Marketers must realise that they are in complete control of the success, and failure, of their email marketing campaigns. The crux starts with their email sender reputation. Margaret Farmakis, Senior Director of Response Consulting at Return Path, offers a guide to getting your recipients’ attention.
Marketers must realise that they are in complete control of the success, and failure, of their email marketing campaigns. The crux starts with their email sender reputation.
Return Path’s bi-annual European Email Deliverability Benchmark Report found one in eight marketing emails requested by consumers from companies goes missing completely – not in subscribers’ spam folders or inboxes, but blocked by ISPs before reaching them – compared to one in nine in December 2009. The study also found that one sixth of the emails consumers actually want now go undelivered, either going missing or reaching subscribers’ spam folders.
Marketers’ downfall is their failure to follow best practices designed to differentiate their emails from illegal spam. Margaret Farmakis, Senior Director of Response Consulting at Return Path, the world’s leading email deliverability services company, has these tips to help marketers avoid spam filters and get their emails read by consumers.
Demand accurate performance metrics
The recent DMA UK National Client Email Marketing Survey 2010 shows that while marketers are concerned about deliverability, they still aren’t paying attention to where their emails are going. Many simply rely on the “sent minus bounced equals delivered” formula for email marketing performance, but their primary concern should be the number of emails actually reaching the inbox, and being read by, their subscribers.
Email marketers must first accurately measure their email campaign performance or demand accurate metrics from their email broadcast providers to understand how many emails are actually being delivered to inboxes, going missing completely or ending up in the spam folder. Only then can they begin fixing their email reputation, which governs whether an email is routed to the inbox, the spam folder or to oblivion.
Clean-up email sender lists
Out-of-date lists are one of the top five factors that can lead directly to email deliverability failures. Although it may not cost anything to continue to send to inactive subscribers, mailing to an email database with a large non-responsive segment of addresses can have long-term damaging effects for email marketers as ISPs begin to factor this behaviour into their filtering decisions.
Bad email addresses – unknown users and spam traps, expired or misspelt accounts or addresses blacklisted by ISPs that force emails to bounce back to the sender – must be regularly removed from marketers’ databases. Senders who generate high volumes of bounce backs – or just one spam trap – risk having their messages blocked by ISPs, thus damaging their email reputation.
Utilise win-back campaigns
Less than a quarter of marketers are targeting inactive subscribers with win-back campaigns. This is no longer simply a nice-to-have strategy. It’s now essential for the health of marketers’ entire email databases and it directly impacts on email deliverability, as well as response rates. Marketers must define the inactive segment of their email address lists to determine what percentage of recipients are inactive and the type of audience they need to reach out to with a win-back campaign. Subscribers that don’t respond by opening or clicking on these win-back campaigns should be removed from the file.
Offer consumers an opt-out
Too many marketers fail to provide subscribers with an unsubscribe option at all. Of those that do, many are failing to act on the requests they receive. This poor practice means subscribers complain – marking the incoming emails from those marketers as spam, which leads to ISPs diverting messages to the spam folder or blocking them altogether. Subscribers are more likely to engage with a brand when they are given the choice of what emails they receive, and when and how often they receive them.
Best practice exists for a reason – to differentiate between legitimate marketing emails that should be routed to subscribers’ inboxes and the barrage of illegal spam that ISPs must fight on a daily basis. Until marketers understand and continuously monitor their deliverability rates, tidy up their email address lists, start to implement win-back campaigns and offer consumers an unsubscribe option, their sent emails will continue to go undelivered meaning consumers will be increasingly unable to read their requested emails.
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director of Response Consulting
Return Path
www.returnpath.net/
