Are high open rates holding you back?

Our findings last month on the Obama campaign caused a lot of debate but the bare facts of our analysis still stand – had Obama’s team optimized for improved open rates, their send volumes would have dropped and their all-important donations would have followed.

Open rates remain a widely used and hugely misleading measure of performance and engagement in the email industry. At best they give you an idea of a campaign’s performance in isolation but at worst they lead email marketers to focus on optimizing the wrong strategies for their email program.

Here we discuss how to identify if maximizing open rates is holding you back and how to go about identifying the strategies that will have the biggest impact on your results.

The open rate paradox

Using EDS Analyst we examined the relationship between open rates and total unique opens for the top 200 email senders by list size in the US for 2012.

We were confident that, like the Obama campaign, there would be an inverse relationship between rates and totals – so as rates increase, totals decrease and vice versa. We call this the open rate paradox or to paraphrase a popular sports trusim: rates are for show, totals are for dough.

Each dot on the graph below represents a single sender and we picked out some well-known brands as reference points.

Sure enough, the graph shows that for most large senders, there is an inverse relationship between open rates and the total number of opens – the higher the open rate, the lower the number of total opens. Rates are for show.

It’s also no coincidence that nearly all of the brands with the biggest lists (orange dots) also have highest number of total opens because they are sending more opportunities to open.

Although opens don’t directly correlate to revenue, even the most avid fans of open rate maximization would agree that the more people that actually open your emails, the more engaged your database and the more revenue or conversions you are likely to generate. Totals are for dough.

Keep it simple – focus on just three strategies

If your goal is only to improve open rates, then your strategy is simple: halve your list by suppressing your less active subscribers and watch those rates soar… and those total opens plummet! But if your goal is to increase total opens, then the bell curve in the graph above helps define three clear strategies:

1. List size:
   Has the biggest impact on totals and can be improved independently of the other two.
2. Increase send volume:
   Significantly increases total opens for relatively little effort (low effort to gain ratio).
3. Optimize for rates
   Increases total opens but requires the biggest effort (high effort to gain ratio).

Most brands are clustered towards the lower middle of the curve because it’s the easy place to be. By and large, they all put a similar amount of effort into their program and use the same undefined strategies.

The outliers, however, go above and beyond in one of three ways – those to the right have very high open rates, those to the left have high send volumes and those at the top are combining high send frequency with very big lists to produce massive send volumes.

In effect, this is the three different strategies implemented to their extremes.

Of course, there are limits to the effectiveness of each strategy and these are defined in the graph above by the orange line to the left (frequency cap) and green line to the right (optimization cap).

These boundaries exist because for any given list size there is point at which diminishing returns kick in for both frequency and open rate. And, as the big empty space to the right of the green optimization cap shows, it’s very hard to send a large volume of email while still achieving a high open rate.

So the basis of a successful email program is to continually grow your list while finding a balance between increasing send volume and maximizing open rates with better offers, targeting, subject lines, etc.

And you find that balance by ignoring your open rates…

Define your strategy by ignoring open rates

To illustrate the effect these strategies have on an email program, we have created a simple optimization chart, below. The green curves represent the impact of send volume on total opens and the brown lines represent the impact of open rate on total opens.

Each intersection represents a hypothetical 10-hour unit of resource, as a means of comparing the effort required to implement each strategy. As you get closer to each cap, the effort required to improve your totals with your chosen strategy increases exponentially.

Imagine your brand is the star in the middle of the curve and you want to take on your leading competitor, the lightning bolt.

If you use open rates to define your strategy, then you focus your resource on maximizing those, route A. Your open rate may now be much better than your competitor’s but they are out-mailing you, so they are still creating twice as many opportunities to buy or convert.

If you choose to increase your send volume, ‘route B’, then your open rate drops but your total opens more than double. However, as you approach the frequency cap, the impact of your strategy diminishes and you still trail your competitor.

If you use totals to define your strategy, then you take ‘route C’, which balances resource between increasing send volume and maximizing open rates. Your open rate drops but you are finally creating more opportunities to buy than your competitor.

Smart email marketing is not just a case of increasing send volume indiscriminately or of only focusing on ever tighter targeting. There is a balance that exists for each brand, you just have to find your own sweet spot.

Total opens the key to optimizing your program?

In this instance, we have highlighted the open rate paradox using total opens because that was the data available. However, we’re confident you will find the same inverse relationship in your own campaigns with total clicks and, more importantly, revenue. And in the end that’s the only metric that matters!

If you haven’t looked at all your marketing messages on the small screen, now is the time to do so. Mobile email is hot, and not in the sense of a hype, but in the sense that you need to take it into account. Otherwise you will lose revenue. E-mail is shifting from a pure desktop orientated task to the real, always-on world. Always on has a strong preference towards mobile. The latest report on mobile email shows that the growth isn’t over yet.

The mobile tipping point
On average 41%. of the opened emails originate from a mobile device according to the latest report by Knotice. These are smartphone as well as tablets. The mobile tipping point, the point where half (or more) of email will be read on a handheld device is just around the corner. Earlier this year there was a mobile email tipping point infographic. The researchers expect that the tipping point will be reached this year, even within 6 months.

That is impressive because just a year ago this was only 27%. Although of course you always need to understand your metrics especially concerning mobile email. The shift to mobile has some real implications because the email marketing engagement takes a very different form on mobile devices. Think about the fact that touchscreen are used instead of the much more accurate mouse. The different interaction with mobile webforms and shopping behaviour as well as the reduced screen sizes.

Clicktrough rates on mobile devices

To get a view of the interaction on mobile devices we also need to look the next levels of interaction. Opens are great but more often it is about clicks and conversions. So in the Knotice report the open statistics are complemented with clickdata. Take notice these are the mobile email clickratios, compared to the clickratio on desktops.

Increased mobile email engagement

The clickthroughs on mobile devices are lower compared to desktops, we can all feel that is quite logical and not bad per se. Take emails from financial institutions for instance or emails that link through to a downloadable PDF. Although you could open those on mobile more often these days, it is also the question if you are in the situation to do so. And if recipients feel comfortable doing so. The context also matters, where you are at that moment. It is interesting to see the clickthrough rates from tablets now beginning to become higher than smartphones, these used to be almost identical.

The clickthrough rates on mobile are increasing, this could be explained by three trends:

• More companies are sending mobile optimized email
• Recipients are more used to interacting with email and websites on their mobiles.
• More websites are responsive and are fit to interact with on a tablet or mobile device.

Differences between industries

Mobile e-mail marketing statistics differ strongly per industry, something which is common in all email marketing statistics. Many of the industries appear to level off in their growth, while others are still growing strongly in mobile email. For instance consumer products (22,3% growth, now 36,22%), Cable and Telco (12,6% growth, now 40,35%), consumer services (19,3% growth, now 50,29%). The data from the report is from last quarters of 2012, the first 2013 numbers show a small decline in opens.

Why mobile email should needs an Upgrade instead of an Update
Being unconscious about mobile is definitely no longer an option. Although some say that mobile email optimization (with responsive design) is just a shiny new thing. Tim Watson wrote an excellent piece about how optimizing your mobile email is a waste of time for many. I would say, going from just the title: that is nonsense.

If you are going to optimize for mobile, the trick is to not to treat it like an update, but as an upgrade. This means avoiding the  triple play of mistaken mobile-head first tactics.

* Don’t just make your current design “fit for mobile”,
* Don’t just add some “mobile best practices”,
* Don’t just make a new template which the designer filled with things he thinks are cool.

Instead treat it like a chance to swing your emails around and put results first instead of “mobile first” .Go ahead and design a new template if you will, one that takes all the above head-first tactics if you must. But think about your conversions and how you are going to increase your results. As an anecdote, I was involved in a new template design which had already been mobile optimized. But we made a different, new one, Guess what? The new mobile optimized design outpreformed the old mobile optimized design by 75%. 75% revenue that is.

Related articles

• How To Design Mobile Emails
• Marketers still need to work on mobile email: stats
• What Email Cavemen Can Learn From the Dinosaurs
• Email Messages That Work for Mobile: Things to Keep in Mind
• Marketing Analytics, Optimizing the Connected Customer Experience

Now, a survey is only as good as the questions it contains and how these are phrased so let us look at the question. “If you get a mobile email that doesn’t look good then what do you do”. So what constitutes “does not look good”

Lets go back a few years to the days when Blackberrys where the only smartphones we had to worry about. In these days the html renderer on a Blackberry was pretty terrible and only the simplest of html would be readable and older versions would only give you the text version of the message. If was pretty safe to say that any html you sent would not look good.

Nowadays the html renderers on smart phones are excellent and they will pretty much render anything that a desktop email client will. Just because people are opening your email on a mobile device and you haven’t fully optimised your campaign for mobile it doesn’t mean these people aren’t engaging with your campaign.

So, everyone can relax a little. Without doing anything, you have a mobile strategy because people can read your emails on a smart phone and engage. It maybe harder to navigate around the email on a mobile device and the calls to action a little difficult to click but if your email looks good on a desktop then the odds are it will look ok on a mobile device.  If you want to improve the user experience on a mobile device then it is not about getting your campaign to render on a mobile device but about optimising it for mobile devices.

The question is will this improve your campaign results? Every campaign is different and just because Litmus say that 43% of emails are read on a mobile device it doesn’t necessarily translate to your target audience. Tim Watson from Zettasphere analysed the data and found there are still campaigns at both ends, some with almost no mobile activity and some with almost only mobile activity. If you have historical campaign data to your subscriber base then look at your open stats and see what your mobile open rate is across a variety of campaigns.

However, don’t be misled by your mobile open rate. Just because someone opens your email on a mobile device it doesn’t mean they don’t then open it on their desktop as well. If I receive an interesting email on my mobile device but find it difficult to read I just wait until I’m in the office and read it on my desktop.

One thing that does generally improve campaign performance is re-designing an old template whether it is related to mobile or not. If you put the time and effort in to look at your existing template and re-design it with the mobile user experience in mind then I would expect your results to improve. No matter whether this is related to mobile opens or not.  Its a win win. The new template should get more opens on the desktop and mobile devices.

Everyone should be thinking about mobile devices and how this affects their campaigns but you don’t necessarily have to drop everything and rethink what you are doing. Look at your recipients and stats. If it has been a long time since you changed your template then it may be time to think about creating a new simplified template with mobile devices in mind.

There is little doubt in my mind that email was the No.1 non-political contributor to Obama’s win in the 2012 US Presidential race.  75% of the $934 million raised by Obama was attributed to digital and nearly all of that $700 million was raised through email¹.  That fact alone is phenomenal.

But it’s not until you start to drill down into the data to find out why Obama’s email campaign was significantly more effective than Romney’s that the exciting insights start to appear.

Marketing pundits from all channels have offered their opinions. Just look at the word cloud based on the top 15 blogs about Obama’s email strategy – targeting, testing, creative, subject lines – everything but the two biggest contributing factors: list size and mailing frequency.

Why have these been missed? Because it is relatively easy to get a sense of a campaign’s creative, subject line strategy, frequency and, to some extent, personalization by simply subscribing to a list. What you can’t find out is how large that list is or how much segmentation is being done. That makes it almost impossible to know how many emails are actually being sent. Enter eDataSource …

Scratching below the surface with eDataSource

So, we recently took out a subscription to eDataSource and let our analytics team loose on their web-based tool that combines active monitoring of over 800,000 consumer inboxes with a library of millions of digital marketing messages from thousands of brands. This impressive breadth and depth of reporting gave us everything we needed to find out what really made Obama’s email strategy so effective.

First up was to prove my prediction back in October that Obama would win because he was sending significantly more email to more people. Using the Federal Election Commission, we were able to attribute all donations over $250 to each campaign for the 79 weeks running up to the election. We then plotted this against the corresponding weekly send volumes taken from eDataSource in graph 1.

Graph 1: Donations Received vs Emails Sent

The trend lines tell the story more succinctly than any blog: the more emails each campaign sent, the more donations each campaign received. If the purpose of each campaign was to generate revenue, then it was frequency and list size that had the biggest impact on performance.

What I couldn’t predict was what we found when we dug deeper into the data – the send volumes for each campaign had a striking correlation with the probability of each campaign winning based on the opinion polls …

Obama – the President who ignored open rates

On graph 2 below, we pulled the send volumes and open rates for both campaigns in the two month run-up to the election and compared these to Nate Silver’s Poll aggregator for the 2012 election. His algorithm has correctly predicted the winner of 99 out of 100 states in the last two elections, so it gave us a highly accurate winning probability at each point during the campaign.

Graph 2: Email send volumes vs Probability to Win (Romney volumes scaled up by x15)

As Obama ramps up his send volumes early in the race, his probability of winning increases. Romney also increases his frequency at a similar rate but, because his list size is 15 times smaller, his growth has little effect on the polls. List size matters.

When Obama reduces his send volumes by 38% his probability of winning drops by 42%. By contrast Romney’s campaign grows by 180% and his chances of winning increase by 160%.

In the final push, Romney reduces his send volumes and with it his probability of winning. But his open rates improve by an impressive 14%. Obama takes the opposite approach and aggressively increases his send volumes, which improves his probability of winning.

And Obama’s open rates? They plummet by 14% to a campaign low … and he wins the election.

Obama’s email strategy? Send more, raise more

Had Obama chased open rates would he have lost the election? Well, what we do know is the best way to achieve that goal, as shown by Romney, is to reduce send volumes. Of course, send volumes don’t win elections, donations do. So we set about finding a correlation between send volumes and donations to add weight to our theory.

Graph 3: Open Rates vs Volumes vs Probability to Win

Graph 3 plots annual donations against annual send volumes and open rates for the Obama campaign. The correlation between send volume and donations is undeniable – in fact, they are close to an exact match. The general trend is for a steady increase over the year until a drop off at election time.

But more interestingly – and this may surprise some people – the relationship between open rates and donations is an inverse one! Or, to put it another way, the higher the open rate, the lower the number of donations.

Why?

Because, broadly speaking, there is an inverse relationship between send volumes and open rates. The more email you send, the lower your open rate is likely to be. But if doubling your send volume only results in a 15% fall in your open rates, then you will be significantly better off.

So why is revenue so closely linked to send volumes? Because people cannot engage with an email they do not receive. Replace the word ‘email’ with ‘opportunity to donate’, and “an extra email send to 1 million people” becomes, “let’s send another 1 million opportunities to donate”.

While relevance, engagement, creative, subject lines, testing and targeting all played a part in Obama’s success, they pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of reach, frequency and list size. And best of all? With email, you can optimize all of these at near-zero marginal cost.

But does it work in retail? Hell yeah!

Obama’s campaign is one of the few examples of a noted sender admitting that increasing frequency works. The data backs it up, too. But does it work outside of the rarefied world of political fundraising? The answer is “hell yeah!”

Are you being out-mailed by your competitors? If the answer is “yes”, then they are probably out-selling you as well – and we shall be digging down into the data for that particular topic in the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled.

If you want to replicate Obama’s success for your own email program, then feel free to use these strategy ideas from this post from our blog: FIVE reasons why open reach will revolutionize your email marketing.

1. Joshua Green, The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails, 29 November 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails

Over time we have had members that have been very active participants, who for whatever reason have stood down and the election time lends itself to be the perfect time to bring new members to assist with the work of the council. Two such recent members that have stood down are Denise Cox of Newsweaver and Simon Bowker of Teradata/eCircle both of whom have contributed to numerous projects and outputs in their time as a council members and I’d like to extend my personal thanks to them both for their efforts and valuable contributions over numerous years.

Immediately post-elections the council must align its outputs and objectives for 2013-2014 in line with the DMA’s business plan and the initiatives from the Chairs of all of the DMA councils which include; putting the foundations in place for greater cross-council collaboration and supporting development of the value chain and improving the customer journey.

The Email Marketing Council has some objectives that are on-going including the updating of the Council’s Best Practice Document, the production of White Papers all of which are designed to help the membership and support our desired goal to champion email as an essential part of the greater marketing mix and an effective direct marketing channel.

In short there is much work to do and those with an appetite for helping should consider standing and getting involved as proactive council members – now is the perfect time to get involved. I consider us to be an accessible council as we maintain an open door policy to observers that wish to attend our council meetings as well as encouraging active participation to the work of one of our hubs. If you have previously considered standing for election and for whatever reason have not done so historically then I would encourage you to reconsider, but do so quickly as you do not have long at all – the closing date for entries is this coming Friday 22nd March at 5:30pm.

The website to register as a candidate can be found here, if you have any questions please contact either myself or Georgina Lippa (Project Manager, Media Channels) directly via email: georgina.lippa@dma.org.uk or via telephone: 020 7291 3317.

Richard Gibson, Chair Email Marketing Council and Director Client Services, Return Path.

Data processing is featured heavily in the proposed Regulation. One of the changes is around notifying the relevant national data protection authority, in the case of the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), of your organisation’s data processing activities. Currently, providing such notification to the ICO has been a matter of course, whereas the proposal states that full records of data processing activities must be kept by the organisation and only supplied to the relevant national data protection authority on request.

The use of data in many organisations is crucial for marketing purposes, as well as general interaction with customers. If you work client-side, just think of the number of email campaigns your organisation sends out to your customers, whether the customers are active, prospective, lapsed or otherwise. Your data would have had to be processed in some way before emailing, whether it’s cleaning or segmenting for a targeted campaign; therefore keeping a record each time the data is processed with specific information would add another compliance burden to the activity. The obligation to keep records of processing activities is also extended to agencies where dealing with data is an integral part of running of the organisation, such as list rental and lead generation activities. With this in mind, if you think of your own organisation’s activities as well as the number of organisations involved in a typical data processing chain, then the number of data processing activities that will need to be recorded is overwhelming. The ICO is concerned that there is a danger that organisations will focus on the ‘paperwork’ rather than on actual data protection compliance. The removal of the notification fee, which organisations currently pay to the ICO when they complete the notification form, does raise questions as to how the ICO will be adequately funded to carry out its data protection work effectively.

Another change in the proposal which will have a big impact is the requirement for organisations with 250 or more staff to have a designated independent data protection officer. Even though data is crucial to a lot of organisations, the size, reasons for its use and frequency the data is handled and processed amongst organisations varies. The ICO believes that “a simple head-count criterion for the designation of a data protection officer is not the best approach.” Some low head count organisations may process a large amount of information about a lot of people and are therefore high risk. On the other hand, large head count organisations may carry out relatively small –scale and low risk processing. Read the ICO’s report on the draft regulations here

The additional bureaucratic requirements relating to these proposed new compliance obligations will certainly create extra administrative costs, particularly for smaller organisations. As well as the increased documentation of all data processing activities, consider the revision and issue of new terms and conditions, and the amount of employee guidance and training around these changes.

These new compliance obligations , as well as implementing the right to be forgotten, and explicit consent for data processing will mean that all organisations will have to review their day to day activities.

Fines from Regulators

The original proposal gave regulators the power to levy a full €1m, or up to 2% of a business’s global turnover for breaches of the regulations. On the 20th of February, the Industry Committee of the European Parliament voted against mandatory fines and to give the power to set the size of the fine to the national regulators, which is in line with the current regulations. While many consumer and privacy advocates have said this will water down the new regulations, I for one applaud this move as it will allow fines to be in-line with local attitudes about data privacy and economic conditions.

Do not think that because the power to set mandatory fines has been taken away from Brussels and granted to the UK Information Commissioner that companies dealing in personal data will have an easy ride here in the UK. The ICO continues to lobby for greater enforcement powers and more importantly, greater budget to dedicate towards enforcement. The ICO’s office has also been using their current ability to assess financial penalties more over recent years with a two fold increase in the number of fines issued in 2012 over 2011 and a fourfold increase in the monetary penalty over the same period. The trend is clear the ICO is issuing more penalties and the fines are getting bigger.

Individuals Right to Compensation

The other potential hit to your corporate wallet is the new proposal giving individuals the right to compensation for breaches in the data protection regulations. This is worrying for a number of reasons. First, there are no guidelines around how a court or regulator would determine when personal compensation is warranted, how the compensation should be calculated or limits to the compensation award. A second concern is that this proposal will drive the EU to be more litigious.

The third and greatest worry for us as an industry is that this personal compensation can be sought from both the data owner and the data processor. Making data processors responsible for the actions of the data controllers is a new and very troubling concept which will significantly impact the email marketing industry.

Up till now, data processors primarily in the form of ESPs acted only on the instruction of the data controller and therefore were not required to ensure that the behaviour of the data controller was in fact legal. There is already an extra burden on our industry because as we all know we deal with the “second regulator” in the form of ISPs deciding whether to accept our email transmissions or not. Should this new provision go through, ESPs will not only have to ensure that their clients are following the best practices to optimise deliverability but they also have to get right under the skin of the client’s business to ensure that they are legally compliant with data protection regulations. This will be an intrusion that many client companies will not want, it is a process which ESPs are not currently structured to handle and one that will have to be funded in the form of higher send costs.

Should I Worry?

At the end of the day it is email marketing 101 type stuff. Any email marketing professional worth their salt, or any member of the DMA should be following the basics of best practice closely enough to not be doing anything wrong and should therefore have nothing to generally worry about. The worry comes as a result of simple human error which can cause a file to be corrupted, or a laptop left on a train or a password that is too easy to crack. These “simple human errors” could get to be very costly.

Take action now!

If you haven’t already, take time to read the DMA’s assessment of the impact of the new regulations Think about how this could hurt your business and then reach out to your MEP and make your voice heard.

A case in point is some work I’ve recently completed for Coinks Deals. I’d like to share with you what was learnt about subject lines and how to best communicate with a large dormant database.

Coinks Points introduced a new deals service for their members and wished to provide these deal emails to members who responded to an introduction email about them. Coinks have millions of members, including hundreds of thousands of who had been suppressed from contact for over 12 months. The challenge was how to message to their entire member database, including the dormant members.

The messaging strategy I developed was a four email sequence using a high degree of personalisation to make connection and re-establish trust with members. Several tests were developed to optimise each step of the sequence, testing a variety of elements, including of course subject lines.

As always with testing, the results were insightful and I’m going to focus on one of the subject line tests and what you can learn from it.

For the third email in the sequence to the dormant segment, one of the tests was of these two subject lines:

• Subject A: Are we still welcome in our inbox?
• Subject B: Was it something we said?

The email itself was a short mostly plain email with a few links and a couple of central buttons shown below

The subject line B gave a 67% higher open rate. However, what was interesting to show the impact of the subject line beyond the open was the ratio of clicks on the above two buttons.

For subject line ‘A’ the ratio of clicks on the first button to second button was 6.5 whereas for subject line ‘B’ it was 2.8. Customers with subject line ‘A’ were more inclined to click the first button. The test cell sample size was 12,000 and the difference in clicks was statistically significant.

The difference in ratio was due to the different subject lines, it changed how customers read the message and what they did as a result. In this case “Are we still welcome in your inbox?” prompted the customer to consider this very question and whether their answer is yes or no. Whereas “Was it something we said?” does not prompt the direct question and the more conciliatory tone creates more interest in deals.

In the many tests I’ve run over many clients I’ve time and time again seen that what happens in the email is skewed and changed by the subject line. The subject line should be designed to get the right people to open not the most people, the right people means those most likely to take the action you want. Plus the subject line should frame their thoughts correctly.

The subject line is used by customers to self-qualify, if the subject line does not accurately qualify the right people then customers who might have taken action do not open and conversely some open only to find it’s not the right message for them. In this case the risk is customers become less inclined to open again since they found they wasted their time previously.

Summarising two key learning’s:

• When testing subject lines don’t stop evaluation at the open rate, get more insight by looking deeper at which individual links were clicked and the call to action of each, to learn why the subject line created a particular result.
• Create subject lines with the call to action in mind. The power and impact of the subject line goes further than getting the read, it’s about getting the action and not just the read.

This was just one test out of many over a series of four emails. The compounded gain across the whole email sequence was an impressive 190%.

Next time you think about subject lines don’t focus on just getting the open but setting up the right thought sequence for the call action.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to Coinks Deals and Emailvision for permission to publish the results from this work.

The real worry is that the current draft of the European Union Data Protection Regulation, does the opposite by introducing more complexity and ambiguity than already exists, and potentially creates further issues which would not have surfaced if the status quo were maintained.

The verbatim definition of consent within the Regulation is as follows:

“…’the data subject’s consent’ means any freely given specific, informed and explicit indication of his or her wishes by which the data subject, either by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to personal data relating to them being processed…”
[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0011:FIN:EN:PDF Article 4 (8)]

Furthermore, the “Conditions for Consent” are laid out as follows:
1. “The controller shall bear the burden of proof for the data subject’s consent to the processing of their personal data for specified purposes.

2. If the data subject’s consent is to be given in the context of a written declaration which also concerns another matter, the requirement to give consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter.

3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

4. Consent shall not provide a legal basis for the processing, where there is a significant imbalance between the position of the data subject and the controller.”

[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0011:FIN:EN:PDF Article 7]

In the above, I have highlighted the key elements here – the Regulation is essentially saying that organisations need to obtain a clear and explicit statement/action by which a data subject provides consent. From an email permission-marketing best practice perspective, this is fine – however the Regulation does not address whether or not this would need to be retrospective for existing databases, and whether or not organisations would be able to contact customers with whom they have had previous interactions (as is currently permissible under the existing Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive – and, the majority of the time, expected by consumers).

This is completely disregarding whether or not those consumers actually want to be contacted, and if the “burden of proof” detailed above is an enforceable requirement (in a worse-case scenario) – then the Regulation is effectively saying organisations must delete said data if they cannot prove consent has been given explicitly! Then there’s the possibility of dispute over the meaning of “informed & explicit”… well, you can see where this is heading to – more ambiguity and less clarity.

Furthermore, there is an argument out there that this Regulation does not take into consideration the low risk use of Business-To-Business (B2B) data for marketing purposes – where, more often than not, a organisation would hold and process information on another organisation or group of members of staff, with perhaps multiple key decision makers – not an individual.

In summary, the intention is good but the detail is lacking – I strongly urge the legislators in Brussels to revise and alter the Regulation so that it can sit with the existing Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive They also need to focus on what the effect of the changes in the draft Regulation will be for both consumers and organisations.
To find out more about the consequences of this legislation passing unaltered, and the potential impact on your own business, take a look at http://dma.org.uk/eu-data-protection This site also provides information on how to take immediate action, by lobbying your regional MEPs.

The email footer delivers the powerful message “180 days to save your industry”, with a strong call to action “Act now”, and this links directly to the event sign-up page for the DMA Data Conference. As well as linking directly to their site, and helping to promote registrations, it also helps to demonstrate one of the core activities of the DMA – that they lobby on our behalf, and ensure DMA members are informed about the implications of any proposed marketing legislation. And what’s good about their signature is that it also works on mobiles. So if, like me, you are reading their emails on the loo, you will still experience their branding. – And, actually, you’ll get an even better experience on your phone than on Outlook…they have used an animated gif in their signature, that looks particularly good on my (new) iPhone, creating a neat “countdown effect” that shows that time is running out, and increases the urgency of their message.

Having a good email signature can make all the difference to your communications. Here are my top tips of things to think about for your email signatures plus any headers or footers that you include, to help increase the marketing potential of the thousand individual emails that each employee in your organisation will send every month. • Define your objectives: Is it to achieve a consistent corporate look? To generate sales? To increase awareness? To distribute content? Do you need to measure the results? (These factors will impact the design style plus the kind of solution you’ll need to implement your signatures.) • Aim to keep image weight under 30KB • In terms of image size, don’t make your designs wider than 650 pixels or deeper than 100 pixels. • In signatures, use web safe fonts, so that they will render consistently for all recipients • Use basic HTML without nested tables as these can cause issues with reply mail chains • Try to avoid background colours in the HTML layout as these render differently in different email clients • Try to avoid using background images as many email clients do not support them • Minimum font size should be 8pt or size 1 for best legibility