With the exception of a noteworthy few firms, we were generally unimpressed with the quality and frequency of the marketing emails reviewed for this report, which covered a four-month monitoring period from July 1st through October 31st. During this time, we received a total of 65 emails from all the Credit Card Monitor firms we track. Of these 11 firms, over half (6 total – including Capital One, Chase, GM Card, Juniper, Providian and U.S. Bank) sent just 4 emails or less over the 4-month time frame, ranging from 1 email per month, to 1 email every other month.

Other firms, such as Bank of America and MBNA, fared even worse, as not one marketing email was recorded by either firm, despite the fact that all of our accounts are enrolled to receive promotions, news and announcements via email.

Consequently, the numbers revealed a lopsided playing field that overwhelming favored a limited number of issuers – nearly 75% of all emails were received from 3 firms – AmEx, Citibank and Discover (averaging 3 to 5 emails per month) – of which nearly 60% were received from AmEx and Citibank alone. This was surprising, considering the fact that 9 of 11 firms (Capital One and Providian were the exceptions) included some sort of opt-in/opt-out radio button on their respective email profile/preferences pages. Therefore, it seems as if several major issuers have a significant amount of catching up to do when it comes to making an impact on their customers via email.

Find out why we ranked Citibank’s email preferences page best-in-class, and which firms are offering the best designed marketing emails in the November edition of Credit Card Monitor Report where, as always, you will find our competitive matrix, detailed findings and best practice recommendations.

Subjects

Website Reviews/Company Reviews, Marketing, cross-selling

Segment: Credit Cards
Publication date: Thursday, November 24, 2005
# Pages: (43 pages)