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.”

Viral/WOM marketing is now a reality
Beyond these literal connections with “you, the customer,” the report also touches on the significant power shift in media today. The ability to empower consumers to act as marketers on your behalf — the phenomenon more commonly known as viral or word-of-mouth marketing — is no longer just a marketing pipe dream.

• The report illustrates that consumers themselves are embracing the concept of viral marketing and actually enjoy acting on behalf of the companies that they know and love; “consumers are increasingly likely to pass those deals on. The share of online adults who say that they are either likely or very likely to forward emails containing promotions or discounts on to others rose to 30 percent in 2009 from 28 percent in 2008.”

Email is key to driving website traffic
For all of the Internet proclamations pronouncing email to be a dead technology, the numbers say that on the contrary email is alive and well. In addition to providing direct, measurable revenue streams, email is also driving business website traffic in general. In the coming weeks we’ll look at how these numbers compare to traffic generated via social networking sites, but in the meantime we can see some impressive numbers from the report.

• “For most retailers, email messages are an important driver for return visits to their Websites. For example, in November 2009, 11 percent of the traffic to Overstock.com was referred from email, and 62 percent were returning visitors who had not visited the Website in the past 30 days.”

For more insights like these, as well as extensive coverage on related topics such as consumer insight, digital advertising, mobile marketing, and multichannel marketing, download a copy of the 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report from Experian.com. And remember, it’s all about “you,” folks!

Bazaarvoice is a partner of ours and has helped a number of our clients combine the power of user-generated content with email marketing. As I told a number of colleagues at the event, the real beauty of combining email marketing with ratings and reviews is that the numbers speak for themselves – according to a recent article by Mary Wagner of Internet Retailer, fifty-three percent of shoppers “prefer to see recommendations based on top ratings by other consumers” compared to only twenty percent who prefer to see best sellers. Likewise, Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research recently stated that “two in five online shoppers are partial to retail sites that offer customer ratings and reviews,” and that “tactics like adding a link to write a customer review in the order confirmation email are the new standard.”

A few high-level takeaways I gathered from the event include:

• Product review submission/confirmation emails perform exceptionally well across the board, especially when it comes to open and clickthrough rates.
• User-generated content (UGC) not only drives sales, but also functions as a product development and inventory tool for some of today’s biggest brands, including Dell and Sephora.
• While it is difficult to predict which content will become truly “viral,” marketers can help guarantee ROI by ensuring that viral campaigns are initially distributed to a large enough group of people. That way, even if the campaign is only forwarded at a 50% rate of decay, the campaign reaches close to double the size of the initial recipients — half of which were essentially sent for free.

And if you’re looking for some cool examples of our clients putting word-of-mouth marketing to good use, I’d highly recommend having a look at these links:

• Zales Love Stories – a slick micro-site dedicated to user-generated engagement and jewelry gift stories, with links to purchase online.
• Aveda Top Rated Winter Essentials – an elegant email promotion featuring top-rated products from Winter 2008 with actual reviews from real customers.
• Urban Outfitters 5-Star Reviewers – a slick email campaign highlighting the reviewers themselves (lifestyle branding using social media) in addition to their reviewed items.

With all of this being said, why wouldn’t a marketer want to elevate the customer voice and include top rated picks or UGC in their email programs?

Scrolling through my inbox, the main image of the Urban Outfitter “Where to?” campaign grabbed my attention above all the others. For those of us on the East Coast, it’s been a long winter. Nevertheless, spring is in the air, and Urban Outfitter’s image of the ocean popped out at me. The creative inspired me to open the email and daydream a little about being on a beach where I could forget about the economy and relax.

The “Where to?” campaign is a great example of using attractive photography and creative marketing to engage your subscribers to open your emails.

Because I took the time to look at the picture, I saw that Urban was advertising friends’ top picks for the season based on their travel plans. Their approach of using friends’ favorite items was a clever take on viral marketing, used in this instance to market a number of different products. Even if the recipient does not have any trips planned, the items fit different personalities as much as they fit the destinations selected.

The marketing effort is also well supported. The email links to landing pages from which you can toggle between the picks as well as the product detail and purchase pages.

I wondered if the “friends” were really subscribers or if this was just a marketing effort, so I continued to look for this campaign elsewhere on the web. I was happy to discover that Urban had included the campaign on their Facebook group page and on Twitter.

I don’t know if these “friends” are actual fans of Urban or if this is just a fun idea. I’d also love to see them go even further and open this up to their fan base to use their picks. Either way, it works!