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QURIS STUDY FINDS ALMOST 50 PERCENT OF CUSTOMERS REPORT THAT THEY HAVE STOPPED DOING BUSINESS WITH COMPANIES THAT HAVE POOR EMAIL PRACTICES

Quris's View from the Inbox™ consumer research finds that so-called "best practices" for permission email marketing (PEM) are not just theoretical concepts promoted by consultants and columnists. Email can be a highly effective channel for driving revenues, developing customer relationships and creating brand-experience differentiation. At the same time, however, poor email practices can train customers not only to ignore an offending company in the channel, entailing a high opportunity cost of lost revenues, but nearly half of consumers surveyed reported that they have stopped doing business with companies altogether as a result of poor email practices. Thus, sending "just one more email" is a double-edged sword: it may yield an additional sale, or it might drive a customer away forever.

The critical challenge marketers face is to predict which behavior each additional email will drive. The best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. Marketers should measure individual customer email relationship engagement over time (e.g., a history of opening, clicking and purchasing), and not simply track response rates of indiv idual campaigns. Measuring engagement and how it is changing over time – its momentum – is one of the best predictors of how a customer will behave in future. Depending on how engagement momentum is changing, marketers can then segment and target customers based on key behavioral variables, such as frequency of mailings, topical relevancy, content quality and privacy, to maximize customer engagement.

Get the white paper (PDF, 215kb, Get Acrobat Reader).