Basic measures such as personalization, calls to action and better placement of registration requests would help email marketers to significantly improve their campaigns according to a Silverpop study released yesterday at the Annual Catalog Conference in Orlando, Florida, reports DM News. The initial findings are part of Phase I of the permission-based email marketing company's "Retail Email Marketing Study," which found that three-fourths of retailers don't respond to prospects' requests with even simple personalization like the recipient's name.

One-fourth of the companies studied failed to offer a simple explanation of benefits to encourage visitors to sign up for emails. When a call to action was offered, 45 percent offered notices of sales and promotions, and 14 percent offered news. The type of information retailers offered was generally limited, with almost eight of 10 companies offering only one communications choice, such as notices of sales, newsletters or information bulletins.

Forty-three percent of companies sent a registration confirmation message. Eight of 10 sent the confirmations the same day, and 76 percent displayed product or brand names in the messages. Only 12 percent asked to be added to the recipients' address book or white list, and only 25 percent of the confirmation messages were personalized.