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Today, Experian Marketing Services is proud to release our latest report, the 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report. Looking at the data contained within the report, there is certainly a lot of information for email marketers to chew on.

For the loyal readers of Email Responsibly, I thought I’d add some of my thoughts on the report and explain what these data points mean for the email industry at-large and the state of email marketing.

Let’s jump right in and have a look at what the report tells us:

Time Magazine was right
Way back in December 2006, a number of people (myself included) had a good laugh at the expense of Time Magazine, who named “You” as Person of the Year. At the time, the decision seemed like something of a cop-out and also bit out-of-touch with technology.

But looking at the data from our 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report, I couldn’t help but think about Time Magazine and say to myself that they were right — maybe prematurely, but still correct nonetheless. Email marketing today, much like the rest of the Internet, is about you, sometimes even literally. Consider these points from our report:

• Four out of five industries (business products and services, consumer products and services, multichannel retail, travel and entertainment) used the word “you/your” more than any other word in their email subject lines. The fifth industry (catalogers) actually uses the terms “you/your” more than the other four industries (24% of the time), but they also happen to use the terms “free” and “ship” slightly more than that.
• The words “you/your” appear in 19.94% of all email marketing subject lines.
• According to the report, “The increase in usage of the term ‘you/your’ illustrates increased emphasis on businesses building more personal relationships with customers by addressing them directly.”
• According to the report, ”The top term — ‘you/your’ — indicates a clear connection between consumer product and service businesses and their individual customers. The percentages of any ‘top’ word are lower given the wide mix of businesses and product types in this vertical.”

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Today, Experian CheetahMail released “The remarketing Report: Benchmark data and analysis on connecting web behavior to email marketing.” This white paper delves into the details of deploying emails based on website browser behaviors, and reveals some surprising results along the way.

As most of us would expect, abandoned cart messages pull higher open, click and transaction rates than standard promotional messages. However, marketers might be surprised to learn that cart abandoners respond differently to triggered emails that leverage web analytics data. A few specific notes on browsers versus abandoners include:

• Emails sent to cart abandoners (those who have placed an item in their shopping cart but have not converted) with an incentivized offer only pull $0.09 more in revenue per email than those emails that do not contain an offer.
• Meanwhile, customers that only browsed products but did not add any items to their cart (i.e. ‘browsers’) are much more likely to respond to an incentivized email offer.

This report confirms that email marketers don’t need a special remarketing offer to convert abandoners into buyers. This is a positive development for the email industry in that we don’t effectively encourage our customers to abandon their carts with the hope of receiving a discount email at the end of the process.

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Nowadays, many email marketers fill the pre-header area of their emails with “click to view” and message summary information that occupies the prime viewing areas of their messages. Due to this congestion at the top of messages, some companies have begun omitting whitelisting instructions due to a lack of available real estate within the pre-header area of their emails.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term whitelisting, it refers to the process of adding an email address to a list of contacts that the user deems are acceptable to receive email from. This prevents approved email marketing messages from being delivered to the trash or spam folders. Frequently, whitelisting text is phrased in the following manner: “To ensure delivery to your inbox, please add email@company.com to your address book.”

To determine whether including whitelisting instructions in the pre-header area of emails added value to their email program, Origins Natural Resources recently teamed up with Experian CheetahMail to test the effects of including whitelisting instructions in their email template for new subscribers.

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Camping World's email template before the redesign.

Recently, Experian CheetahMail’s Creative Services team worked with Camping World in a multi-variant creative test of its monthly product email template. Our main challenge was to deliver 3 finished designs that adhered to creative best practices and incorporated learnings from historical campaign data, and then test these three designs against a control version over the course of two campaigns.

As with all redesign projects, our first step was to analyze historical performance data to identify any  strengths and weaknesses pertaining to the existing navigation and content layout. We then generated several wireframes to clearly map out the navigation, content organization, and product area layout options that the new designs would encompass.

One of the key areas of Camping World’s email template targeted for improvement was the main product section. Traditionally, this section loosely grouped items in a grid-like structure without considering product type or cost. We also found that the feature section took up too much vertical space within the template, pushing the main product section down below-the-fold.

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According to the latest report from Experian Simmons, two-thirds of American households use coupons, and a vast majority of them (87 percent) use them to save money. Although 70 percent of coupon-using households still obtain their coupons from newspapers, the Internet is a growing coupon source. Over the last three years, the number of households that get their coupons online has increased by 46 percent.

Taking Simmons’ findings into account, it should come as no surprise that customers are much more likely to make a purchase when offered a coupon via email. This finding and several others were confirmed in Experian Cheetahmail’s recent white paper, The coupon report: Benchmark data and analysis for email marketers, which examined the performance of emails with coupons redeemable online and those with coupons to be printed and redeemed in-store. The businesses that participated in Experian CheetahMail’s study had a 64 percent average increase in revenue per email, as well as increases in all other transaction metrics. In addition, average order values and transaction rates increased by six percent and 48 percent respectively.

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