The Whitelist

Email Marketing Best Practices: Listen to Your Subscribers’ Preferences

In today’s world of email engagement, effective use of a preference center has to be at the top of your email marketing best practices toolbox. As early as last year, we discussed the importance of using preference centers to improve email deliverability, which by this point, we all know is of critical importance to email marketing ROI.

When you show your subscribers that their preferences are important to you, you are implementing subscriber-centered email marketing best practices. And that means your subscribers will feel more valued, which will lead to more engagement, more email deliverability, more conversions, and ultimately, more email marketing ROI.

Using a preference center effectively lets subscribers tell you exactly what they want from you and how often they want it. Interestingly, even though by now most email marketers know the value in using email preference centers, they are still not being set up to maximize the variety of choices available to subscribers. And this is where the value of email preference centers comes in. The more choices you can offer your subscribers, the more targeted and relevant your information can become to them, which leads, again, to increased relevance, engagement, email deliverability, and conversion rates.

When setting up your preference center options, ultimately you should think about these two main categories, from which a multitude of options can be selected:

1) Content: What do they want from you? Do they want coupons? Notifications of online specials and deals? The latest updates via your weekly newsletter? Notifications of monthly webinars? Specially selected partner offers?

2) Frequency: How often do they want to hear from you? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

Putting the control in the hands of your subscribers will ultimately work to enhance your overall email marketing best practices. Regardless of how many names you have on your in-house email list, each of those subscribers have different needs, and you can meet all of them when you offer up different options for your subscribers to choose among.  One generic message to everyone on your list sounds, well… generic. And over time, that will lead to unopened emails, automatic deletes, loss of interest, unsubscribes, and maybe even an increase in the dreaded spam reporting.

Keep your subscribers interested by ensuring your messages are targeted and specific to their needs: your email deliverability will go up, and so will your email marketing ROI!

For assistance with creating your custom preference center, contact us.

Email Deliverability: Do's and Don'ts Guide

As we’ve discussed often, a sent email is not necessarily a received email. In fact, an estimated 20 percent of all emails sent in North America never even reach the inbox.

This is a truly unfortunate waste of all the time and resources that you’ve spent crafting engaging and relevant messages! In fact, you know your customers would actually benefit from your messages, if they were able to actually see them. Ultimately, reputation is king in the world of email marketing. Keeping your reputation clean will increase the likelihood that ISPs will let your email through and maximize your email deliverability rates.

Last week we talked about the importance of quality content to maximizing email deliverability rates. Quality content equals quality reputation, which equals improved email deliverability.

That said, managing email deliverability can be a challenge for even the most experienced marketer or well-established brand, and sometimes we all need a tell-it-like-it-is, concise guide to help us tease apart the complexities behind why some emails are delivered and others aren’t. Enter the downloadable “Email Deliverability: Do’s and Don’ts Guide”.

Some of the issues covered by this guide include:
•  A clear definition of deliverability and the laws that govern it
•  How to identify most common causes that may be hindering your process
•  Email deliverability best practices that you can easily integrate into your email strategy
•  How to positively increase your sender reputation to improve email deliverability

Download the Guide here.

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.

Businesses Improve Email Deliverability but Open Rates Decline

MarketingProfs has just reported email open rates fell to 17% on average in 2010, down 9 percentage points from 26% in 2009, according to a report from Harte-Hanks.

That is a decrease of over one-third in only a year. And that is significant.

The report is based on metrics from 3 billion emails, meaning in 2009, 780 million email were opened. And in 2010, only 510 million were. Adding up to 270 million fewer emails! 270 million emails that were delivered to inboxes and never opened.

Although “the study acknowledges that changing patterns in use of text and imagery that records open activity is having an impact on open rates,” it’s still a significant decline and something to pay attention to. How do your 2009 and 2010 open rates compare? Did you notice a decrease? Increase? Flat line?

Other news was good. Email deliverability rates improved, from 93% to 95%, and bounce rates decreased from 7% to 5%. That’s all good news for us as an email deliverability consultant! More businesses are apparently adhering to email deliverability best practices. How does your email deliverability rate compare? Should you be thinking on how to improve email deliverability?

Click-through rates stayed the same at 3%, meaning the people who are opening the emails are about as engaged and interested as they were before. So that’s also good news. And also a stat to consider as you review your own metrics for that time period.

To see how your email marketing program is faring in comparison, get more information, or request the full report.

Connect the Dots for Email Marketing ROI

Heading into this week, we’ll continue our recap of MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas and the seven key takeaways that can lead to email marketing best practices.

Today’s takeaway: Deliverability, performance and relevance are interrelated

Now this takeaway sounds like it’s straight out of ClickMail Marketing’s email marketing best practices literature! We’ve said repeatedly that your relevance affects your email deliverability because email delivery problems can be the result of people reporting your email messages as spam…only because they don’t want to hear from you because your emails are irrelevant.

And performance is going to matter more than ever in the inbox. The more your emails are opened and interacted with, the better your email deliverability rate will be. And that email delivery rate is affected by how relevant your emails are to each individual subscriber!

Remember that the more emails delivered, the higher your email marketing ROI because the more chances you have to reach the person who is ready to buy. We might be talking about performance, but ultimately, we’re talking about ROI.

Connecting the dots on these email marketing best practices yet? Now is obviously the time! If you need help improving your email deliverability, performance and relevance, call on ClickMail!

Email Deliverability Consultant Guides You to Email Deliverability Best Practices

As we’ve said in this blog so many times: Improving your email deliverability best practices—and therefore improving your deliverability rates—even a half a percentage point can improve your email marketing ROI.

That’s why we spend so much time as an email deliverability consultant teaching clients how to do things just a little bit better. As a friend of mine likes to say, if you improve by just 1% every day, in 100 days, you’ll be 100% better. Think what that can mean to your ROI!

Unfortunately, even organizations that follow email marketing best practices can be thwarted, with 30% of the emails they send ending up in a spam folder or—worse yet—getting completely blocked, according to a Pivotal Veracity benchmark study of 1.2 million emails done in June 2009.
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You’re testing, testing, testing, right? And measuring? Just making sure you’re heeding our email marketing best practice advice!

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.
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You have no choice. You must take email delivery problems seriously. Very seriously.

Why? Because every percentage point of improvement in your email deliverability is a potential improvement in your email marketing ROI. You might think there’s no real difference between an 81.5% email delivery rate and an 82% email delivery rate. Not really, you say, that’s such an insignificant number. But if half a percentage point equals 1,000 more inboxes, and you have a conversion rate of say, 2%, that’s 20 customers you’ll never ever reach. Simply because you didn’t improve email deliverability.
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Email Deliverability Best Practices: Can We Say Enough About Testing? No!

Testing is a topic that has come up a lot lately at our email marketing vendor offices. We encourage constant testing all the time. Not to say you should test every single factor every single time. But always be testing by choosing something to test every time you do an email. It could be anything from your From name to the color of your call-to-action button.

Constant testing falls into the category of email deliverability best practices for several reasons. One, anything you can do to improve your email deliverability rate even a fraction is a good thing (more emails delivered, more possible sales!). And once you’ve gotten into the inbox, anything you can do to improve interaction with your recipient is going to improve your email marketing ROI.
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Make Content Part of Your Email Deliverability Best Practices

Among your email deliverability best practices, be sure to include content. I don’t mean the “buy now” content. I mean content with a little meat to it…

Your emails are intended to generate money for your company, right? That’s the end goal of your department: generating email marketing ROI. But you can’t only and always sell. You’ll wear out your welcome in the email inbox sooner rather than later if that’s the approach you take. And that will hurt your email deliverability rate.

I get frequent emails from a local restaurant chain. And frankly, I’m tired of them. I have seen enough two-for-one deals and free-cup-of-chowder deals to last me a lifetime. When I first signed up for the emails a couple of years ago, I was excited to get the special offers, and I’d dutifully print them out, arrange a meal out with a friend, and use those coupons. But they got old. Fast.
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