The TEM 500

Surveying The Email Marketing Landscape

The Premise

David Ogilvy would have loved the Internet.

Before he became a masterful copywriter and ran a world-renown advertising agency, he was a researcher. The pursuit of knowledge became the keystone of his success and he made a point to know more about his clients’ businesses than they did.

Gathering that information before the Internet existed was a tedious endeavor. Today, just a few quick keystrokes open a window to the world. Ogilvy would feel like a kid in candy store.

The doors to every online retail enterprise are wide open, inviting anyone to come on in, stroll along the aisles, and peruse the merchandise. Even a brief walk-thru can speak volumes about a business.

But, even more information is to be gained after the visit. That’s when the real communication between companies and window shoppers begins and loyal customer relationships are forged.

Taking a page from Ogilvy, we decided to follow those messaging streams with a very specific purpose in mind.

The Process

First, we identified the stores to visit. We selected 500 ecommerce companies with Alexa scores ranging from 50,000-300,000. The resulting group included well-established catalog companies you would recognize and new online-only retailers you might not.

We then signed up to receive their emails, put an item in a shopping cart, and abandoned without completing the purchase – and waited to see what arrived in our inboxes.

This time-consuming procedure was strictly followed to accomplish our main objective: assess the adoption of cross-device technology. Refer to this post for a more detailed explanation of both our purpose and procedure.

The Profiles

Our very defined, targeted objective unleashed an avalanche of intelligence that would have made Ogilvy proud.

Visits to each website checkout were mini usability studies revealing various barriers to purchase completion. And the emails collected over a three-week period produced 500 storyboards tracing each company’s welcome messaging stream. A unique perspective most companies might not take the time to observe.

The Payoff

Not only did we meet our objective, we now have tons of valuable data to share, both in the aggregate and the specific. The former will appear in our blog posts as needed to illustrate a point. The latter is available upon request by filling out the form at the top of this page.