Silverpop Releases Comprehensive Analysis of Retailers' Email Registration Practices

Business Wire, August 17, 2005

ATLANTA -- Despite the proven value of targeting customers through email marketing, few retailers take full advantage the technology's tremendous potential, according to findings of Silverpop's comprehensive "2005 Retail Email Marketing Study," released today.

Silverpop analyzed the email programs of 175 companies, including nationally recognized names such as Crate & Barrel, Neiman Marcus, JC Penney, CompUSA and many others. The data in Phase I of Silverpop's study provides marketers with insights into how retailers deal with the registration process.

Key findings include the following:

--Location of registration: A surprisingly large number of retailers do not have a strong call-to-action for email registration on their homepage.

"Ideally, subscription action items should be located prominently on all pages of the Web site," said Elaine O'Gorman, vice president of strategy for Silverpop. "With the growth of search engine use, shoppers can arrive directly on product pages. If invitations for opt-ins are located on only one page in the site, chances are they'll be missed by customers actually seeking your products."

--Incentives: Forrester Research found that 50 percent of online consumers are likely to opt-in for discounts and 30 percent want alerts and tips. Yet one-fourth of the companies studied by Silverpop offered no explicit value for providing an email address.

--Registration information: Three out of four online email registration forms collected more than just an email address. One in four companies used Web site registration to populate more than email lists, alerting users that registering on their site would enable the company to send the subscribers materials through direct mail and/or telemarketing.

--Confirmation: More than half of the companies (57 percent) didn't send a confirmation message upon registration, missing a valuable opportunity to positively impact deliverability and avoid mistakes. As Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey points out in his book "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing," the confirmed opt-in is the easiest and most effective way for a marketer to catch accidental opt-ins as well as identify mistakes such as address misspellings.

--Personalization: "Email provides marketers a rich opportunity to develop highly beneficial customer relationships," O'Gorman said. "Yet only 25 percent of the companies studied included simple personalization in their confirmation messages."

To receive a copy of Phase I of Silverpop's "2005 Retail Email Study" and register to receive the entire study when available, visit www.silverpop.com.

Silverpop is a leading provider of permission-based email marketing solutions, strategy and services. Ranked as having the highest business value and richest feature set by JupiterResearch in 2004, Silverpop was also acknowledged by Forrester Research as a "strong performer" that "stands out with an interface that is quite easy to use while providing strong functionality."