A decade of commercial use has given rise to a number of “best practices” in marketing e-mail, but not every marketer uses them. An EmailLabs audit of more than 200 commercial users, of which about a third were retailers, determined that only one of 18 best practices identified by e-mail services providers was in use at 100% of the marketers audited.
That was the practice of including a working unsubscribe link with e-mails sent to customers. That is a requirement of the CAN-SPAM Act, but some marketers still haven’t gotten the message on another CAN SPAM requirement for commercial messages that’s also an e-mail best practice: 9% of those audited didn’t include their physical address in their e-mails to customers.
Overall, EmailLabs found that few marketers are using more than one of two of the 18 defined best practices. As a result, they’re not getting the maximum return from their e-mail programs, EmailLabs said.
The audit, across six vertical segments including retail, found that the travel industry has adopted the largest number of best practices, ranking highest most often in using recognizable “sending from” lines, subject lines, subscription management and navigation within their newsletter and to their company site. Financial services marketers used the fewest best practices of any industry segment.
Retailers scored in the middle in their adoption of best practices. They scored their highest adoption rates in the practice of providing a link to a web version of their e-mail, with 60.6% of those audited employing this method; and in providing at least two navigation links either in the message or to their web site, 69.7% of those audited.
Retailers scored lowest in their adoption rate of two other practices. Only 33.3% of those audited had designed their e-mails to accommodate preview panes or blocked image functionality at the browser end, representing lost sales from customers unable to see the product images. Only 21.2% had implemented a link allowing e-mail recipients to forward the e-mail to friends, “another crucial lost opportunity to capture sales through viral marketing,” according to EmailLabs.
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