The Whitelist

Sharing Social Chatter? Share Carefully to Avoid Problems

A recent article in MarketingProfs.com raised some red flags for this email marketing vendor. And if you follow this advice, you might end up with some email delivery problems.

The author suggests repurposing social chatter about your business in your email marketing. I agree with this suggestion in principle, because we want to be sharing our content across multiple media, and repurposing content from social networking sites as email marketing content is one way to do so.

However, there are two things we’d like to add as a caution to this article.

First off, your email marketing must be more than self-serving or you’ll earn yourself plenty of unsubscribes. You could even damage your email deliverability rate if people report you as spam because they don’t like what they see…and who likes to see self-serving messages?

If you’re going to copy and paste in comments about your business into your email marketing, please make sure you at least provide a context that somehow makes doing so relevant to the audience.

Secondly, your motivation must be more than building “the impression among your subscribers that your brand is a major social media player,” as the author states. Unless you’ve done testing that shows this is the kind of “relevant” information your subscribers want, I’ll argue it’s simply fluff. If they did care about your social media presence, wouldn’t they already “like” you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter?

There might be bona fide reasons for repurposing this content, such as creating share-worthy emails or building community among your subscribers. Make sure you’re motivated by customer-focused factors like that, not by something as base as bragging rights.

Repurposing social content is a good thing but a perceived bragging in your email marketing will hurt you more than anything . Knowing what your audience wants to hear and being clear on why you’re sharing your social chatter should be driving what content you share. A great secondary goal could be putting these suggestions to work if you want to avoid email delivery problems.

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!

Avoid Email Delivery Problems by Choosing the Right ESP for Your Enterprise

Inline with advice in our new 2011 guide to choosing a top tier ESP, this email marketing blog post titled “Don’t Put Your B2B Email In a Box” by Ardath Albee gives a great illustration of what we’re cautioning against. Although she’s making great points about different channels beyond email and being cognizant of what is happening outside of your email marketing program, the same case can be made for knowing what is happening within your B2B email marketing program.

Having an ESP with capabilities that give you the insight you need is imperative. You might even think of these preventive measures as email deliverability best practices, because unhappy subscribers who are over-messaged or confused often become happy unsubscribers.

Any enterprise-sized business will have particular ESP requirements that enable them to avoid email deliverability problems with the right controls and capabilities. This kind of larger organization might have different business units running independently of one another, for example, but with a need to control the look and feel of any messaging that goes out.

In the 2011 ESP Guide, factor #22 on enterprise needs gives you questions to consider so you can avoid the kinds of email mishaps Ardeth Albee is describing. Because the time to make sure you won’t have email blunders like that is when you’re choosing your new email service provider, not after!

Some questions to ask yourself when searching for a new ESP:

• Do you need the ability to silo business data, so one department cannot email another department’s list?
• Do you need corporate level views into the activity of different departments?
• Do you need corporate level approval? What about a master reporting toolset that pulls in data from the different departments?
• Do you need the ability to have different headers and footers, for different accounts and brands?
• Do you need different unsubscribe and bounce policies between business units? Do you want to allow a user unsubscribe from one brand’s list without unsubscribing from all?

As Ardath says, “The oversights made by B2B marketers who only consider one email program at a time are irritating to prospects, and customers, alike.”

Choosing a top tier ESP with all the enterprise level capabilities you need is a great place to start to avoid problems later.

Download the ClickMail Marketing 2011 guide to choosing a top tier ESP.

Can’t Make It to Vegas? Attend This Online Email Marketing Summit Instead

Keeping up with email marketing best practices and common email delivery problems can be a lot of work. There are email newsletters to read, email marketing blogs to scan, email marketing conferences to attend…

So if you can’t make it to Las Vegas next week to get your free Email Health Check from ClickMail, one of the email marketing vendors exhibiting at the event, you might want to attend part or all of this EEC online email marketing summit instead.

With topics like…

• Passports to Email: A Global Perspective of Email & Privacy Laws
• Email Optimization – Your Customers Take It Personally
• Email to Lead in 10 Days
• Email Trends for 2011

…and four more to choose from, you’ll definitely learn more about email marketing best practices. You can register for each individually so you can attend as many or as few as you want.

Of course, we’d rather see you wandering among the booths of email marketing vendors at Email Summit ’11 in Las Vegas so we can talk email deliverability and email marketing best practices in person. But we also realize not every budget, job or home situation allows that kind of travel. So we’re happy to tell you about this free online option instead!

Learn more about the free online email marketing summit.

Got Email Delivery Problems? Get Email Deliverability Tools

When was the last time you heard an email marketer say everything was perfect? Never? I hope that’s your answer, because with all the ins and outs, nuts and bolts, and constantly changing parts of email marketing, I don’t know how anyone would ever get to the point where they could honestly say they had zero problems. Nada. Zilch. None.

For one thing, no one has a 100% email deliverability rate. OK, an email from me to my mother might have a perfect email delivery rate, but not an email from me to an in-house email list of 87,000 names. Email delivery problems are a fact of life for people in our field. And a reason for companies like ClickMail, that can act as an email deliverability consultant.

To improve email deliverability so it’s as close to perfect as you can get it takes a lot of expertise and email deliverability tools. You’ll need to look at many factors, including:

• Being permission-based
• Authentication
• Your sending reputation
• Compliance issues
• Choosing the best ESP for your organization
• Whitelisting
• Design, layout and messaging considerations, including the subject line
• Coding
• Honoring preferences

The good news is, all of the above is doable. You can improve any and all of these factors starting today with the right email deliverability tools and expertise.

Even with ClickMail on your email delivery team, a perfect deliverability rate will be near impossible. But an incremental change that can improve email deliverability will in turn increase the numbers of people you reach and your possible conversions. So any improvement is a good thing, no matter how slight.

Your Email Delivery Problems Aren’t Going to Go Away

Although Facebook won’t replace email, there’s one thing it offers that email can’t: Facebook is free of deliverability issues! That’s because users go to Facebook. We email marketers, however, must push our content out. And what do we have to deal with as a result? Email delivery problems.

Something tells me those problems won’t be going away any time soon. 

What’s an email marketer to do? Everything you were in 2010, only more so. Continue to put every email marketing best practice into play that you can. Never stop managing and monitoring your email deliverability rate. Evaluate your ESP and to see if it’s still the right fit. Stay on top of new technologies like Pivotal Veracity’s Mailbox IQ that will give you an edge. And always, always, always:

• Keep your in-house email list squeaky clean
• Segment, target and be relevant as can be

As long as we have email, we will have email delivery problems. But as long as we have smart people and savvy technology, we’ll be able to overcome them.

Need help with some email delivery problems? Call on your email deliverability consultant: ClickMail.