One of those programs touts that they send me offers tailored to me. Except that the offers I get at Hotmail are different than the ones I get at Gmail are different from the ones I get elsewhere.

So how tailored is this really? In general there is no difference with how I interact with the mail in those various accounts, so that profile is the same. And, well, the person behind the addresses is all the same. If the ads were specially chosen for me, why am I getting different ones at different accounts? Is this particular marketer simply randomly assigning offers and claiming they’re targeted? How many other mailers claim to send ads tailored to my profile, and then just throw the profile out the window and send whatever they want to send today?

This isn’t to say that there aren’t a some marketers that do pay attention to recipient profiles. But I’m starting to wonder if the majority of “targeting” is more lip service than reality.

What do other people think?

Sending relevant email is important. Not only do recipients expect mail to be relevant, but the ISPs often make delivery decisions on how relevant their users find your mail. Marketers that send too much irrelevant mail find themselves struggling to get inbox placement.

Permission makes sending relevant mail all that much easier. Sure, really good marketers can probably collect, purchase, beg, borrow and steal enough information to know that their unsolicited email is relevant. But how many marketers are actually that good?

My experience suggest that most marketers aren’t that good. They don’t segment their permission based lists to send relevant mail. They’re certainly not going to segment their non-permission based lists to send relevant mail.

Macy’s, for instance, decided that I would find their Bloomingdales mail relevant. I didn’t, and unsubscribed from both publications, after registering a complaint with their ESP. Had Macy’s asked about sending me Bloomies mail I wouldn’t have opted-in, but I probably wouldn’t have unsubbed from Macy’s mail, too.

So what’s your stand? Does relevance trump permission? Or does permission trump relevance? How much relevant, unsolicited mail do you get? How much irrelevant permission based mail do you get? And what drives you to unsubscribe from a permission based list?

Overall, it seems the researchers were disappointed in how the retailers were using mail. Even the title of the whitepaper captures this feeling: “Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?” The answer seems to be more no than yes.

From my perspective the data is not all that surprising. In many cases it seems bigger companies rely on the recognition of their brand to get them through minor delivery problems (like complaints) rather than good practices. Whereas a smaller company will have to work harder to develop a relationship, larger companies with wide brand recognition can fall back on their brand.

There were a few areas ReturnPath measured.

1. How many companies sent welcome messages?
2. How soon did recipients start receiving email?
3. How did companies use information collected during the subscription process to personalize email?

Most other people commenting on the study have focused on the fact that 60% of mailers did not send a welcome message and 30% do not send any mail within the 30 days of the study. Basic, basic best practices here. Send a welcome message! This is a sender’s opportunity to touch the customer. Good marketers set recipients them up to expect future, high value messages. Really good marketers include information like how to modify subscription settings and what address future messages will come from – along with instructions on how to add that address to the recipients address book. ReturnPath points out Kraft as a good example of a mailer using that welcome message to start the relationship.

[Kraft's] welcome message included a personalized greeting and a recipe based on the subscriber’s expressed preferences. They also include “white listing” instructions along with information on what to expect from future emails.

In the 30 days of the study, 30% of the retailers failed to send any email. I can guarantee you that in 60 or 90 days, when the retailer finally gets around to mailing, a significant percentage of recipients will forget they signed up for the mail. Some of those recipients will hit the “this is spam” button. This is a missed opportunity and ReturnPath pulls no punches about how bad it is to ignore it.

They’ve asked you to market to them! They’ve made themselves vulnerable, and now they want acknowledgment, even gratitude. You can’t put off making a connection. If you aren’t well on your way to building a relationship within a month your subscriber may have forgotten that they registered.

One of the most interesting parts of the study to me, and one many others have not commented on, was the analysis of the information retailers collect and then do not use. Only 25% of the companies who sent routine emails within 30 days actually used the information they collected from the recipients to personalize the messages. The others did not even use subscriber names in outgoing mail.

Taken as a whole, marketers lost a major opportunity to engage their subscribers through early personalization. Fifty-six percent of marketers who sent welcome messages had the data to personalize them, but only 13 percent sent personalized welcome emails.

This is where the market is going. Senders MUST learn to step up and uphold their end of the sender – recipient relationship. Personalized email is a small way to connect with subscribers, even something as simple as a name will help the recipient feel as if the relationship is two way. Recipients want to know sender sees them as more than an email address, but actually as a valuable customer.