Email data quality research: Roundtable on industry trends
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Almost all companies collect email addresses to use for marketing or customer outreach purposes. But not every company approaches handling or maintaining email quality the same way. One company can have numerous tactics for just managing deliverability. The email industry is constantly changing—that’s why we’ve conducted a research study to bring you up to speed on the latest news and developments on email data quality. Check out this slidedeck from our October 28th roundtable with industry experts to learn about this year’s trends, challenges and imperatives to ensure your email initiatives are heading in the right direction. We discussed: - Industry challenges regarding email collection and database maintenance - How businesses manage email deliverability - How businesses track email marketing success
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Email data quality research: Roundtable on industry trends
- 1. ©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian and the marks used herein are service marks or registered trademarks of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. No part of this copyrighted work may be reproduced, modified, or distributed in any form or manner without the prior written permission of Experian. Experian Public. Email data quality research: Roundtable on industry trends Sarah Herlihy Product Marketing Director Spencer Kollas VP of Global Deliverability Holly Prescott Premier Customer Account Manager
- 2. 2©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 2 Introducing our speakers Sarah Herlihy Product Marketing Director, Experian Data Quality Spencer Kollas VP of Global Deliverability, Experian Marketing Services Holly Prescott Premier Customer Account Manager, Experian Data Quality
- 3. 3©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 3 Key 2015 email trends and challenges Email data management: Deliverability Customer email challenges Dealing with email data quality Today’s agenda
- 4. Key 2015 email trends and challenges
- 5. 5©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 5 The multi-channel consumer Over half of all customer interactions involve more than one channel or brand touch point Multi- Channel Single Channel
- 6. 6©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 6 Email collection and database maintenance challenges Duplicate customer data Purchasing email lists
- 7. 7©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 7 How companies manage email databases Validating new email addresses Engaging in reactivation campaigns Suppressing inactive email subscribers Following CAN-SPAM requirements Removing hard bounces from campaigns
- 8. 8©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 8 Key trends Email volume rose 16% over the past year *Data taken from Experian Marketing Services Q2 Benchmark Report Unique open and click rates remained the same (17% and 2%) Average order value is $187
- 10. 10©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 10 Common deliverability consequences Consequences of poor deliverability Inability to communicate with subscribers Poor customer service Regulatory hurdles Unnecessary costs Lost revenue Spam trap hits Trouble reaching the inbox Customer complaints Sender reputation problems Low deliverability rates Black listing
- 11. 11©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 11 Deliverability Unknown Users Spamtraps Complaints Engagement Deliverability can be simple
- 12. 12©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 12 A story with Redbox
- 14. 14©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 14 A lesson in email database management POS collection is often the least accurate
- 15. 15©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 15 A lesson in lost opportunity Validation is particularly important for re- engagement campaigns
- 16. Polling question
- 17. Dealing with email data quality
- 18. 18©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 18 Cost of bad emails 100,000 Net-new emails during holidays 5% Email conversation rate $170 Average order value $850,000 Potential revenue X X = 20% Invalid emails $850,000 Potential revenue $170,000 Loss in potential revenueX = Over 2 million lost in additional revenue per year!
- 19. 19©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 19 Tackling bad email data quality 21% Daily batch processing 20% Real time at point of capture 16% Monthly batch processing 11% Dependent on channel data was collected 5% No data cleansing
- 20. 20©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 20 Tracking email marketing success Bounce rates List growth rates Click through rates Conversion rates Email sharing rates ROI per email
- 21. 21©2015 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 21 Roundtable discussion Discussion time
- 22. 2222 Thank you! Stay connected with us for up-to-date insights: dataquality.info@experian.com @ExperianDQ & @ExperianMkt www.edq.com/blog/ & ex.pn/mkt-blog or call us at (888) 727-8822
Editor's Notes
- Shirley: Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today. My name’s Shirley Zhao and I’m a Content Marketer here at Experian Data Quality. I’ll be moderating the webinar and you’ll hear me reading off a couple of poll questions as well. Feel free to submit any questions you have into the chat box throughout the webinar. So today’s we’ll focus on the key email trends and challenges we’ve seen. The stats used here were taken from Experian Data Quality’s Q3 email research study and Experian Marketing Services’ Q2 Email Benchmark Study. With a landscape that changes as constantly as it does, it’s important to keep up to date on what your competitors are doing and what the industry is doing. That’s why we’ve brought in three experts in the email field for today’s webinar. We’ll engage in a roundtable discussion and keep it as informative and fast-paced as possible so you guys can get the most out of it!
- Shirley: Our speakers for today are Spencer Kollas of Experian Marketing Services, and Holly Prescott and Sarah Herlihy from Experian Data Quality. Would you guys like to introduce yourselves and give a little background on how you work in the email space? Spencer: Introduce yourself, been in the deliverability space since before it was a word Holly: Introduce yourself, I have been with Experian over a year and a half, focusing entirely on our email product, working with ecommerce space, clients focused all on email, real time validation and batch processing Sarah: Introduce yourself,
- Shirley: Today we’ll focus on: The various email challenges that businesses struggle with—specifically as it relates to email collection and database maintenance challenges How business fair with deliverability Some of the most common email challenges we hear from our customers (industry-oriented) And then end with the most common methods companies use to ensure good email data quality
- Spencer: …Which is a great segue way into our first topic. But before we get into the top email collection challenges faced by businesses today… (click to next slide)
- Spencer: While the email channel is still making you a lot of money and validation is important, it’s not just about validating. Email is the primary identifier that links customers across channels. If you don’t get it right, you can’t understand your customer. Example: If an email address is the common factor across these profiles, (fb, twitter, SMS, etc.), if you get my email wrong across your database from the beginning, you don’t know if I’m looking at you through Facebook, you don’t know if I’m following you on Twitter, you don’t know how to best communicate with me. Everything is based off emails. It’s still the true way to tie these channels together If you get my email wrong across your database from the beginning, you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with me. Email is still the foundation of your marketing efforts; if you don’t have the email address right, everything else is screwed Of those who engage, 66% use multiple channels. 56% percent of all customer interactions involve more than one channel or brand touch point. And now I’ll pass it off to Sarah. Source: September 18, 2012 “Brand Engagement The Consumer Way” Forrester report Source: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131212125736-1816165-the-new-four-ps-everything-you-need-to-know-about-your-customers?trk=eml-ced-b-art-M-0&ut=3mG8IAB4HVT601&_mSplash=1
- Sarah: Thanks Spencer. That’s right, customers are entering in emails from more and more channels today. One of the impacts is that it’s even harder to have a grip on DQ From our research, 33% of the companies who took our survey didn’t know how faulty their emails were, but believed that at least 20% of their email database was invalid Very hard thing to measure, but we’ll talk later about some ways you can leverage technology to gain more insight into the quality of your email database Regardless of which channel emails are coming from, one thing is for certain – 64% of respondents/companies say that the biggest challenge in collecting email addresses is human error. To illustrate this, think about some of the common situations you likely find yourself in as a consumer. For example, the long line at the retail store where an associate is trying to get your contact details for the store’s loyalty program or to make sure you receive your eReceipt. Another contributing factor is purchased lists. This is not a best practice that we recommend, but the reality is that 24% of companies purchase email lists to augment their marketing files. Purchased lists can wreak havoc on your sender reputation if you don’t have a strategy for how to use them.
- Sarah: From our research, there is no one way to manage email databases – as you can see here, you really need a multi-pronged approach that ranges from proactive (validating new email addresses) to reactive (removing hard bounces from campaigns). Most important is to have a strategy to manage your email database and to evolve along with your business strategy. These best practices are always good to follow, but you also need to consider your wider business strategy and what that might mean for how you manage and use your emails.
- Sarah: Now that we have discussed some of the specific challenges and solutions to managing your email database, let’s take a look at some key trends. These particular trends were taken from Experian Marketing Services’ second quarter benchmark report. We have seen email volumes rise at a rate of 16% as compared to last year , and for retailers that increase has been even higher These numbers tell a compelling story for email - volumes are increasing while conversion rates are holding steady – this translates to more revenue being driven by email These key trends show that the importance of email isn’t diminishing and that people are taking tracking the value of email seriously I’m now going to hand back over to Spencer, who will talk about the role of deliverability in overall email strategy
- Spencer: Thanks Sarah. - We’ve gone over how companies manage email databases and email data collection - Now let’s get into how those factors affect a business’s ability to use those emails effectively—in particular, let’s talk about deliverability
- Spencer: Exactly, and when you don’t continuously work to improve on those main aspects of deliverability, these are the consequences that can result Read off a few deliverability problems 1st animation: most common consequences of poor deliverability 2nd animation: secondary consequences of poor deliverability that you may not foresee
- Spencer: Four main aspects of deliverability are: Unknown users Spam traps Complains Engagement Deliverability is the sum of many parts, if you continuously work on them, good deliverability doesn’t have to be as hard as you think it is. But there are a lot of customer challenges we’ve seen…
- Spencer: - I’ll start off with my Redbox Story
- Holly: …Which is a great segue way into our next topic: some anecdotal examples of email challenges we’ve heard just in our day-to-day dealings with clients
- Holly: A vision retailer saw great opportunity in collecting email addresses from POS. They began requiring email collection, but the problem was that their sales associates were entering in invalid emails due to a number of reasons: not hearing correctly, fat-fingering, rushed, etc. So what happened was, associates were entering emails, but the emails were basically gibberish because of those reasons Think about what you use emails for: e-receipts, promotional campaigns, product updates—if they were collecting so many bad emails, all of these initiatives would be pretty much unsuccessful I’ve also seen companies giving incentives on number of emails required resulting in fake emails addresses to be entered By verifying emails, they were able to remove 19% of invalid addresses 1st: set best practices with employees Implement real-time validation – corrections technology Guess (personal example)
- Holly: One of my customers moved companies and was faced with improving a database he knew to be filled with inactive subscribers. He wanted to focus on re-engagement campaigns, but needed to remove any invalid addresses. As you all know, databases can decay by up to 2% every month, which means that if you’re seeing inactives in your databases, you can’t be sure that those are still their right emails that they gave to you however long ago. And actually, we also found, according to a Marketing Sherpa report, that 75% of email subscribers are inactive—so validation is very important when attempting any re-engagement campaign. So in comes our validation product, right? After this company validated their emails, they were able to verify and segment their database, send a re-engagement campaign to those validated addresses, provide personalized content because of that segmentation—basically it’s like dating! You can’t just come out of the blue, talk about only yourself, and expect the other party to be interested at the end! They had to reintroduce their brand, personalize it to their subscribers, and remind them why they were so awesome. At the end, they doubled their conversion rates in terms of event signups and dramatically decreased their opt-out rates. Email Insights: (for Spencer to talk about) After you validate the email addresses, it’s also important to find out who’s interacting with other brands and not just with you; which can help with reactivation campaigns
- Shirley: Let’s take a quick polling question. The question is: What methods do your organization employ to maintain and validate your email database? Validate new email addresses Suppress inactive subscribers Remove hard bounces Following CAN-SPAM requirements Engaging in reactivation campaigns Not sure [Respond accordingly to survey results]
- Spencer: Now we’ll talk about different methods companies use to manage email data quality.
- Spencer: Based on the Q2 EMS benchmark EMS benchmark report data says AOV for retail is around $170 If you’re collecting 100K new emails, with a 5% conversion rate and $170 average order value, you can see $850K in potential revenue. Basic calculation, but it’s just to give you all an idea of the value of emails But if 20% of the emails you collected were invalid (we see invalid rates anywhere from 15%-40% for retailers), you’re losing around $170K of potential revenue. And when you carry that number over throughout an entire year, that’s over $2M you can lose out on.
- Spencer: Lots of different methods to tackle email data quality Go over stats on slide (they are animated) Talk about how it comes down to lost potential, and link back to RedBox example, you’re losing out on reaching your customers by not implementing real-time data checks Even SpamHaus said that real-time at point of sale is where good email data quality makes the most sense Inbox placement rate – explain what it is Email volume rose 16% compared to the same time last year (based off EMS Q2 benchmark report) 29% of businesses have trouble reaching the inbox—and that’s directly linked to poor deliverability Amount of incorrect emails increases when there’s no quality control inbox placement rate impacts due to bad emails ultimately deliverability is affected
- Spencer: Read off some examples from slide Email Insights: (for Spencer to talk about) After you validate the email addresses, it’s also important to find out who’s interacting with other brands and not just with you; which can help with reactivation campaigns All of these things are pieces of a puzzle—there shouldn’t be just ONE metric you’re looking that to determine success Even if your bounce rates are low, it doesn’t mean your clickthrough rates are going to be high Understanding your customer base, business model, and the whole picture of your business is important to optimize the whole channel - And now to Holly
- Shirley: Thank you everyone! Hopefully that was helpful for everyone listening. And because this is a roundtable discussion kind of webinar, I’d like to begin with some questions for the speakers myself: A lot of organizations are focused on getting to the inbox—and this is true for B2B and B2C clients—In your opinion, what is the most important factor for getting to the inbox? Holly want to take a crack at this first? Everybody preaches tracking email marketing efforts, but few actually follow their own advice or are able to do it themselves. How can organizations start tracking email success if they have no idea where to begin? Sarah: identify elements that are most important to your business; different metrics matter to different companies; clickthrough rates, open rates are pretty standard. Once it comes to revenue attribution per channel, we see different approaches ranging from ROI per email to revenue per customer. What do you guys think—from your interactions with clients—are the big things to pay attention to in the coming year on email? Spencer what do you think?
- Shirley: That concludes our webinar, thanks guy for listening! We’d now like to open the floor to any questions you may have.