E-mail

The disconnect between how executives and consumer privacy advocates view email marketing was never more obvious than during the latest hijinks surrounding Barnes & Noble's acquisition of Borders' customer data, including email addresses. As part of the Borders bankruptcy proceedings, Barnes & Noble paid $13.9 million for Borders' intellectual property, including its 48-million customer database.

Starting in 2005, Borders began amassing a database of more than 48 million email addresses of customers who participated in its loyalty program. Now that the company is in bankruptcy, that email database is seen as valuable property by Barnes & Noble, which won an auction to purchase Borders’ assets for $13.9 million. The problem for Barnes & Noble is that Borders originally promised many of the customers in its loyalty program that it wouldn't disclose their personal information without their permission. Borders changed its policy in May 2008, but collected millions of email addresses and other data before then.

In a session at the recent eTail conference in Boston, Jim Moore, president and CEO of The PSNE Group, parent company of online footwear retailer Birkenstock Central, discussed how his company’s email program has leveraged customer lifecycle management techniques to increase revenue from the channel. Moore focused on three specific areas of Birkenstock Central’s email program: acquisition, triggered messaging and re-engagement campaigns.

Responsys has released its Viral & Community Links in Emails 2011 report, which found that retailers are more focused on using email marketing programs to promote their social communities and less focused on email for social sharing.

Major retailers, including Nordstrom and Gap, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either emailed or uploaded to password-protected websites. The retailers report more customers are opting for paperless.

Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru was on hand at the Retail Email Exchange symposium in San Diego last month to offer best practices for four current trends in the e-commerce space. Looking to debunk conventional wisdom, Mulpuru advised that things often turn out to be different than they initially appear. With that in mind, here are the four trends that Mulpuru addressed:

DEMCO realized it needed to find new ways to increase overall conversions on its website. The company selected an email service provider to create more sophisticated, automated email campaigns with shopping cart recovery initiatives and new subscriber welcome programs.

The summer months — and July in particular — are slow months for email marketing. Last year, July had the slowest year-over-year volume growth of all the months. Email marketers should take advantage of the slow summer months by taking some vacation and by starting to plan your holiday email marketing campaigns.

With Father’s Day messaging wrapped up, Fourth of July messaging will be on the rise. Last week we got our first reference to back-to-school shopping, which will build slowly and peak in August.

How tightly do you plan the upcoming schedule for your email campaigns? Marketers who view email as an important sales and acquisition channel are likely to have a detailed plan for what their email content will include in the next 90 days. They also have a skeleton outline for email offers over the following 90 days. Yes, successful email marketers are actively planning the next six months of activity.