The Whitelist

Five Signs It’s Time for a New ESP

Business relationships differ from personal ones in a very big way: Sometimes it’s just time to move on.

Case in point: Your marriage might be for life and your kids are around for good, but your ESP could be a temporary relationship. As much as you might like your ESP, as long as you’ve been doing business with them, there still might come a time when staying with the ESP you know so well could mean a lower email marketing ROI.

If you’ve been with the same email service provider for more than a year, consider these five signs that it’s time for a new ESP:

1. Your in-house email list has grown.

With over 100 ESPs to choose from, you’re going to find that capabilities differ among them. This includes scaling to meet your needs as your volume of email grows.

2. Your email deliverability has shrunk.

As strange as it sounds, the email deliverability rate you’ll get with one ESP is not the same as you’ll get with another. As an email marketing agency, we test different ESPs with the same list and we get markedly varied results. When even half a percentage point in improvement means more email ROI, having the highest possible email delivery rate is imperative. It could be your ESP isn’t keeping up with your needs, and that’s affecting your bottom line.

3. You’re ready to automate.

Triggered, event-based email marketing is the way to achieve the most targeted, relevant messages possible. If you’re ready to go that route and your ESP isn’t, it’s time to move on…not get left behind.

4. You’re ready to integrate.

Web analytics, CRM systems, social media, SMS…there are so many sources of customer insight and possible contact points that all need to be working in tandem for maximum results. Email marketing best practices alone will only get you so far. Integrating with other marketing channels is imperative. If your ESP is limited in integration capabilities, it might be time to shop for a new one.

5. You need some strategy.

In today’s economy especially, marketing budgets can be tight and staffs small. If you’re resources are enough to get the job done but not enough to add a strategic element to your email marketing program, you might need an ESP with consulting services available.

If you’re thinking maybe it’s time to move on to a new ESP, here are three ways to jumpstart your search:

• Plug your requirements into the online ESP selection tool, the ESPinator
• Download the 2011 guide to choosing a new ESP
• Head to booth #39 at MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit in Las Vegas this week to visit with email marketing agency ClickMail

Whether you do one, two or all three, you’ll be well on the way to moving on to the right ESP for your newly evolved needs.

First Impressions: How Typography Helps (or Hurts) Your Email Marketing Campaign

We all know it’s inner beauty that really counts, but unfortunately, we form a first impression in less than two seconds, based entirely on superficial appearance and presentation. And, like it or not, first impressions influence our beliefs and ultimate receptivity to the whole.

Wait, you didn’t think we were talking about people, did you? While the power of first impressions upon meeting others is undeniable, the same principle applies to email campaigns.

You might have the most interesting, relevant, sexy, or innovative content in the world but your audience isn’t going to read it if your typography and design overwhelms it (in a bad way). Ensuring your email design and typography is clean and easy to read will eliminate any unnecessary communication barriers to your effective email marketing campaign.

A bit of consideration to formatting and clean typography will go a long way to getting your emails read, which leads to improved email deliverability, open rates, and click-through rates. In your email marketing campaigns, be sure to:

• Simplify colors! No one needs a rainbow in their email. Keep a simple color palette of no more than 2 or 3 colors (at the most). Ensure your headlines are strong and easy to read, and use a secondary highlight color for any call to actions. Contrasting colors help define hierarchy, allowing readers to scan and easily parse out the most relevant information. Pastels and lighter colors are definitely to be avoided!
• Minimize the number of typefaces, sizes, styles and weights. Don’t confuse your readers with a hodgepodge of fonts, sizes, and weights. As with colors, keep the typeface simple and clean.
• Be consistent! Consistency is the key to effective presentation and responsiveness from your readers; after all, familiarity breeds comfort! When they become familiar with your clean and eye-catching emails, as long as your content is good your readers will look forward to scanning your emails for useful and relevant information. To ensure consistency in every email, spend some time crafting a good template of headers, subheads, colors, and so on.
• Kill clutter. Maximize white space and ensure ease of skimming and reading by breaking up your content into small and digestible chunks. Use visual elements like bullet points, line spacing, and indentations to help distinguish points in your message and improve scannability.

Remember, email marketing best practices are not the same as novel writing best practices! People don’t curl up with their email, they get through them as quickly as possible – click, scan, delete. Combined with good content, design simplicity will ensure more email opens, increased email click through numbers, and higher email deliverability rates.

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.

Improve Email Deliverability With Right Timing and Frequency

One of your best email deliverability tools isn’t an email delivery tool at all. It’s the ability to email people at the right time with the right message. How does that improve email deliverability? When you consistently tell people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, your emails are welcomed, not ignored or reported as spam…both of which can work against your reputation and cause email delivery problems.

For advice on how to improve in that area, Silverpop has an easy-to-digest tip sheet on figuring out and maximizing your email timing and frequency. In it, you’ll find some standard email marketing best practices that you might not yet be doing, like setting up a welcome email campaign. You’ll also find some less well-known yet equally valuable advice, such as change up your messaging when your email frequency goes up like during the holidays.

It’s only 10 tips and two pages long, yet the advice is priceless. Download it now, implement it today, and avoid email delivery problems tomorrow. And if you need guidance or help with implementation, call on ClickMail.

Should a Preference Center Be One of Your Email Deliverability Tools?

For email marketers, a preference center might seem like something extra. You know, a nice-to-have but not a have-to-have kind of thing.

But a recent article in MarketingSherpa about Fedex’s preference center demonstrates that it can be an integral part of your entire email marketing program…and even one of your must-have email deliverability tools.

Fedex was able to increase both their deliverability rate and their click-through rate by strategically utilizing and incrementally improving their preference center. And they did it worldwide. They took what they learned in the U.S. region and applied it elsewhere, for a global email deliverability rate of 95%, and a global click-through rate of over 10.5%.

According to the article, Andrew Bailey, Marketing Specialist Advisor, FedEx, attributes the improvements to the preference center: “…allowing subscribers to update contact information and preferences has had the largest impact on global metrics such as deliverability and clickthrough rate.” (emphasis mine)

You might not have the resources to build out a preference center like Fedex’s-or the need-but even the most elementary preference center might be something to consider as one of your email deliverability tools for improving email delivery rates.

Think about it!

Be Smart About Spam: Make Opt In One of Your Email Deliverability Tools

Is opt in one of your email deliverability tools? It should be!

As Jeanne Jennings points out, opt in is simply smart business. In a blog post titled “Opt In vs. Opt Out: It’s a Business Decision,” Jeanne makes a strong business case for opt in, strong enough that we at ClickMail say it’s time to add opt in to your list of email deliverability tools. Opt out is the way out, but “there is a business risk involved with using acquisition tactics that aren’t opt-in,” says Jeanne Among the risks she describes:

• Getting reported as spam
• Getting reported as spam so many times, you end up blacklisted
• Limiting the number of vendors who will work with you

Each of these carries with it a business cost, making opt out practically a gamble, not a strategy.

And if you get blacklisted and therefore shunned by the major ESPs, then you might get stuck trying to do it in-house, which Jeanne also warns against:

“I’ve also seen situations where organizations that aren’t able to meet the permission requirements of legitimate ESPs try to go it alone. They build what is in essence a “mini ESP” in-house to handle their e-mail sends. This involves not just IT but also deliverability expertise, which is both an art and a science and is much more complex than just the send. It’s an expensive proposition for start-up and ongoing costs. And it’s difficult for an organization that’s not focused on this to get it right.”

In the world of email marketing vendors striving to help clients eek out every possible improvement in email deliverability in order to improve email marketing ROI, opt in definitely counts as one of the email deliverability tools!

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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Email Deliverability Tools: What Does That Email REALLY Look Like?

Part of your email deliverability is what that email looks like when you’ve done everything else right and it does get delivered.

Every email marketer worth his or her salt has a seed list, to test deliverability, and maybe even to see how emails are rendering in different email clients. But you’d have to have an unbelievably large seed list to test rendering on all the different email clients out there, especially given that any webmail can be viewed in different browsers as well.

That’s why we recommend Pivotal Veracity’s eDesign Optimizer as a rendering and email deliverability tool.
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Email Deliverability Tools: Always, Always, Always Monitor. Always.

Just because your email deliverability rate is acceptable today, or even stellar, today doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow. In fact, you could wake up blacklisted tomorrow. It happens.

That’s why regularly monitoring has to be part of your email deliverability processes. And having the right email deliverability tools on hand will ensure you actually do the monitoring required. What are those email deliverability tools? Processes and technologies that measure your email delivery rate, track your sending reputation, test your email rendering, and in general keep track of how you’re scoring with the major ISPs.

Tools like these are part of the ClickMail Deliverability Assessment, perhaps the most comprehensive deliverability report available. The ClickMail Deliverability Assessment includes:
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Sometimes the best email deliverability tools are the lessons you can learn from others in the email marketing industry. That’s why I’m encouraging you to attend our June 24 webinar on email deliverability, using the real-life example of Footwear Etc.

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.
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