I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent.

One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain key areas of the email marketing customer life cycle. For this reason, a number of supporting white papers have been produced, which can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the DMA’s website (www.dma.org.uk/toolkit), where they are available for download free to Members.

Here’s a quick summary of what has been produced to date:

Deliverability: Aimed at email program owners who have realised that their broadcasts are experiencing delivery problems, and are trying to identify why this may be the case. Looking at key factors such as sender reputation, spam filtering, blacklist operators, the document provides common-sense guidance on how to deal with them, including 10 easy-to-follow steps to improve your email deliverability.

Creative: Good creative is still an important determinant of a successful email campaign, and is sometimes the only connection a subscriber has with your brand. This document demonstrates that email creative is not a dark art requiring witchcraft and technical know-how! Rather, in non-technical language, it provides some easy-to-implement recommendations that will quickly optimise the performance of your email campaigns.

Data Analysis & Segmentation: Sets out a simple process to help email marketers start segmenting their data, and analysing their results. It defines five key areas to focus on, including: setting objectives; finding the right data; choosing the right segments; different segmentation models, and; effective use of segmentation. It also examines the best methods and approaches to implementing segmentation, as well as how best to interpret the results.

Split Testing: Provides email marketers with the basic capabilities that they will need to run split-testing activity. It looks firstly at the fundamentals that need to be in place to run a split testing program, and then examines ten prime opportunities where split testing can be introduced into any email marketing program to identify the optimal approach to maximise campaign response rates.

Triggered Campaigns: Delivering timely and relevant email messages, using trigger-based email marketing, plays an important part of email best practice. By analysing subscriber behaviour and identifying meaningful changes and/or events, organisations can communicate with their customers at a point when they are most likely to be receptive. This strengthens customer relationships by making them feel valued, and it is not unusual for trigger-based emails to attract high open rates as a result.

In addition to the documents that have been described above, there are also three new white papers whose publication is imminent:

• Using 3^rd Party Data For List Rental & Lead Generation
• A Layman’s Guide to Email Marketing Law
•  Email Lifecycle Marketing

And there are a further two which are scheduled for arrival during Q1 of the New Year:

• Organic List Growth
• Measurement & Reporting

The production of these documents is a collaborative process and the Email Marketing Council, as the representative body of the much larger interest group, is constantly feeding in new ideas about key issues which email marketers would like to have expert guidelines for. Hopefully, the documents described in this article are servicing this need, but it would be great to have direct feedback on whether they are useful, and what the email marketing community would like to see produced next. If you have any feedback for us, then drop a line to email@dma.org.uk , or online via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Guy Hanson Chairs the The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub. He is Director, Response Consulting for Return Path.

One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.

However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.

To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.

All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.

The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.

If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.

Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.

What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.

If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.

What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.

Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.

Driving home last night, I saw a dead badger on the roadside, and I started ruminating on similarities between dead badgers and email marketing programs ! Not so much from the perspective of being a bit flat, somewhat run down, or showing the first signs of decay ( although all of those are potentially applicable ). Rather, that badgers are notoriously shy, so to be able to estimate their population size, a simple rule of thumb is to take the number of dead badgers on the roadside, and multiply that number by 10 to arrive at a rough estimate of the number of living badgers in that area. The key point is that an apparently small cause can provide a pointer to a much larger effect, hence my unlikely association between badgers and email marketing.

Consider spam complaints. Provided that they are being monitored ( that’s another point ! ) they will form around 0.1% of a good sender’s broadcast . Such a small number is easy to ignore, but it can point to bigger issues:

• According to Return Path’s recent Sender Reputation report, 0.1% equates broadly with a sender reputation score of 90+, with the program achieving ISP accepted rates in the high 90% as a result. By comparison, a complaint rate of 0.4% maps roughly onto a score somewhere between 50 and 80. The corresponding accepted rates decline markedly – anywhere between 27% to 88% – as a result.
• There is also churn to be considered. Let’s say you have an email list of 1M addresses, sending on a weekly basis. That 0.4% complaint rate equates with losing 1/5 of your subscribers over the course of a year, and every single one of them is leaving because they are unhappy with your program.

Unsubscribe requests are a similar case in point. The most recent edition of the DMA’s Email Benchmarking Report shows average opt-out rates for retention campaigns at 1%. As above, that small percentage actually provides the frame for a bigger picture. There are also some additional points to consider :

• Leading on from my comments about spam complaints – if you aren’t reporting on this metric, and are only using unsubscribes to measure levels of disaffection with your program, then you are under-reporting the true state of affairs by a probable factor of two, and possibly more.
• Disengagement should also be regarded as a form of opt-out. Your recipients may not physically request their removal, but if they stop responding then they have become “emotionally unsubscribed”. A re-activation program is your first step, but all the non-responders should then be opted out.

Another small number that can conceal bigger issues is bounce rates. The same DMA report shows average bounce rates for retention campaigns as 2%. Using the same example as above, you would lose your entire database in slightly under a year at this rate !

But there is another alarming dimension to this metric – bounce rates for new subscribers are nearly always substantially higher than the average bounce rate for your entire list. For example, if new subscribers form 2.5% of the total broadcast, then an average bounce rate of 2% might easily mask a new subscriber bounce rate of 20%. To counter this, email marketers need to be doing the following :

• Report separately on the first-broadcast performance of new email addresses.
• Ensure new registrants have a strong imperative to supply a good address.
• Validate new addresses using a process such as double entry, or confirmed opt-in.

So – at the risk of mixing my metaphors, my advice is to look between the trees ( the small numbers ) and see all the badgers that are frolicking in the woods ( the larger considerations ). Learn to interpret these metrics, and act quickly on what may at face value appear to be small variances. In this way, you can remain confident that the first whiff of putrefaction really is coming from that poor badger alongside the A5, and not from your slowly decaying email program instead !

Morrison’s have just finished running one of the best promotions I have seen.

For those of you who missed it, it basically involved going shopping and for every £30 you spent you received a pack of Disney top trump cards. They also added in bonus products that when you purchased them you got an additional pack of cards.

This was advertised heavily on the TV and also the kids at school were swapping cards and this prompted my 6 year old to ask to go shopping to Morrison’s. So somewhere kids have been chatting and with the power of TV I swapped super markets (and have continued to go there after the promotion ended)

Benefits to Morrison’s

• New customers
• The ability to push the sales of products by just putting a bonus Disney sign on them. The shelves where they were positioned could not be stocked quick enough. Mainly been emptied by a hoard of children who had suddenly decided shopping was fun.

They also sold rather a lot of the collector albums priced at £4.

What’s this got to do with email?

Well not a great deal apart from to highlight a missed opportunity by Morrison’s. At no point did anyone have to register to take part in the promotion, so they had no record of who the new customers were and no way to market to them to keep them coming back.

Once the promotion had finished there was lots of information about how you could get any missing cards by visiting the website. I actually wanted to celebrate the stroke of genius, what a great idea get people to register at the end to claim the missing cards. However when I logged on to see what happened it was simply out sourced to the card company where you can buy the cards for 10p each, and despite having to give my name, address, postcode and email in order to order them at no point was I given the option to opt into receive information from Morrison’s.

When could data have been captured?

Although on a professional level, I sometimes subscribe to things to see what happens, my personal email and details are only given out when I can really see the advantage in doing so. There were so many opportunities to do so here, it was just crying out for someone to do so.

People could have been opted in to a Customer database

• At the point when you collect the cards? This was done by the customer service desk and a registration process would have only taken a couple more minutes and an extra pack of cards would have probably got quite a high take up.
• When purchasing the collectors album a reduced price or free folder would have offered an incentive.
• They could have created a community page on the website for swapping cards, this group of people could then have been used for focus groups and research moving forward.
• At the point where you can claim any cards you are missing.

Summary.

An example of a great marketing campaign, but also an example of where a company miss an opportunity to engage and build an ongoing relationship via email. The lessons this highlights it to ensure that email is a fully integrated piece of any business strategy and when appropriate opportunities should be sued to collect information and options from individuals who you can then engage with moving forward.

There’s no doubt there is a change afoot in the email marketing industry. Despite  all the best practice mantras (“must segment more”, “this year we won’t look like spammers”)  it is becoming plainly clear there is a divide growing between those who have stuck to their New Year resolutions and those who have not. Email is becoming the strongest digital media channel deployed by the modern marketer, but to make the most of it, you need to know more than how to push the “spam now” button.

The email channel has arrived with many businesses now acknowledging the importance of the channel to their business model. But despite the importance of the media, there has not been uniform treatment when allocating budgets..

This has been borne out in the recent DMA email benchmark report, that concluded there are “two classes of email marketer; those sending simple campaigns and those splitting lists into multiple segments” concluding ”A major divide has opened”.

The “haves” and the “have nots”

The latest Marketing Sherpa email benchmark report backed up this class system, but seemed to suggested the reason for lack of budget was due to some marketers not being able to justify (or measure) overall ROI. It also suggested that the segment of marketers who were investing liberally were in a “strategic phase of maturity” where they could measure ROI and segment effectively.  Unfortunately the research also revealed only 36% of the companies surveyed measure response by list segment and just33% measure revenue per email .

So it would seem that those organisations investing heavily in email marketing, are those that are best able to measure its ROI and effectiveness, and are best placed to know is value. So, how do you get your email marketing to the strategic phase? And what moves can be made to pitch for extra budget to drive the revenue the email channel can really generate?

Measure email’s influence across multiple channels

Trying to convince the board to allocate more budget to a media that is cheap, that you don’t need to invest much money in to get a return, is tough.

As email marketers, we’ve probably all sat round tables where we have discussed spikes in call centre activity and website traffic following an email campaign. The problem is proving these increases in activity come from email. If these revenue streams are not attributed to email (at least in some part), the budget for developing the media further will never be available.

So, mirroring the findings of the Marketing Sherpa report, if you want achieve more budget for your email campaigns, you need to make sure you are measuring its true value.

The value of Influence

I know it’s a bit of a contentious subject in some circles, but the value of email communication moves far beyond the last bit of revenue that was attributed to the last email sent (and last click). it’s the measurement of that value that provides the greatest challenge for the modern marketer. Over the last couple of years I have noticed that when you directly relate a person’s revenue value, against their open and click behaviour, they relate very closely. So closely in fact, that in some instances 80% of online and offline sales will come from the customers who are regularly and recently opening and clicking your emails. An interesting thought; this means someone who opens and clicks an email, is worth more than one who doesn’t. Factor that one into the equation when working out the value of your email list, and you soon see the people who open and click emails are worth far more than those that don’t (10+ times the value is not uncommon).

Segmenting for Influence

If the recipient is reading your emails, they can be influenced. If they can be influenced, you can encourage them to buy more. And that’s the important difference; if you are only attributing last click revenue to the email channel, it will be reflected in a restricted budget. If you can attribute email’s influence on overall sales, you are more likely to get the money to achieve the greatest returns from email.

Why is this important now?

Thanks to the global economic slowdown, there will be less money in the customer’s pockets and the fight for conversion will be a tough one. Thanks to channel migration, (offline to online) online sales have been growing for several years, sometimes in the face of reducing overall sales.  This growth cannot continue and soon it will be back to the slog of battle for market share. Email will be a key weapon in the marketer’s armoury and your strategy and tactics will either be pulling customers from your competitors or they will be pushing them the other way.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Karin Von Abrams’s* perspective of the DMA benchmark report;

“Time, effort and insight can partially compensate for lack of financial resources. But companies that don’t find either time or money to devote to their email campaigns may soon face the consequences. It probably won’t be too pleasant at the bottom of a two-tier email marketplace.”

*Karin Von Abrams, Senior Analyst, eMarketer

Due to exceptionally good feedback in 2010, the Email Marketing Council decided to re-run the Email Customer Lifecycle series albeit with different speakers, case studies and content. So whilst the overall concept remains the same the content is completely different. In case you have never been to one of these events before the format is quite simple and always held in a morning with a great amount of content in around two and a half hours, allowing attendees to only be out of the office for a short period of time.

The first one of 2011 got off to an excellent start late last month on the topic of list growth or acquisition. The keynote speaker was Richard Evans of Silverpop set the scene for the morning: how do marketers grow their lists whilst balancing all of the internal stakeholder pressure and at the same time, where to most appropriately focus the efforts for the most reward. Several options were presented, along with case study data from leading brands across the morning and speakers included Susan Young of Screwfix, Richard Austin of Silverpop, Denise Cox of Newsweaver and Guy Hanson of dbg. I was impressed not only by the quality of the speakers and the content but the level of engagement and interaction from the audience who challenged the expert panel.

Feedback from the event was incredibly positive and if last year is anything to go by I expect to see many DMA members presenting, participating in case studies and attending the future events in this series. The next event in the Email Customer Lifecycle series will be on the topic of Conversion with two great case studies by MyVoucherCode and CentreParcs, and will take place on 12th July 2011, and is sponsored by Silverpop. Space is limited, so book now to ensure a place at this free event.

If you are interested in attending, or speaking at a future DMA event please contact Amelia Bingham at the DMA.

Frameworks have been used to structure thinking, people and process effectively in many different industries. I created the email hierarchy of needs framework to help breakdown email marketing into distinct key elements and have found it helpful when working with clients on their email marketing programmes.

Its inspired in part by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The concept is simple. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid each layer builds on the previous one. Each layer must be in place to advance to the next layer. For example, until you have email permission nothing else matters, then when you have permission you need to actually reach the inbox and so on through each layer.

I’ll summarise each of the layers, starting from the bottom and working up before going into how to apply it to deliver a coherent and well executed email programme.

Permission and profile management

Getting permission is an obvious first need in email marketing. This gives rise to questions. Where is permission being requested? Is it being requested effectively? How is the list being grown? Even once you’ve got it you need to keep it and manage it. Are the right people being emailed? Are you legal? What other customer profile data are you collecting and how is that managed? How are different sources of data integrated, what is the approach to CRM? Unfortunately you will sometimes lose permission, so have you got a rescue process in place? How are you learning about the reasons why permission is lost?

Deliverability

Reaching the inbox is always on the email marketers mind. How are you monitoring and checking your deliverability? Using a good ESP will ensure criteria such as whitelisting, DNS, authentication protocols and feedback loops are in place. What pre-send and spam checks are used? Beyond this a good reputation is needed. This is increasingly based on what your customers think of your emails. In short, low spam complaints, high opens and clicks build a good reputation. So doing a good job of the rest of the layers in the pyramid will do most of the work needed for deliverability.

Accessibility

Once the inbox has been reached the email has to display correctly. A message that can’t be read won’t get you very far. Does your email display as you intended in email clients, web browsers and on mobile devices? How will it look with images on and images off? Do images have ALT tags?

Functionality

Email is much more than a printed flyer. Are functional elements of the email working? Its sadly too often that emails are sent with links that go to the wrong place or personalisation that is not working. How about ensuring images are of small byte size so they load quickly? Especially with the trend to read emails on smartphones, where data connection speeds are lower. Processes such as recommend a friend, share to social or unsubscribe need to not only be present in the email but work when you click through. Have the processes changed or stopped working, when was the last time they were tested? Often they are added to a template and assumed they can never go wrong.

Presentation

This is more than just how it looks, but is everything about how the email connects and carries your message to the customer. Its much more than just creative design. What is says and how it says it, the copy and tone. The subject line and the consistency of message from subject through the body. Choice of from name and calls to action copy. How the images fit and carry the emotion of the messaging. How is split testing being used to optimisation this layer? Testing can really tune the presentation and improve bottom line results.

Relevance

Is the email appropriate to the customer? What is the customer expecting and wanting from your emails? Do they match those desires? How about the impact of timing and frequency? When and how frequently should the customer be contacted and about what? Sending too little or too much email? What of the balance between frequency and accuracy of targeting. A higher frequency of emails will be more acceptable if they are well targeted. This layer is all about using customer insight to drive content.

Value

Answering the what’s in it for me question. You may have negotiated your way through all the layers and messaged about a fabulous pair of shoes to the ideal shoe fanatic. However, if the shoes are poor value then it was all in vain. Value doesn’t have to mean a low price or one of free, win and save. Value can also be about providing a better service level, a more generous guarantee, providing valuable information, offering exclusivity or simply being entertaining.

Using the email hierarchy of needs

First be clear about your business goals and marketing objectives. Then review each layer of the email hierarchy of needs and consider these questions.

• Who owns and manages this layer?
• How is strategy mapped into this layer?
• What people skills are required?
• What processes are needed?
• What resources, tools and solutions are needed?
• What testing and refinement is used for continuous improvement?
• What metrics and KPIs should be used? How will overall ROI be measured?

Please do leave a comment if you’ve ideas adding to this or if you’d like me to expand on any particular aspect.

Join us on June 15th, 6-8pm for the next in our Whitepaper events.

At this evening event we are launching two new white papers by the DMA Email Marketing Council that will help you take your email marketing strategy to new heights, giving you valuable insights into how to test and segment your data.

Data Analysis and Segmentation White Paper takes you through the different stages of segmentation from setting your objectives to deciding on the right form of segmentation (eg profile, behavioural, lifestyle).

DMA Email Council member Simon Bowker from eCircle wrote the white paper which includes ideas for quick wins.

Split Testing White Paperis a comprehensive guide to split-testing (taking a campaign and sending different versions of the same email to different people). It provides marketers with all the basics to run a split-testing program.

Sponsored by The Database Group (dbg), the white paper is written by DMA Email Council members Tim Watson from smartFOCUS and Guy Hanson of dbg.

dbg will also demonstrate all these findings in a recent and exciting case study.

This event is not to be missed by anyone who wants to achieve better results and put their questions to the experts. It is also an opportunity to enjoy a summer’s evening with others in the industry.

To find out more, click here

To book, click here

In this second part of tips for successful preference centre’s I explore what data should be collected and discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of using modeling to help drive relevant communication.

6. Start simple and Get the Basics, Then Ask Detailed Information

• When brands require more than three or four preferences, separate opt-in from preference election, first get opt-in with minimum of data such as Email address and Key subscriber data necessary to drive basic customisation (e.g. name or location).
• Also use field validation to standardise and check entries for consistency and even accuracy and asking users to re-enter a critical value like email helps the accuracy of those fields.
• Hitting submit opts in the subscriber then follow up with preferences on next page. Although if you can avoid the words submit and go for something more action orientated and clear such as; ‘Yes, sign me up!’ ‘Update my preferences!’ or ‘Yes, send me email!’
• Also remember that for many companies the objective of an email / multichannel program is to engage consumers in a long term relationship. Like any relationship the more comfortable you are the more you are likely to share. This is just as true of a brand / consumer relationship and so make ongoing data collection a fundamental part of the program. Either by making prominent use of the preference centre link in email or by using softer methods such fun quizzes are a great way to collect and keep data fresh . Keeping it simple or put another way making the data actionable is also one of the key reasons to use preference centre data above behavioural data that may have been collected.
• Which bring us nicely to the debate between explicit and implicit information. The preference centre deals with explicit preferences but often you will see data not necessarily represent reality. At one cinema client you often saw preference data of art house movies and thrillers whereas the booking data shows all animated kids films and ‘Rom Coms’ in these scenarios using models can help you more easily see and target based on these realties.
• The downside for models is that they can be more difficult to implement and require a more sophisticated eco system to capture, analyse and operationally execute. When developing a preference centre marketers should ask themselves the question, “What can we most efficiently determine from models and what should we ask the customer directly?” Of course, any given marketer might have an easier time implementing some models than others. For instance, a next logical product model might be easier to develop than a cadence model but some marketers might lack even rudimentary analytics capabilities. I am a big advocate for ensuring that an email program should be evolutionary and whatever you do don’t get caught up with analysis paralysis, small actions are better than no actions and from studying our clients results you will see the benefits of targeting long before you get to any nirvana state of relevance.

7. Use Welcome and Thank-You Communications to Enhance Preference Election

• On confirmation page, give subscribers the opportunity to correct preference elections immediately.
• Use confirmation and welcome emails to drive preference elections for those who do not do so at opt-in.
• The further removed preference election is from opt-in, the less successful it will be.

8. Make your preference centre an acquisition tool

• Adding an invite a friend link and allowing the person social links – letting their networks know they have signed up, may not drive dramatic numbers will create a more integrated feel to your wider multichannel communications strategy.
• Making sure you have a share to social link on the page to encourage people to share that they have signed up.

The preference centre gives you a great step forward in helping understand and engage with your consumer so go and review your pages now and make sure they are delivering as much value to your business as possible.