The Whitelist

Your online sending reputation must be solid and stellar to keep your email deliverability rate high. But there are two huge threats to that reputation:

1. Sending to people who complain about your email, whether because they don’t remember opting in, they think you email too frequently, or your message is irrelevant. The reason itself is, well, irrelevant. What matters is they complain. They either report you as spam or as an abuser, or they might report you to the mail admin if it’s a B2B situation.

2. Hard bounces that result from sending to bad email addresses also harm your online sending reputation.
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If your company is blogging, do you still need an email newsletter? Yes, if you want to improve your email marketing ROI. There are several reasons for this:

One, this is the age of integration. (For proof of that, see our new 2010 guide to choosing an ESP.) Just because you are doing one thing (blogging) doesn’t mean you should not do the other (email marketing). The more marketing channels you have, the better. Plus blogs and emails are delivered differently. A blog must be found by a reader, and then subscribed to, to be read. An email newsletter can be part of your email marketing program, sent to people already on your in-house email list. You can actively recruit email subscribers via a multitude of channels. And people are less likely to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed than they are to your email newsletter. Using a blog in combination with an email newsletter simply increases your reach, and therefore your ROI.
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You simply can’t rest easy in this business of email marketing. 

Case in point: Smith Harmon released a short report on email rendering that shows most retailers failed a rendering test when viewing their emails in Hotmail using Firefox.

This is precisely why ClickMail Marketing preaches the following as an email marketing vendor:
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Add this to your list of email subject line best practices: Be honest.

Your subject line is the second factor people consider when deciding whether or not to open your email. (The first is the From line.) Obviously, your subject line is critical to your email marketing ROI for that reason.

But that does not translate into get them to open the email at all costs, even if that means lying in the subject line.

Think about the spam you get, and how blatant those subject lines lies are, like the trickery of “How are you?” Yes, it will get you to open the email, because that subject line will have you wondering, “Who is this?” But then you feel cheated after you open it, right? And realize you fell for their ruse?
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Although it was published a year ago, I only just came across this email marketing stat and it’s so relevant to our message, I have to share it with you!

According to an email marketing report published by Merkle last year at this time, subscribers who opt-out of permission-based email give to primary reasons for doing so:

• 75% said the emails lack relevance
• 73% said the emails are sent too frequently
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Have you ever gone to a dinner party that bored you but felt like you couldn’t leave?

Some unsubscribe processes are like that. And they are the opposite of email marketing best practices.

A few years ago, I subscribed to an industry newsletter to help me get a better understanding of the industry, as we were taking on a new client, and that knowledge was useful. After a few good years, the client went away. (It was a government client, and the contract changed hands.) I still get the email newsletter I signed up for all those years ago. Every time a new one shows up in my inbox, I delete it, I no longer need it.
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Here at ClickMail Marketing, we like to say we’re vendor agnostic. Fancy words with a simple meaning: We resell several different email service providers (ESPs) so we can fit our clients with the ESP that will work best for them. We want to fit a round peg in that round hole, not a square one.

One reason for this unique approach is our focus on deliverability. In fact, when trying to categories ClickMail, it might be easiest to think of us as an email deliverability consultant. Sure, we can do anything your email marketing program might require, from email design and landing pages to deploying your email for you and helping you analyze your results. But the ability to improve email deliverability is one of the most important services we as a consultant can provide, because it’s your email deliverability that’s going to have a direct impact on your email marketing ROI.
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If you like numbers, and everyone in email marketing has to be a bit of a numbers geek, you’ll like this website! The Email Stat Center offers all kinds of numbers and stats that could help you possibly improve your email marketing ROI.

From branding to budgeting, from lines to subject lines, this website serves up numbers, stats and data on a full range of email marketing topics. Choose a topic, and you’re presented with a laundry list of stats.
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As an email deliverability consultant focused on improving your email marketing ROI, ClickMail Marketing launched an advanced, new email deliverability service at the opening session of the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Summit last month.

The ClickMail Deliverability Assessment is designed for organizations that are looking to improve their email marketing ROI by using email deliverability tools. Even if you’re following email deliverability best practices, you’re no doubt ending up with some emails in the spam folder or blocked completely.
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Think about this: You’re impacting your deliverability rate even before someone signs up.

That’s because it all starts with the subscriber: whether they want to hear from you, and how engaged they are with your email.

Moving forward, major ISPs will be measuring the subscriber engagement when determining whether or not your email is spam. An email deliverability best practice is to let the subscriber determine the boundaries of his or her relationship with you to make sure that engagement is higher later.
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