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!

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.

There are plenty of pieces to email marketing, and we as an email marketing vendor can help you with each and every one. But no one else focuses on email deliverability the way we do. We’re even vendor agnostic, so we can match your company with the ESP that offers the highest email delivery rate for you. So that’s what we talk and write about: email deliverability. It’s our niche.

But we aren’t the only ones who talk about deliverability. Just this week, MarketingSherpa published nine best practices for protecting your online sending reputation, and therefore your email deliverability rate. They include:

*Avoid changing your IP address
*Monitor your reputation data
*Do limited test runs
*Quarantine new opt-ins or risky test email campaigns
*Process unsubscribes quickly
*Process CAN-SPAM opt-ins quickly
*Remove feedback loop complaints
*Manage and remove hard bounces
*Manage your email volume

None of these are new. None of these are rocket science. They are all standard email best practices. But it’s good to have the reminder, because every one of these email best practices can in turn impact your delivery rate. So learn them, follow them and profit from them as you keep your email marketing ROI as high as can be by keeping your email deliverability rate as high as can be.

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.

Think of the unsubscribe as a metric you can use to measure how well you’re serving your target audience. As we’ve noted in another blog post, an increase in your unsubscribe rate can indicate that you’re over-messaging your audience.

Sometimes we get so focused on email delivery and fancy email marketing tools and choosing the next great email provider that we lose sight of the most important piece of the email marketing puzzle: the customer.

Next time you’re reviewing your email marketing data, don’t frown when you see the unsubscribes, but smile. This is data, data you can use to improve your email marketing campaigns. Keep track of your unsubscribe rate, notice when it goes up or down, do your A/B testing, and improve, improve, improve. Always be relevant to your audience and learn to love those who opt out. They’re teaching you a lesson you can apply to increase your email marketing ROI. How great is that?

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

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.