The Whitelist

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!

If you read our email marketing whitepapers, this blog, or our email newsletters with any regularity, you might be asking yourself, “Why do these guys talk about email deliverability so much?” And we do! We talk about email deliverability tools, email deliverability best practices, our work as an email deliverability consultant… Chances are, if it has to do with deliverability, we’ve talked about it or will.

But here’s why: Your email marketing ROI begins with your email deliverability. The more emails delivered, the more conversions you can get. Conversely, if your rate is low because you’re sending to bad email addresses, you’ll damage your online sending reputation until you can’t achieve any kind of email marketing ROI because you can’t get any emails delivered.
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ClickMail’s expertise is featured prominently in a story about problems with White House email communications by the Washington DC-based National Journal.  When the Journal needed an expert on email marketing and email best practices, the call went out to ClickMail CEO Marco Marini.

Read the full story here, as reproduced in the Journal‘s blog on lobbying and advocacy, Under the Influence.

CAN SPAM. Love it or hate it, it serves a purpose. The real problem isn’t the legislation itself, it’s the fact that we need it in the first place because so many email marketers don’t live up to the standards of email marketing vendors like ClickMail and email marketing people like you.

But the unsubscribe option—required by CAN SPAM—isn’t all bad. Sure it lets people opt out of your email marketing in-house list, but guess what? If they’re opting out, you don’t want to be marketing to them anyway. They’re actually doing you a favor because they’re helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not in your permission-based email marketing initiatives.

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Last time we covered the importance of your digital reputation for deliverability and therefore email marketing ROI. This time, we cover what determines that reputation in the first place.

As we said last time, ISPs are relying more and more on a marketer’s reputation when deciding which emails to let through. Why do you care what the ISPs think? Because they stand between you and your prospects and customers. They are the gatekeepers that let your email pass…or stop it in its tracks.

According to Pivotal Veracity, ISPs look at the following when determining your reputation:

• Complaint rates
• Unknown user rates
• Identity stability
• Volume
• Third-party assessments

You don’t have to live in the dark, however, firing off your email marketing campaigns without knowing if you’re considered a goodie or a baddie. There are a variety of ways to find out what your reputation is and how you fix it. To get you started, here are two great online tools you can use to make sure you’ve got your bases covered:

https://senderscore.org

http://www.senderbase.org

Do you know your reputation? Do you care? No, it’s not a popularity contest, but you should be paying attention to your reputation because it affects your deliverability. And your deliverability rates are key to your email marketing ROI.

Deliverability is a top challenge for online marketers using email marketing. Having a great design and offer won’t do much if you can’t make it to the inbox. And reaching that final destination-the inbox-gets more difficult all the time due to the vast amount of resources that are being thrown at the ‘spam’ problem. There are hardware and software filters and algorithms in place that attempt to stem the flood of spam. As a result, what used to make it to the inbox is no longer a good indicator of what will make it there now…or in future.

And now more and more ISPs are routing inbound email based on the email marketer’s reputation, and not just on the potential spamminess of the content or subject line. In some cases, ISPs are basing that decision solely on the sender’s reputation.

Obviously reputation is now something you as an email marketer must pay attention to.

Now that we have your attention (we have your attention, right?), we’ll spend the next Email Marketing ROI blog post on what affects your reputation and what you can do about it. Stay tuned.