By Crystal Silvas

According to a new study by the Email Experience Council, welcome e-mails are apparently on the rise. The Email Experience Council (EEC) is the Direct Marketing Association’s group that focuses on the e-mail marketing industry. According to the study, seventy-two percent of major online retailers send out regular welcome e-mails this year, up from sixty-six percent last year.

In its second annual report titled “Retail Welcome Email Subscription Benchmark Study,” the EEC analyzed the welcome e-mails of one hundred-eighteen of the top online retailers, tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot. The study identifies a number of best practices and benchmarks in the areas of merchandising, relationship-building, deliverability and CAN-SPAM compliance.

Jeanniey Mullen, EEC founder and a senior partner and executive director for e-mail and dialogue services at OgilvyOne Worldwide said, “There has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of welcome e-mails this year. I think that over the past year e-mail’s positioning has changed from being strictly a direct marketing tool to being more of a customer relationship [component]. A welcome message is a good way to start this relationship.”

This year the EEC has for the first time tracked the passage of time between subscriptions and the delivery of welcome e-mails. While most retailers deliver their welcome e-mails within ten minutes of sign-up, nineteen percent take more than twenty-four hours to deliver and nearly a third of those take over a week.

The report also found that fifty-eight percent of welcome e-mails were CAN-SPAM compliant in terms of including both a mailing address and unsubscribe method, versus fifty-two percent last year. Additionally, sixty-two percent of welcome e-mails asked subscribers to whitelist them by adding an e-mail address to their address book, up from forty-nine percent last year.

HTML-based welcome e-mails were also one the rise this year, with seventy-nine percent of retailers sending out e-mails using this format, up from sixty-nine percent last year. The remaining twenty-one percent sent text-only welcome e-mails.

The report also showed that seventy-five percent of the welcome e-mails included the retailer’s brand name in their subject lines, which remained consistent from last year. “I think that the retailers who use their name in the subject line are going to have better results,” Mullen added.

Retailers appear to be moving away from incentive offers during sign-up, as thirty-two percent of welcome e-mails include a discount, reward or incentive, down from thirty-four percent last year. If you would like some more information on this report, please visit http://www.emailexperience.org/Login-Whitepaper-Room.