The Whitelist

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.

Email Marketing Best Practices for the Global Marketer

What does a global economy mean to a U.S. email marketer? It means you need help. And the DMA has it.

Yes, spam might be a distinctly American food, but as unsolicited email, it’s known the world over. And you want to avoid being seen as spam by making sure you know the rules and regulations for countries other than your own.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) partnered with the Email Experience Council (EEC) to put together an exhaustive guide to global email compliance: the International Email Compliance Resource Guide. It covers 25 countries where you might be doing business—or want to be doing business. Using this guide means you can adhere to email marketing best practices that will keep you compliant the world over. And that means more revenue when you can save yourself from being blacklisted in a country with willing customers!

Download it. Refer to it. Hang onto it for future reference. You’ll be glad you did!

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.

Assess Your Email Marketing Practices YTD

It’s that time of year, time to take stock of the past year, assess your email marketing program, and plan for a better year ahead.

OK, really it’s not. It’s July. But halfway through the year is a perfect time to look back and learn. Six months gives you enough data to look for trends and react to them. Ideally you’re following email marketing best practices and conducting ongoing assessments. Spotting trends, however, requires a few months worth of information to look back on.

To help you take stock of your year-to-date (YTD), we offer some guidance here.

Start by analyzing your metrics for each month YTD. See which months did well and which months didn’t. Start determining why. If your ESP has an email overlay view of your email with “hot spots” of clicks, check for trends of clicks. Where do most of your subscribers consistently click? What type of information seems to interest them most? Tips? Offers? Resources? Articles? Downloads? Whatever it is, consider doing more of that to generate more click throughs.

If the information you want them to click on isn’t being interacted with, ask yourself first of all, why they aren’t interested. If your research shows this is information they want, then determine what you can do to ensure it’s the first thing that catches their eye. Does it warrant a new email template?

How is your deliverability? Does that trend hold steady or not? Are you losing a significant number of subscribers? If so, figure out why. How is your bounce rate? Any trends there? Is your in-house email list growing at a steady rate, based on the last six months worth of data? If not, what can you do to encourage more signups?

Finally determine if you’ve assessed every factor adequately. If you’re not sure, would you like a consultant like ClickMail to review your email marketing program and provide an assessment for email marketing best practices and email deliverability?

A year is such a very long time. If there are lessons to be learned now, mid-year, why not learn them and enjoy a more successful second half of 2011?

If you’d like help with your YTD assessments, call on ClickMail.

Great Content Will Beat Out Your Email Marketing Competition and Improve Email Deliverability

The good news is, email isn’t going away any time soon. The bad news is, email isn’t going away any time soon.

That’s bad news because that means your competitors are likely still big users of email marketing, just as you are. And that means more competition for attention in the inbox.

Not only are you up against your competitors in the inbox, but everyone else as well. You might be selling dress shoes and think the company selling pet supplies doesn’t threaten you. But if you’re both vying for attention in the inbox, you are competing. Recipients don’t open every email. They might choose the flea shampoo special over your sexy stilettos offer.

Email marketing has long been a crowded space. That’s nothing new. But with the major ISPs now using engagement as a ranking factor when determining which emails are spam, that crowd has turned nasty. That makes it even harder to improve email deliverability.

How do you compete and win now? You aren’t going to win by increasing the frequency of your emails. You’ll only annoy. You aren’t going to win by getting louder with screaming deals in your subject line. You’ll only train subscribers to think of you as lower priced, lower quality. You aren’t going to win by revising your email design. You’ll only get a temporary bump. Each of these tactics might result in a temporary lift in engagement and response rate. But none of those approaches is sustainable.

There is one change you can make that’s ongoing, sustainable and effective. Invest in great content.

Strive to make your email marketing content not just really good, but great. As a recipient, what makes you want to open and read an email? Think content that’s personal, useful, relevant, funny, fun, interactive, informative, helpful, customer-centric, entertaining, compelling. Think about websites that catch your eye, cartoons that make you chuckle, blogs that make you think, newsletters that make you share. Why does that content engage you? How can you emulate that in your email marketing content?

Engaging content=engaged subscribers=happy ISPs=your improved email deliverability.

What is one thing you can do right now, today, to make your email marketing content more engaging?

Improve Email Deliverability With FreshAddress

The place to start when you need to improve email delivery—after making sure you have the right ESP for you, that is—is with your in-house email list.

To impact your email marketing deliverability in a positive way, your in-house email list must be two things: 1) permission-based through your sign-up process, and 2) clean, with hard bounces and unsubscribes removed on a regular basis. It can be hard to say goodbye to those bad addresses though, because we email marketers watch our list size go down any time we remove a name.

For help with keeping your list clean, building  your list, and reconnecting with email subscribers lost when an email address changed, look to FreshAddress. FreshAddress helps companies and nonprofits build, clean and update their email address lists.

They are the undisputed leaders in these types of email list services. In 2004, FreshAddress patented their email change of address (ECOA) service. Then in 2008, FreshAddress purchased Return Path’s ECOA business for even stronger ECOA and hygiene offerings and match rates.

Through their patented ECOA services, FreshAddress does B2C and B2B email appending, list cleaning and hygiene, and real-time email address correction, among other services. Organizations can work with FreshAddress directly, or through partners like ClickMail.

In addition to the patented service, FreshAddress makes it easier for you to educate yourself on ways to improve email deliverability. They offer 15 different whitepapers for download at their website. Any one of these presents useful information for managing and maintaining your in-house email list.

And keeping that list clean will go a long ways toward keeping your email marketing deliverability up.

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.

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 Deliverability: Know the Difference Between Newsletter and Nurture

Gretchen Scheiman has a great post in a recent issue of Email Insider on the difference between your email newsletter program and your email nurture program…or at least what should be the differences.

Before you disregard this email marketing blog as irrelevant to you, ask yourself: “Is my email deliverability rate as high as it could possibly be?”

If the answer is no, take a quick look at this email marketing blog post. Knowing the difference might even improve email deliverability, because treating each appropriately—the email newsletter and the email nurture program—means delivering appropriate content to each audience, which means being more relevant.

Yes, sometimes the steps to improve email deliverability are disguised as something else. But anything that makes your email marketing program more relevant falls into the category of email deliverability best practices if you ask me!

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.