5 Holiday Best Practices for Increased Email Deliverability

‘Tis the season… for email marketing campaigns to ramp up! Which means increased promotions, increased email volume, and, unfortunately, increased subscriber fatigue. How do you ensure that your emails stay on your email subscribers’ “Nice” list, keeping your email deliverability rates high, and don’t migrate onto the “Naughty” list – resulting in unsubscribes or worse? Here are five simple but powerful holiday-themed email marketing best practices to keep in mind:

1) Fulfill email frequency wishes: This is the most important thing you can do as an email marketer to honor and respect your subscribers’ wishes. And yet it’s one of the most flagrantly abused by many email marketers, especially around the holiday season. If your subscriber requested once/weekly emails from your business, store, or organization, just because ’tis the shopping season, does not also equate to ’tis the time to flood email inboxes. At this time of year, email subscribers are already inundated with more than the normal volume of catalogs, circulars, newsletters, and donation requests in both direct mail and email. The last thing you want to do is annoy your email subscribers with too many emails, especially if they specifically requested the frequency with which they want to hear from you. Honor their wishes and your email deliverability will benefit.

2) Surprise your subscribers: Holiday shoppers are looking for great deals and special savings at this time of year: it’s your opportunity to think of fun and creative ways to offer it to them. Another boring 10% off promotion won’t cut it… this yawn of a sales email results in a “delete” without a second thought! But today I just had an interesting offer hit my inbox that taps into the joy of unwrapping presents because everyone likes a surprise: “unwrap your secret offer to save over 50%!” The code is valid only upon checkout, but I’m already guaranteed a 50% savings, making the offer highly attractive. The added surprise of an additional discount of who knows how much more off just makes it irresistible.

3) Spread holiday cheer: Take this special time of year to be fun, whimsical, and make your subscribers smile. A crowded email inbox means there’s less patience on your subscribers’ part for clicking through and reading. Are your subject lines informative while also inspiring positive feelings or a nostalgic memory? Think of ways to make your email marketing campaign stand out from the rest, and you’ll increase your email deliverability and, ultimately, your email ROI this holiday season.

4) Make a list and check it twice: Email deliverability relies upon sender reputation. Check yours now and take note of where you can improve. Can you improve your email content relevance? Have you segmented your list for increased specificity?  Are you developing targeted email campaigns for different subscriber populations?

5) Inspire with merry and bright designs: Make sure your designs are eye-catching, clean, and fun. Do your emails render well on mobile and tablet, as well as desktop clients? Are they holiday-themed but are any pictures or image files streamlined for quick loading? Keep it simple and be sure to test your designs for effective rendering. What do your emails look like in the preview pane? Always keep in mind your subscribers’ behavior path and design to lead them all the way through to conversion: Preview, Open, Scan/Read, Engage, Convert.

Keeping these five holiday-themed email marketing best practices in mind this season will ensure you’ll sail through the holidays with high email deliverability rates and increased conversions!

Reinforce Trust With These Email Deliverability Best Practices

Recently I’ve been having a very frustrating experience. My emails haven’t been getting through. As someone that constantly writes about email deliverability and the importance of adhering to email marketing best practices, the irony of this recent development hasn’t escaped me. Granted, the emails I’m referring to are personal emails, from my personal gmail account, to someone who is expecting my emails, but this whole thing got me thinking: If I’m not assured my emails are getting through to one recipient who has written back and forth with me, and who, I assume, has added me to their “safe sender” list, how can you, as an email marketer, be sure that your emails are getting delivered to all of the subscribers on your recipient list?

Email deliverability remains one of the greatest email marketing challenges for a reason. The better your email deliverability, the more trusted your email sender reputation becomes, which equals more opened emails, and increased number of click throughs and conversions. All of this results in one meaningful effect to your bottom line: your ROI will climb.

The major obstacles to email deliverability are lack of consumer trust in email, and ISP blocking.

Consumer trust in email is under fire in two ways:

1) Trustworthiness: Recipients are increasingly more wary of unknown or unrecognized senders. They are on high “spam”-alert and scan each email asking, “Can I trust that this email is coming from whom it claims to be coming from?”

2) Reliability: Is email a reliable source of communication? How do I know that what I’ve signed up for is what’s going to actually come to my inbox?

So how does an email marketer reinforce trust in the messages they send?

Content. Content is king when it comes to restoring trust in email, and increasing email deliverability. Make sure that the content of your emails and subject lines don’t contain words that tend to set off spam filters (a few high-trigger words include: millions, easy income, cash, money, and others you’re probably unwittingly aware of. Look no further than your spam folder for a laundry list!). In addition to eliminating spam triggers from your email marketing messages, it’s crucial that you keep your messages relevant and specific to your subscribers. Using advanced email marketing features such as dynamic (personalized) content and triggered messaging, which automatically sends messages based on time and/or actions or inactions that your subscribers perform, means that each message will be tailored for each subscriber’s needs.

Trust = Sender Accountability. You should ensure that your ESP has adopted authentication standards. If the top ISPs in the world block your email because it doesn’t comply with their authentication systems, then you might as well have burned your email marketing budget in a beach bonfire.

Don’t worry, though: as daunting as email deliverability can seem, you should be working with an ESP that will help you. ESPs have been addressing these problems for years and are the experts on email compliance and deliverability. You’re not alone! If you need help selecting an ESP, reach out to ClickMail today.

For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

So, you’ve crossed all your email marketing t’s and dotted all your email marketing best practices i’s with a targeted, relevant offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns.

Then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address due to spam complaints. Before you know it, your email deliverability is plummeting and you can’t get an accurate sense for how effective your email marketing campaign was.

How could this be? Your subscribers opted-in, after all!

Well, the reasons are multiple-fold. Sometimes, an email subscriber will forget opting in and rather than clicking “Unsubscribe,” they may just opt to hit that pesky “report spam” button, without an awareness that your beautifully crafted email marketing message is indeed a message they chose to receive. The reasons behind this have a lot to do with failing to obey email marketing best practices (and listening to your subscribers’ preferences) in the first place. (But that’s another blog post). In the meantime, your email deliverability starts to suffer.

The best thing to do now is to take a good hard look at your email list, take a deep breath, and start cutting. It’s hard. You don’t want to voluntarily trim the increasingly large (and growing) subscriber list you’ve worked so hard to cultivate with all of your email marketing genius. Oftentimes, making a cut can yield higher email deliverability rates. In the case of email deliverability, it’s not always quantity that matters. Consider focusing certain ad campaigns only on subscribers who have made a purchase. In other similar case studies, this strategy has consistently yielded close to 100% inbox delivery. If you need help with list segmentation, you’re in luck! We covered it in detail in our September issue of the ClickMail Marketer!

Emailing to fewer, but more engaged, subscribers can be the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from the subscribers who really are interested in your email marketing messages. Because the other alternative is that your valuable customers may never see your email due to failed email deliverability.

In navigating today’s world of email marketing and email deliverability, be prepared to face the choice between reaching some valuable customers, or reaching no customers at all.

Email Preview Panes Mean Less Must be More

These days, the majority of email users (around 70%) view their email messages via preview panes, making it even more critical that your email subject lines and first couple lines of body text make a statement. Preview panes make checking email more efficient for users, ensuring they can get a snapshot of each message immediately, without having to open each message first. More and more, users are feeling inundated with emails overwhelming their inboxes, so they are more likely to scan each new group of incoming emails at once, and batch delete without opening. So as an email marketer, this means meeting an additional challenge in order to get your emails opened to achieve maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign. It’s essential that your email messages get straight to the point AND create intrigue and interest, which will lead to higher email open and click-through rates!

How, you ask, can I make my emails pop, to ensure maximum email deliverability?

1) Compelling subject lines: Short and snappy subject lines stand out and are easily readable in preview panes. Well-written and relevant subject lines also illustrate the main point of your email message. For even more on headline words that ensure an opened email, see our blog post on subject lines.

2) Keep the content simple: Because people spend, on average, less than 10 seconds scanning their email inbox before batch-deleting those emails that don’t appeal, simplicity (along with compelling) must reign. Shorter headlines can be strong, and the body of the email can contain white space. Scanning emails is a lot of text to process, so helping yours stand out from the crowd with a few well-designed but bold elements will definitely ensure your email “pops” out from the text-heavy rest.  And that means more email opens and increased email deliverability.

3) Clean, uncluttered email: People approach their email with a short attention span. Where people used to read email, now they are scanning, skimming and deleting. Users are becoming more discriminating about whether to open and act on their email messages or just delete after scanning the preview pane. So be sure to be clean in design and to-the-point in your content. Write to the preview pane, and think about what your users will be able to learn from the first three lines they’ll see. For more on clean and simple design, see our recent blog post on how typography can help your email marketing campaign.

Quality Content Is The Key To Email Deliverability

One of the main reasons you have an email marketing program is to add to your organization’s bottom line.  Whatever this means to you and your organization, generating email marketing ROI is every email marketer’s ultimate goal. Successful email marketing programs come in many “flavors”: they can increase sales, develop brand awareness and brand loyalty, grow new relationships, increase customer engagement, or even increase awareness of issues and raise support for social causes.

But as an email marketer, it can become all too easy to emphasize one message repeatedly in your emails: selling. Even if your main goal is to increase sales, consistent sales or deals messages could work against your overall email deliverability, which will definitely undermine your ROI.

How does this happen?

Unhappy email recipients report emails as spam, which teaches the ISPs to start blocking emails from those senders. Even if they aren’t technically spam, since “spam is in the eye of the beholder” (i.e., your unhappy subscriber), your reputation and ultimately, email deliverability, becomes damaged. Your subscribers probably signed up for your email list in the beginning because they did want the special offers, insider-exclusives, promotions, and limited time deals that you are offering. But too much of one thing starts to get monotonous – and people forget that they even signed up for something in the first place, if they are repeatedly deleting these messages.

As the old idiom goes: “Variety is the spice of life.” So it holds too, with email messages. Your email marketing mix should definitely contain a good amount of special offers and deals; but even more important than the deal is the kind of content you’re providing. Are you occasionally providing useful information? A helpful hint? Is the content fresh? Are your subject lines informative and intriguing (leading to increased email open rates)? Are your deals written well (fun, interesting, specific, and clear)?

When you start paying attention to the quality of your content (instead of quantity of emails that get sent), you’ll start to see less unsubscribes and decreased spam reports, thereby increasing your email deliverability and ultimately, conversion rates.

Consider focusing on creating quality content as an email deliverability best practice. Increase engagement with your email messages by offering your subscribers more than a discounted deal. Make an effort to make the content interesting and fun, such that your subscribers will look forward to receiving your emails and then forward or even share them to their social networks. Engaging content will help you make it to the inbox, and maybe beyond, when people like it enough to share it.

To protect or even improve email deliverability, focus on great content as much as you focus on great offers.

What is the ESPinator?  Thank you for asking.  The ESPinator is an online system, used to choose the Email Service Provider that best suits the needs of a particular company.

Why did we build it?  Here at Clickmail Marketing, we’ve noticed the trend of most ESPs using the samed buzzwords, making similar claims, and generally dazzling the audience with MarketingSpeak.  It is neigh impossible for most people to separate the many ESP marketing promises from their functional realities.

By way of example, just about every ESP claims they can integrate everything seemlessly, but some do it much better than others.  One ESP may have built an elegant connector to a CRM system whereas another requires the use of a technical sledgehammer to make it ‘fit’.  For an email marketer to make a sound decision, a lengthy RFP process has been necessary.  No longer.

Clickmail used its in-depth knowledge of ESPs, stripped off the many layers of marketing lacquer, and judged each ESP on an apples-to-apples basis.  Over 200 questions and criteria were analyzed, weighed and rated.  The result is the ESPinator, a system designed to replace a long RFP process with an hour long questionnaire.

There are currently eight ESPs rated and loaded into the system: ExactTarget, BlueHornet, Acxiom, eDialogue, Responsys, Yesmail, WhatCounts, and Lyris; and we plan to add an additional 24 ESPs to the mix over the coming weeks.

Try it, you’ll like it.  Tell us what you think!

When you’re measuring, and you’re seeing an improvement in email delivery but a decline in open rates, you might have something other than email deliverability problems. You might have an infliction that can strike any email marketer, no matter how well they adhere to email marketing best practices: You might be boring.

If open rates go down, it could be your creative is tired, meaning people are tired of it and feel like if they open it, they’ll see the same old, same old, so why bother?

Or maybe it’s list fatigue. If you’ve been offering the same deals using the same creative with the same copy time and time again, your recipients are probably bored and have no reason to open your email: They already know what it says.

The only solution is to change it up! The only way you’ll re-engage those folks is with new subject lines, new creative and new offers.

Can you delight your subscribers somehow? Surprise them with catchy images, clever text or a swanky offer? Can you change the subject line so it’s obvious this is something new, to increase the chance that they’ll open your email? You could even use something along the lines of “We’re no longer doing boring offers.” (And of course test every change you make!)

You might be doing everything right, adhering to all the email marketing and email deliverability best practices. But just like you might show up at a party wearing just the right outfit and sipping just the right cocktail, if you’re boring to talk to, you’ll be avoided.

Can your email be the life of the party?

Footwear Etc. excels in email marketing, adhering to email marketing best practices and consistently staying at the forefront of the industry. The success rate of their email marketing program reflects this dedication to maximizing their email deliverability and impact for better email marketing ROI.

But even an industry leader like Footwear Etc. can run into a glitch. Sometimes, no matter how many email deliverability tools you have at your disposal, things go wrong. That’s because the email marketing world is constantly shifting and changing, and ISPs refuse to remain static, as they try to do a better job of serving their customers, not the businesses marketing to their customers.

If a company like Footwear Etc. can unexpectedly run into problems, so can you! Find out what went wrong for Footwear Etc. and how they resolved the issues by attending this DMA-sponsored webinar on email deliverability.

Because no matter how many email deliverability tools you’re using, there’s always room for improvement.

The Online Marketing Summit 2010 (OMS) takes place next week in San Diego and email marketing vendor ClickMail will be there offering an Online Marketing Lab on email deliverability and reputation. Sign up for a one-on-one session with ClickMail, then submit an email example a few days before the show. Prior to OMS, we’ll analyze your reputation, deliverability, layout and email rendering, and produce several diagnostic reports. During the lab at OMS, we’ll go over the reports with you, and make recommendations to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Make time to be at OMS and work directly with ClickMail, for free, expert consulting. Register for your one-on-one email marketing consultation with ClickMail Marketing today, before the slots are all filled. Each coaching session lasts just 20 minutes, so you’ll still have plenty of time for other OMS activities. Choose a time slot anywhere between 9:20 and 4:20 on Tuesday the 23rd, and 10:00 and 4:00 on Wednesday the 24th.

• How to avoid email marketing spam filters
• The most recent laws and email best practices to keep your email marketing legal
• Making sure your email marketing gets delivered to your intended recipients
• An examination of the email delivery landscape, including email best practices to use and pitfalls to avoid
• Real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t work in email delivery

Moderated by Dianna Dilworth, Associate Editor, DMNews, the panelists are:

• Michael Kelly, Director, Strategic Alliances, ClickMail Marketing
• Craig Spiezle, Chairman & Founder, Online Trust Alliance (OTA), Managing Director, AgeLight LLC
• David Fowler, Director of Email Strategy, Deliverability and Privacy Compliance, Lyris Technologies

Make sure you maximize your email delivery and therefore your email marketing results by joining us on Tuesday, July 14 starting at 1:00 p.m. ET (10:00 a.m. PT). To register click here.