June 2013: Email Collateral Review

This edition of Small Business Card Monitor explores how business card issuers communicate with their customers via email. In a span of 60 days, we examined the types of email collateral received by our eight SBCM firms. Although all eight SBCM firms were studied, we only received email collateral from seven of the firms. The report mainly focuses on the following:

• Types of email collateral received
• Email presentation
• Ability to select email preferences on the private site

The types of emails we received during the 60-day period consisted of account alerts, marketing promotions, notices of products and services, survey requests and newsletters. The highest volume of emails we came across were account notifications, and next were marketing promotions. Unfortunately, only three SBCM firms sent customers marketing promotion emails, of which we hoped to see more. Based on our examination, most business card issuers tend not to push cross promotional products onto their customers.

As for private site email preference options, we found that five SBCM firms give clients the option to decide if they wish to receive email marketing materials. Of these five SBCM firms, only one of them actually allowed clients to decide exactly what type of emails they wish to receive, such as e-newsletters, special offers and service updates, as well as set an email delivery frequency. 

Other key findings included in the report:

• 75% of SBCM firms provided security information within the emails to secure the authentication of the sender
• 50% of SBCM firms promoted their social media platforms within email content
• Only two SBCM firms used e-communications to inform clients of a service and product upcoming updates