Verifying email addresses is just one part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. Today, Experian Marketing Services offers a new case study on Bass Pro Shops, showing which tools the renowned outdoor retailer uses to market to their customers more effectively. One of the key elements of Bass Pro Shops’ success is their diligent data capture process.

Capturing and maintaining correct contact information for customers and prospects is an important step in the data collection process. Good contact data allows businesses to ensure that consumers receive important communications, which ultimately translate into sales opportunities. In particular, email addresses have grown in importance as more and more communications shift to a digital form.

While today’s marketers collect large volumes of email addresses through various channels, there is no guarantee that those email addresses are in fact correct. Inaccurate email addresses frequently plague marketing databases, and mean that order confirmations, targeted messaging, and other vital information is never received by the consumer. To combat this problem, businesses are beginning to implement email validation tools.

The most effective email verification tools work at the point of capture, checking different parts of the email address as the consumer enters their information. When a potential error in an email address is identified at the point of capture, the consumer is able to correct potential typos or other careless mistakes. This type of email verification ensures that an accurate email address is captured up front while the consumer is still engaged. Future business communications actually reach the consumer, ultimately improving their overall experience, as well as the business’ future marketing opportunities.

Read the full case study on Bass Pro Shops to learn more.

Google recently announced plans to enhance Gmail by introducing a ‘Priority Inbox’ which will soon be rolling out to its estimated 200mm global users. Experian CheetahMail’s deliverability team has received many inquiries about the new interface, what it may mean for our clients, and how it could affect deliverability.

From a deliverability perspective, this feature once again proves that building a good sender reputation that includes regular customer engagement is of the utmost importance. If users are consistently marking your mail with increased priority, then the sender’s reputation will likely improve. If users are consistently marking mail with decreased priority, the sender’s reputation will likely degrade. While the importance of these new priority settings are mainly user-specific, if too many people push the ‘less important’ button, then Gmail’s algorithm will take this into account and may push those senders email into the “Everything else” section or possibly into the Spam folder.

How Priority Inbox works:

Priority Inbox analyzes incoming mail, giving it a ranking and sorting it into four customizable sections: “Important and unread” (or just “Important”), “Starred” and “Everything else.” “Important” messages are intended to be the most relevant or relationship-oriented, and sit at the top of the screen. Next is the “Starred” section which are messages the user manually flags or sets up as a recurring indication of importance. “Everything else” includes those messages that may not be from an established contact or regularly engaged with before.

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As Jordan noted in his earlier post, there are a lot of things you can do to make your transactional emails better. But as any busy email marketer knows, there are also about a million other things you could be working on instead. The question is, how high of a priority should improving your transactional emails be? After all, only a small sub-set of your entire list receives one of these messages every day.

Let’s be clear: your transactional emails should take an extremely high priority, regardless of your industry or line of business.

In our latest research, The transactional email report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting purchase behavior to email marketing, we see that two key indicators — revenue per email and transaction rates — are off-the-charts for transactional emails. The transaction rate of order confirmation messages is eight times higher than standard promotional messages.

In other words, you can get much more bang for your buck by improving your transactional emails rather than, say, your weekly newsletter.

So what are you waiting for? Have a look at The transactional email report to learn more about what makes transactional messages so valuable to email marketers.

A transactional email is an email that is sent in response to an action — things like order confirmations, ship confirmations, and order tracking emails. Transactional emails are generally high performers, on average having seven times the open rate and four times the click rates^* of standard promotional email. Also, transaction rates (i.e. purchases) can be four to eight times higher^* in transaction emails compared to bulk emails.

A few reasons why these types of emails perform so well:

• Transactional emails are sent to already engaged customers, including recent purchasers.
• The recipients in most cases are expecting an email after a transaction and then interact with it once it arrives.
• Since the recipients are already engaged with your brand, they have a higher chance of making another purchase from the transactional email.

10 Transactional Email Best Practices:

1. Say “Thank You” in the email
2. Send optimized transactional emails using HTML
3. Include your branding
4. Include dynamic product cross-sells using product recommendation engines, or seasonal offers
5. Provide a link to track order and shipping status
6. Include some site navigation in the email creative
7. Test the Inclusion of an offer ($ off, % off, free shipping, etc.)
8. Include links to all of your social media efforts
9. Promote email sign up
10. Do not include an offer in the subject line or as the main message

* These statistics come from our June 4, 2010 webinar, “The Key Event-driven Triggers in the Consumer Lifecycle“

It’s already September, and while the rest of us are taking one last summer vacation, diligent online marketers are coordinating budgets, hammering out timelines, and enlisting production resources for the looming holiday season. It’s also time to start asking some serious production questions of your email creative. Questions like, “How easily can I update my template?” and “Can my production staff handle an increased holiday workload?” need to be answered immediately in order to stay competitive this holiday season.

If you’re unsure how to gauge your creative’s holiday health, here are some criteria to measure against:

Speed is key
If your template isn’t easy to update and turn around, you may be missing out on some opportunities. Here are some turbo-boosting tips to speed things up:

• Use existing product image sizes, HTML text, and HEX colors in your email design. This will allow production artists to revise the template quicker, or make easier, on-the-fly updates.
• Coding the template effectively will allow your designers to concentrate more on new creative, rather than fixing rendering problems on existing campaigns.
• Design the template to allow account management resources to make last minute updates to creative without needing a creative resource.

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