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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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit in Austin, TX, where a number of interesting discussions took place on the state of word-of-mouth marketing across the digital landscape.

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.

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