The Whitelist

Where Should You Swim? When a Shared IP Pool Makes Sense

Come on in, the water’s fine…maybe. It depends on whether that “water” is your own pool or one you share. And by pool, we mean IP addresses.

As an email marketer, there are two routes you can go: You can pay for your own dedicated IP address that only your organization will use. Or you can spend less money and be part of a shared pool of IP addresses.

Typically, if you are a high volume sender, we as an email marketing vendor and deliverability consultant recommend that you purchase a dedicated IP.

If your sending volume is low or you’re new to email marketing, then you don’t really need a dedicated IP address yet. If your existing reputation is shot, you might consider a shared IP pool because the good established reputations of the other marketers as a whole will help yours. As our Director of Sales and Business Development Michael Kelly likes to say, “If you are not the cleanest kid in the pool, you might not want to be the only kid in the pool.”

There are drawbacks to being in the shared IP pool, however. For example, if you’re working hard to adhere to email marketing best practices and keep your online sending reputation clean, but another marketer in the shared pool has a bad day, the complaints generated could cause the IP address to be blocked, which, in turn affects your email deliverability rate.

If you need help deciding whether a dedicated or shared IP address will work better for you and your implementation of email marketing best practices and email deliverability best practices, reach out to ClickMail. We’re happy to take a look at your particular situation and make a recommendation.

Email Deliverability Consultant Builds Online Tool for Choosing Best ESP

In the email service provider (ESP) space, it has become very difficult for email marketers to discern hard facts about ESP capabilities from the ocean of competing marketing claims…especially now that ESPs are adding social media integration and marketing automation type features.

What was already confusing is now even more so. And it’s not as if one or two ESPs shine as the standouts, because every organization has different needs…so every organization is going to have different ESP criteria.

Given all of this, how do you choose an ESP?

Try the ESPinator.

To create a completely vendor-neutral, objective way of evaluating ESPs, ClickMail Marketing—a reseller of email marketing products—built the ESPinator, an online tool for comparing email service providers.

The ESPinator looks at the actual capabilities of the various ESPs, compares them based on the needs of your organization, and generates actionable results, free of any bias or sales pitches.

A team of email consultants  evaluated each ESP  based on 200 different criteria. These evaluations were built into a software system that removes any subjectivity when helping you compare the capabilities of an ESP to the capabilities you’re looking for.

You can trust the ESPinator to give you bias-free results. Clickmail Marketing is assiduously vendor-neutral and maintains our role as email consultant,  in order to help you find the best ESP for you so you can improve email marketing practices and ROI.

If you’re looking for an ESP or want to size up your current one, use the ESPinator.

Improve Email Delivery With Good Dental Hygiene Practices

The other day after getting the mail I mumbled something about “list hygiene” in front of my 12-year-old. She asked, “What’s list hygiene?” I was holding a piece of junk mail that should never have shown up in our mailbox. Now I can’t remember why, but it was a classic example of a mailing list being woefully out of date and a business wasting time, money and paper on a bad address when they didn’t need to.

As I explained to my daughter about list hygiene and how really it’s an email marketing best practices term, I was just using it for the snail mail, she said, “You mean it’s like going to the dentist.” She heard list hygiene and thought of dental hygiene…and she was right on with her analogy.

I asked her to elaborate, and together we developed my new favorite analogy for improving email delivery.

Improving email delivery is like taking care of your teeth. List hygiene keeps your list scrubbed and cleaned just like dental hygiene does for your teeth and gums. It must be thorough, like flossing, to really work. If you don’t do the hygiene, you get cavities…the email marketing equivalent of bounced emails and spam reports that will get you graylisted then blacklisted. (Picture a cavity as gray. That’s your mailing list without proper hygiene.) And that’s going to hurt your email deliverability big time! Just like a big cavity hurts!

Hygiene is something you pay attention to on a regular basis, and pay extra special attention to a few times a year. Twice daily we brush, once daily we floss, and every six months we go in for the kind of scrubbing and cleaning that only a dental hygienist can do. At that time, we also have the dentist look things over and make sure our pearly whites are still doing A-OK.

Your in-house email list should be cleaned on a regular basis, and maybe that includes a plan for reactivating dormant email addresses too, like using teeth whitener for even prettier teeth. Then periodically you should meet with an email deliverability consultant (aka the dentist) for expert help and to make sure your email deliverability best practices are keeping your list as clean as can be.

If your hygiene could use a boost to improve email deliverability, make ClickMail your email deliverability consultant.

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.
(more…)

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.
(more…)

Email Deliverability Best Practices Include Regular Monitoring

There were several golden nuggets to be had as we heard from Mark DiMaio of ClickMail Marketing, Bryan Klech of Pivotal Veracity, and Daniel T. Dreymann of Goodmail.

Among those nuggets was advice on monitoring, because it’s not enough to get your email deliverability best practices in line, you have to review regularly to keep them there. Most importantly, you need to make sure it is regular, and not sporadic. Determine your monitoring schedule based on the frequency of your campaigns, rather than based on a period of time, like monthly. You’ll know how often to check after doing it a few times. You don’t want to invest too much time (i.e. money) in your monitoring, but you want to do it often enough to prevent the possible loss of money (i.e. revenue) due to major deliverability issues! Remember to also check your deliverability rate after making any changes to your emailing practices.

Is email marketing like the Force?

Writing this blog from the perspective of an email deliverability consultant, I tend to use a lot of analogies…because honestly, how interesting can I be if I only talk about email marketing best practice and email deliverability tools? No, the analogies help me—I hope—to make good points while still writing something entertaining to read.

So how did I miss Chad White’s email marketing analogies last week? At least I read them this morning, and I’m glad I did.

First off, I was relieved to find out he sees others using analogies for email marketing because I sometimes wonder if I do it too often. But more importantly, I laughed out loud reading some of these tweets. They are poignant and to the point, and a good reminder to all of us of the dangers inherent in taking email marketing for granted and not adhering to email marketing best practices!

From junk food to sex, you’ll find your favorite email marketing analogy here. For me, writing as I said from the perspective of the email deliverability consultant, I think my favorite is from @randydunning: “Email marketing is like the Force – it has a powerful dark side to which many business leaders unwittingly succumb.”

Too true.

It seems like selling a house would be a straightforward thing. You put a price on your house. Someone agrees to buy it. They give you the money. You give them the house.

But it’s not like that at all, is it! It’s extremely complicated!

That’s why most of us use real estate agents. Only the bravest of souls would be willing to tackle all the paperwork and legalities on their own, in my opinion. And in the end, do they do as well as they would have with an agent? I don’t know. I do suspect they leave themselves vulnerable, because of all the paperwork and inspections and disclosures and fees and what not.
(more…)

You do more harm than good when you send to a bad email address. So, again, don’t get caught up in the quantity over quality mentality of in-house email lists. That quantity could come back to haunt you and make your precious list worth about, oh, nothing. And “nothing” isn’t any kind of quantity at all!

Here’s the deal: You only get email marketing ROI when you a) get your email into an inbox, b) get your email opened, and c) get your email acted upon. But each of those three things requires the preceding one. Meaning, if your email isn’t delivered, you’re nowhere.
(more…)

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.
(more…)