Friday, September 21, 2012

Email: 8 Rules of engagement

So you’ve been through all the deliverability tutorials and you have implemented all the recommended best practices. The emails should land in the Inbox and your job is done!

Not so fast...

It is just as important to ensure that customers are reading and engaging with your email messages. Why? Many ISPs use engagement as a measure of whether or not an email is in fact wanted by their customer base. No engagement means you could land up in the junkmail folder.

Engagement measures the customers' responses and interactivity with email messages. Engagement can either be positive (+) or negative (-). Together with your ISP, you can now evaluate engagement in a way that essentially asks the question: Are these emails valuable – and should we allow them into inboxes?


pros-and-cons

  1. Set & maintain expectations
    Set up expectations around what customers will be receiving. This can be done in the welcome email when they sign up. Then do exactly what you said you were going to.
  2. Provide relevant content
    Send segmented messages based on preferences, performance or history - it shows customers that you are listening.
  3. Reply address
    Make sure you have a working reply address, as replies to emails count towards engagement. Implement an auto-responder if replies cannot be monitored.
  4. Subject lines and pre-headers
    The subject line is the first point to pique the customers’ interest and get them to open the email. This copy should reflect the content and attention grabbing.
  5. Content
    The key to high engagement metrics is relevancy. Your content has to be relevant and valuable to recipients or they simply won’t open or read your emails.
  6. Mobile device support
    Make sure customers are able to engage with your emails easily on all devices. If they can’t read it, they’ll just delete it.
  7. Good hygiene
    Remove all undelivered email addresses from your list. A high bounce rate to a particular domain, could be confused for spam sent to a bought list.
  8. Re-engage inactive customers
    Create periodic re-engagement campaigns for inactive users.

Aim for the following metrics:

  • Unique open rate above 6%
  • Click-to-open-rate (CTOR) of 20%
  • Hard bounces below 1% – ideally below 0.25%
  • Spam complaint rate below 0.1% – ideally below 0.05%

Engagement activity is already influencing several areas of email:

  • Deliverability : If your customers are well engaged with your messages, you will see more benefit from your email efforts. The more they interact, the better your deliverability.
  • Inbox placement: Gmail’s Priority Inbox uses engagement to tag order of importance and sorts emails based on user behaviour. It automatically identifies important emails based on which have been replied to or marked as important.

  • Give your customers what they want, when they want it. Compelling and well-designed content is paramount to creating immediate interest and long-term engagement. Do you need some help with this? An email messaging specialist is only a click away
     Linda Misauer
    striata.com

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

66 Reasons to simplify your customers’ eBilling experience

For many years I thought I was alone in my frustration with multiple passwords for the various websites I need to access on a semi-regular basis. There are just so many! Don’t tell anyone, but hidden on my PC I have a (password protected!) Word document. It’s 10 pages long detailing URLs and IDs/Passwords hints for 66 separate logins. Everything from online banking to cinema ticketing via all the usual suspects; EBay, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Whilst I’ve clearly overcomplicated my own online life, a recent article on the Fox Small Business Centre website highlights that this password fatigue is endemic throughout the online community. A survey of 2,000 adults showed that 30% have over 10 unique passwords to remember, and I’m one of the 8% with more than 21 passwords.

From an eBilling and eStatement viewpoint, there are 2 main issues with this: customer experience and security.


Customers would rather clean toilets!


While you may feel that your new eBilling portal is a paragon of best practice online design and ergonomics that your customers will enjoy using every month, there’s a good chance that your customers actually see it as just another IDs/Passwords problem. In the aforementioned survey, almost 40% of respondents said they would rather clean the toilet or try to solve
toilet2 
world peace than create and remember another unique IDs/Passwords combo that meets the ever-expanding security requirements.

That’s an amusing statistic, and if the customer really requires the service being offered online (maybe online banking, or they’ve seen a must-have handbag bargain on EBay), they’ll probably forego domestic chores and follow through to create/manage another password. But when you’re trying to change your customer’s behaviour - switching from paper based bills/statements to electronic versions, the choice in their head is between doing nothing and keep getting paper (which does the job), or to voluntarily do something that’s less appealing than cleaning the toilet!

That goes a long way to explain the poor adoption of portal eBilling solutions around the globe, and is backed up by numerous other reports and surveys. For example, Infotrends’ Future of EBPP in North America Report in 2010 found that 61% of respondents cited remembering multiple IDs/Passwords as the reason for not going paperless.
barriers-for-going-paperless-info

The security Catch 22 situation

Unfortunately, modern password guidelines have created a security Catch 22 situation. The more we are all asked to create secure, long passwords with upper and lower case characters, numbers and punctuation marks, but excluding names and words; the more we all need to write these down and/or re-use the passwords on multiple sites, making them inherently less secure. Another recent article by ARS Technica highlights these issues. Password management solutions only partially solve the problem. In fact at Striata our Security Policy prevents the use of these to access any of our servers.

Good news – there’s a way to maintain security AND keep it convenient


Can we, as billers, provide the convenience required for the customer, while still maintaining the level of security commensurate with the information risks contained within our documents?

A move from a centralized portal to individually encrypted PDF documents delivered to customers via email dramatically reduces the risks, as access to one document is all that could ever be gained (after days of brute-force attack) should the email somehow fall into the wrong hands. Hence a simple shared secret – maybe a combination of a few characters of the customer’s name plus their date of birth –provides enough security, without the customer having to remember or write down a new password.

One more digital service delivered; one less stamp used; one less bit of forest cut down; no new password created. Everyone’s happy! Want to know more? I’m happy to stop cleaning my loo, so get in touch!

Keith Russell
striata.com

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Will the launch of "De-Mail" drive paperless adoption in Germany and beyond?

Now that Deutsche Telekom has finally moved government-certified secure digital mail solution, De-Mail, from pilot to launch, I predict Germany will see an uptick in consumer acceptance of paperless communications. You know the old saying… a rising tide lifts all boats.

Competition to De-Mail (the solution) is already on the market: DHL Deutsche E-Postbrief, which is compliant with De-Mail, has seen underwhelming user adoption, with analysts citing cost and inconvenience as barriers to adoption.

The specifics of E-Postbrief:

  1. Costs around €0.55 per document that is sent

  2. Challenges users to onboard vis-a-vis an unwieldy registration process requiring them to obtain a unique email address AND to register with government-issued ID (exactly the same for the De-Mail solution)

  3. Has, until now*, included separate encryption and signature options

Most German consumers are customers of either Deutche Post or Deutsche Telekom, but will they use either of the De-Mail compliant solutions?

Probably not. De-Mail and E-Postbrief are secure point-to-point communication solutions that require sign-up by both sender and recipient, using government-issued identification and a completely new email address.

If you are wondering who would actually use such a solution, think “C2B” – consumer to business such as a note to your lawyer, a dispute with your telco.

So, whilst actual volumes will probably be slim, the market itself is slowly becoming educated and accepting of paperless communication.

'PUSH' methodology is ideal for B2B & B2C


For B2B and B2C eDocument Delivery - where outbound volumes are massive, especially eBilling and eInvoicing – a much simpler approach is needed. Onboarding is an intuitive “path-of-least-resistance process" and regular usage requires no initiative.

A highly secure “PUSH” methodology yields user adoption results two to three times higher than average, across industries and regions. “PUSH” sends secure document by email and protects the confidential information by encrypting the document and applying a “shared secret” password to open it. It’s easy to use, aligned with customer preferences, and gets results.

(See my earlier blog post “Innovation Inside – Email on the Edge” for more on the importance of intuitive, path-of-least-resistance methodologies for effective onboarding.)

Our highly secure 'PUSH' methodology drives significant user adoption results, we’re happy to share our success stories with you.

* Interestingly, DHL Deutsche Post spokesman Alexander Edenhofer has just announced that, starting next month, separate encryption and signature options will be removed from E-Postbrief, because Deutsche Post now believed that the platform itself meets the De-Mail protocol’s requirements for transmitting legal documents electronically. So, most likely, prices will also be lowered soon, in order to be competitive with De-Mails price tag of €0 .39 per message.

Keira Holland
striata.com