message to the masses. The JupiterResearch study, The ROI of Email Relevance, found that marketers adopting tactics that empower relevancy are nearly nine times more successful than marketers continuing to broadcast the same message to all of their clients.”

Popick, who blogs regularly about successful email marketing on the VerticalResponse Web site, says she wants to make sure that all of their customers’ marketing efforts are as successful as possible. She also notes that customers need to understand that having recipients that receive valuable, well-targeted, content—which they signed up for—is essential to not only the marketer’s reputation, but also, Popick points out, to VerticalResponse’s reputation.