Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:01:00 GMT

The Email Experience Council (EEC) announced the release of its third annual “Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study.”

The report examined the opt-in practices of 120 of the top online retailers and found there is a clear trend toward richer subscription processes. The study also found that retailers are putting more focus on list hygiene. Thirty-eight percent of retailers ask subscribers to confirm their email address by re-entering it, up from 27% last year. Also, 5% of retailers now use a confirmed (double) opt-in process, up from 3% last year, which improves list quality. Other findings from the Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study include:

After falling from 27% in 2006 to 8% last year, the percentage of retailers using sign-up incentives rebounded to 13% this year, despite growing concerns about the quality of subscribers that are attracted by sweepstakes and other incentives.
With recent evidence suggesting that putting privacy policies front and center during the subscription process actually reduces sign-ups, only 36% of retailers mentioned their privacy policy this year, down from 45% last year.
Despite quicker subscription fulfillments overall, 29% of retailers took 15 days or longer to honor opt-ins or failed to honor them all together. That figure was the same as last year.

The EEC Integrates Iconix Truemark Email Service

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:47:00 GMT

The Email Experience Council (eec), the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) email marketing arm, today announced that it has partnered with Iconix, a provider of visual email identification solutions, and joined the more than 500 senders protected from email fraud by the Iconix® Truemark® service. Legitimate email messages from the ecc will now be marked with an icon and the company’s logo in the recipient’s inbox and aim to protect senders from email fraud as the solutions helps recipients instantly identify messages they care about and avoid spam and phishing attacks. As part of the partnership with Iconix, the eec also will make the Iconix eMail ID plug-in freely available to its members and the public on its eec’s website.

“Email fraud is a serious problem that impacts the strength of the brand and the effectiveness of email as a communications channel,” said Jeanniey Mullen, the founder and executive chairwoman of the eec and global executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Zinio. “Not only does the Iconix service allow users to be confident about the senders of emails marked with the Truemark icon, it also builds on the industry standard email authentication that the DMA requires of its members. The eec has chosen to promote this unique technology and to verify our own emails to support a broader industry effort with companies that offer services like Iconix.”

The Iconix Truemark solution uses industry standard email authentication technologies such as Sender ID, Domain Keys, and DKIM to verify the authenticity of the message. It then takes the process a step further by checking the identification of the email sender against a list of registered senders with Iconix, Inc. Once an email has passed authentication and identification steps, a Truemark icon is displayed in the “from” column of the recipient’s inbox.

'Net Features : EEC

Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study

The EEC Integrates Iconix Truemark Email Service