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Comparing Back-to-School campaigns with and without offers in the subject line, we found that those with an offer outperformed those without one. For more insights, download Experian CheetahMail’s new white paper: Back-to-School countdown: Smart strategies for email marketing. Also please join our webinar on May 15 where our resident data experts Bill Schneider and Heather Dougherty will review data, emerging trends and opportunities that exist for marketers during the 2012 Back-to-School season.

We’d love to hear about Back-to-School marketing campaigns that have worked especially well for you in the comments section below!

To start, CheetahMail’s Deliverability and Strategic Services teams recommend that you define the level of engagement of your customers that represent the inactive on your subscriber file and separate these into levels of inactivity. We also recommend considering additional segmentation of these inactive groups (no opens and no clicks; opens and no clicks) identified within the past 12 months based on a variety of factors such as the data source, the subscriber’s tenure, or transaction information.

Our Deliverability and Strategic Services teams emphasize the importance of testing and suggest developing a reactivation series, including ending the series with a reconfirmation email, to test the reaction to different factors (price, exclusive service, different channels, etc.) for the group of contacts who have opened but not clicked. In parallel, for the group without any opens or clicks we recommend sending a series of up to 4-6 reconfirmation emails (opt in permission pass), up to one per week, for the duration of the spring cleaning initiative.

For the subscribers who open or click, but don’t confirm, silo them separately and continue trying to reactivate, but at a reduced frequency. Anyone who reconfirms can be bucketed back into the active segment of your file with a specific communication stream to immerse them back in your flow. The outliers that didn’t reconfirm or re-engage through this series should be removed from your mailings. Of course, we always recommend to continue business as usual with a control group to measure the impact on your email program.
This spring cleaning of your file will help you establish a clean sending reputation, and optimal deliverability with the ISPs.

Last month while attending MAAWG: San Francisco I visited the city’s historic Grant Avenue shopping artery.  While making a purchase from one of the Avenue’s clothing retailers using my credit card, I was offered to have my receipt emailed to me.  I agreed, gave my email address to the associate, signed for the purchase, and went back to the hotel one eco-friendly bag heavier. That very evening I received the promised in-store e-Receipt. Five (5) days later, I started receiving commercial emails from the retailer.

As a consumer I was peeved with how casually my address was auto-consented into to the retailer’s email marketing program with nary a word at the register.  As a compliance professional, I wondered if the retailer realized that it likely violated California’s Song-Beverly Credit Card Act of 1971.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California noted that the Act’s main purpose is to address the misuse of personal information for marketing purposes and that it was “specifically passed with a brick-and-mortar merchant environment in mind.”¹

If you collect email addresses at Point of Sale (POS) in California, here is what you should know about this historic consumer protection law:

1. Song-Beverly prohibits businesses from collecting “personal identification information” during credit card transactions.
2. The law defines PII as “information set forth on the credit card, and including, but not limited to, the cardholder’s address and telephone number”[2]‘Not limited to’ opens the window for ZIP codes [3] and email addresses being covered under the law.
3. California’s Supreme Court ruled[4] that the statute does not apply to vending kiosks and online transactions involving credit cards, supporting the District Court’s assessment that the law focuses on in-store, non-cash PII collection.
4. The statute gives private right of action to credit card users with civil penalties of up to $250 for the first violation and $1,000 for each subsequent violation plus costs and legal fees.

As it is often the case, risk mitigation begins with staff education and customer perception management, and flows into a smart approach to deliverability. It IS possible to collect PII at the counter in California given the following:

1. Decouple PII collection from the credit card purchase. Ask the customer for their email address before taking their credit card or after they sign off on the purchase. Create a script for your sales associates to follow when requesting PII at the register.  
2. Consider using the credit card terminal or other touchpad device for customers to enter their email and NOT use the sales associate. The device should first prompt the customer to consent to receiving an in-store eReceipt and/or marketing communications ideally before proceeding with the transaction, but it could be after as well. 
3. Be transparent about the commercial intent. A consumer who feels misled is more likely to complain and to seek redress under the state’s Song-Beverly or potentially other consumer protection laws. If following different scripts is a challenge, apply the same disclosure/request script for both credit and cash transactions. 
4. Send a welcome permission pass. Don’t assume that the customer wants anything more than an in-store eReceipt even if you can legally claim to have this right. You are looking for a loyal customer, not a courtroom victory. Let the customer make an informed decision at the counter or in a subsequent email.  For example:  
   • If the customer consents to the in-store eReceipt AND opts into your marketing messages at the register, send an ‘opt-out permission pass’ welcome email shortly after delivery of the e-Receipt  to confirm their subscription status and to outline benefits of your email program.  Be sure to include a clear and easy unsubscribe mechanism as well as a prominent link to your privacy policy.  
   • If the customer ONLY consents to the in-store e-Receipt, send an ‘opt-in permission pass’ e-Receipt where you include a “subscribe to our marketing communications” link, button, or banner along with a link to your privacy policy.

Beyond risk of exposure in California, you should also be aware of related compliance considerations: 

1. CAN-SPAM: Requires senders to obtain affirmative (aka; opt-in) consent from consumers who have previously unsubscribed from their commercial emails.  If affirmative consent is not recorded at the point of collection, the address would need to be scrubbed against the appropriate unsubscribe list and suppressed.
2. Primary Purpose: My in-store e-Receipt did not have an unsubscribe mechanism, postal address, or even a link to a privacy policy. Fortunate for the marketer, the email also did not contain any promotional content in the subject line or in the body copy so they qualified under the CAN-SPAM Act ‘transactional or relationship’ message exemption. Yet, the message could have easily been considered ‘primarily commercial’ under the FTC’s Final CAN-SPAM Act Rule if it contained any solicitous content in the subject line or if it was overwhelmed by up-sells, cross-sells or other commercial content.

With the above in mind, we can now clearly see what went wrong during my Grant Avenue shopping experience. The associate asked for PII during the credit card transaction and did not provide notice of marketing intent before or after the request. There was no transition from in-store e-Receipt to newsletter in the form of a welcome email permission pass and no efforts made to solidify the pre-existing business relationship.

I can appreciate the challenge in honoring both the spirit and letter of privacy laws at the register. We believe that following privacy best practices in respect to training, transparency, and permission management can make POS collection a fruitful practice, even in California. I welcome any comments, questions, or suggestions on this topic at privacy@cheetahmail.com.

While this form of collection is relatively quick and easy, it’s important to note that address and email capture in stores can be a cumbersome process, and the pressure to capture data as quickly as possible can negatively impact accuracy, reputation, and ultimately deliverability. The benchmark for POS email capture bounce rate is 20%, a large percentage based on the fact that the total bounce rate across all clients at Experian CheetahMail for 2011 was 1.5%.

In-store POS address collection generally occurs at the cash register. Upon collecting the address the cashier should read back the submitted address and possibly re-enter for verification. Even better, the cashier/retail outlet should have the customers themselves verify the email address submitted with a keypad/touchpad. In some instances, retailers have even started building their customer email list by asking each customer if they’d like a receipt emailed to them. Additionally, Quick Response codes or QR codes are becoming popular and easy ways to capture customer data accurately.

As an email address is captured, the address should be validated to prevent bad data/unknown users from entering your customer database and corrected for domain miss spellings or typos from POS entry. One way to do this is through email list management tools – utilizing services such as Experian QAS to validate and/or correct domains in real-time at the point of registration. Utilizing QAS email solutions can increase accuracy, reduce bounce rates from emails captured at POS, and standardize email addresses across the entire retail operation. For more information visit http://www.qas.com/

Data quality and validation can also be improved by sending a welcome confirmation or welcome series. A real time welcome email reinforces subscriber opt-in recognition. Additionally, a welcome series increases a subscriber’s affinity to your brand and increases likelihood of engagement.

Once captured and validated, to manage list file health, deliverability and reputation, subscribers should be kept within a regular promotional marketing stream if they have opened and clicked “x” (x is an agreed up number) emails within a reasonable time period. The majority of new subscribers will click a client’s email within the first thirty (30) days (approximately 4-6 campaigns). If a subscriber has not opened in a ninety (90) day period (common for retailers), the email address can be deemed inactive. CheetahMail’s Deliverability team and Strategic Services Group can assist clients with the process of identifying and defining inactive subscribers by:

1. Establishing the cause of inactivity i.e. is the address hard bouncing due to email account inactivity? If so, these addresses will be purged from client’s list.
2. For the balance, develop and target subscribers with either a reconfirmation message or reactivation program. Those subscribers that are reactivated or confirmed will then be folded back into the regular marketing promotion stream.

Clients that take the proper steps to overcome POS email acquisition hurdles and identify early on and tackle inactivity will reap the rewards of better deliverability, stronger reputation, subscriber loyalty and increased engagement.

POS email collection practices may also expose retailers to other, compliance-related risks. Please stay tuned for a follow up post by the Compliance Team about POS compliance and privacy related issues.

Display Advertising! Solutions such as Experian’s Audience IQ^SM recognize the changing behavior of digitally-savvy consumers, and supplements email marketing campaigns with data-driven display ads. What this means is that you have more than one opportunity to engage your consumers in making a lasting impression.

For example, you can create different use cases based on what actions the consumer takes regarding the email.

• If the email is opened but the consumer didn’t click through, a similarly-themed display ad with a more aggressive offer can be shown.
• If the email is not opened, then a display ad featuring a different product and offer can be shown.

Data- driven advertising allows marketers to coordinate messages to the same consumer segment so that a particular ad campaign shows up in their inbox, and also on the websites they are visiting. This kind of synergy can drive website traffic by up to 4x if executed correctly.