The Whitelist

Emails Gone Missing: The Myth of the Delivered Metric

In this industry, it doesn’t matter if you’re an email expert or an email newbie, you’ll talk about email deliverability! That’s because everything we do–every campaign we plan, message we write, email we design, landing page we formulate—everything is for naught if we don’t get into the inbox in the first place.

Deliverability isn’t always a known commodity, however, because the number you get from your ESP might not be the actual number that made it into your recipients’ inboxes. The deliverability metric many marketers are used to includes only hard bounces, leaving out other inbox no shows like soft bounces, and those emails that ended up on junk or spam folders.

The industry doesn’t yet have a way to measure true deliverability when you take these other factors into account. But the savvy email expert knows better than to rely solely on the delivered metric for a hard and fast measurement, and to assume that the delivery percentage reported by the ESP might not be the same number as the percentage of emails ending up in inboxes.

The solution? Email marketing best practices that engage and delight, ensuring your emails are wanted, anticipated even, so you’re not flagged as spam, filtered from the junk folder, and missed when a soft bounce occurs. And you don’t have to be an email expert to serve up great stuff like that! Just smart.

Getting Into the Inbox: 3 Ways to Weather the Waves of Change

As we just wrote about last week, the email marketing industry can be frustrating because so many factors are outside of your control, factors that can keep you out of the inbox.

Working with email consultants will definitely help you overcome the challenges of our ever-changing industry, but there are also some tried-and-true email marketing best practices that will help you weather the waves of change and get into the inbox on a consistent basis.

These are email marketing best practices that have worked before and will continue to work. If you haven’t implemented them already, implement them now and be in a better position to handle the fluster and flux of email marketing in 2012…and beyond.

1. Segmentation: Focused segmentation can do wonders for your email deliverability because it means targeted, relevant email messages people will want to receive. Segmentation should be a required email marketing best practice and it’s one even a small mom-and-pop marketer can manage at a basic level. Yes, the big guys are segmenting to the nth degree and using complex web analytics and behavior marketing, but the small- to mid-size business can also be more relevant with some simple segmentation. If you need help figuring that out, just ask.
2. Data Hygiene: Keeping your list clean will also help you weather the waves of change. A clean list means a better online reputation means a higher deliverability rate. For tips on scrubbing your list for better data hygiene, see this advice pulled together by the email consultants at ClickMail.
3. Content: A solid and consistent content strategy will keep your emails relevant and your audience engaged, no matter how regulations change or technologies shift. Content can be words, images, newsletters, tips, articles, or almost anything else, as long as it appeals to your audience as great content they anxiously await. (What kind of ISP would say “no” to content like that?)

There you have it, three email marketing best practices from the email consultants at ClickMail that are sure to help you get into the inbox no matter what the email marketing powers that be throw your way.

Boring no More! Advice for Compelling Content

Your subscribers need more from you. Not more email. Not more offers. No, all they need is more compelling content.

You don’t have to be an email expert to recognize inboxes are flooded and subscribers are bored…bored with sorting through lots of email they don’t want, and potentially bored with you, if you’re sending the same message over and over.

The latest ClickMail Marketer email expert newsletter has advice for overcoming that boredom with variety in your email content. Variety is key for engaging your subscribers and engagement is necessary for two reasons: It leads to sales, and it leads to better email deliverability rates, remember!

Changing things up will teach your subscribers to anticipate your emails, not dread them, as they await the latest installment, offer or entertainment. Check out the newsletter to learn more, plus you’ll get additional email expert content tips including:

• Beware of too much variety
• Pay attention to frequency
• Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke

We are now in the age of engagement. Boring, repetitious emails will not engage. Deliver the same content over and over and subscribers will tune out…and ISPs will block.

Learn to be boring no more with the latest ClickMail Marketer!

An Email Consultant Can Give You Back Some Control

Lately our email consultant clients have been expressing some frustration with how the industry works, with all the constant flux and change that makes it so hard to keep up.

Oftentimes email marketers feel like they are at the mercy of factors they can’t control, from the ISPs to the government to corporate email filters to changes in technology. As email consultants, we are keenly aware that email marketing is a constantly changing landscape, and keeping up with changes is one of the more important parts of our job, so that we can help clients do the same.

Knowing what’s going on in the industry is critical. After all, if you haven’t kept up with changes, it can be a big deal, not a minor annoyance. You can suffer a direct financial hit if your deliverability rate drops or you’re blacklisted.

But you don’t have to feel like you’re subject to factors you can’t control if you’re on top of email marketing best practices and enlist email consultants to help. It is the email consultant’s job to know not only what has changed but also what is going to change, so you’re not only caught up but even ahead of the email marketing game. You have enough on your plate with managing your email marketing program. You can’t possibly devote all of the time required to read the blogs, articles and press releases related to the industry. We can. We have to.

So rather than feel like you’re a ship at sea, subject to the changing tides and winds of email marketing, consider hiring email consultants to guide you. You can bring an email expert on board to help as little or as much as you think you need, initially reviewing your program to see where you stand in light of current regulations and practices, then helping you get your stuff up to snuff, then only stepping in periodically to review your progress or jumping in when a major change in pending.

Hiring an email consultant doesn’t have to be a huge commitment on your part, and it can bring a lot of peace of mind when you feel like these factors are just out of your control.

To learn more, contact ClickMail Marketing today.

Study Says 1 in 5 Emails Never Delivered.

Numbers can be misleading and deceiving, even when they are the same number. Consider six compared to half a dozen. Six sounds smaller, even though the numbers are the same. So sometimes even email consultants like us need to look at the email marketing metrics from a different angle.

For example, would it surprise you to learn that around the world, 1 in 5 emails never make it to the inbox? That sounds like an usually high number, but really, it was all in how it was stated.

The 1 in 5 stat is based on a 19% failure rate globally, according to Return Path, although the U.S. and Canada fare a bit better at 16%, meaning 84% do make it to the inbox.

The Return Path study says, “…only 81% of all permission-based email makes it to the world’s inboxes. Globally, one out of every five emails lands either in a spam or junk folder (7%) or simply go [sic] missing—blocked by ISP-level filtering (12%).”

Really, 81% doesn’t sound as bad as 1 in 5, just like six doesn’t sound like as many as half a dozen. So that 1 in 5 is a good wake up call for email marketers and email consultants alike to take a good hard look at their email deliverability rates and make sure they are happy with them no matter how you look at them.

Any time we are feeling complacent and satisfied with our email marketing numbers, we should take a look at our metrics from another angle to be sure we’re completely happy with them (even from a new point of view).

Because really, it’s not a case of six of one, half a dozen of another, when you’re talking email marketing ROI.

Two of ClickMail's Clients Win Best-In-Class Awards @ eTail

When eTail announced the Best-In-Class Awards for 2012, we were delighted to see two of our clients among the winners. That’s quite a win/win for an email consultant!

First place goes to…

Partnering with Smarter Remarketer, we were part of the team behind Footwear Etc., the First Place winner of the email marketing category. Footwear Etc. is a multi-channel retailer of fashion and comfort footwear. They wanted to understand the value of behavioral marketing as a complement to their regular email marketing. They used highly targeted behavioral marketing built around their traditional email during the holiday season, putting together a variety of re-engagement programs. The tactic increased conversion by putting visitors right back into the buying process. The result of the experiment? The targeted emails outperformed the standard emails by up to 400%.

And honorable mention goes to…

Again partnering with Smarter Remarketer, ClickMail was also part of the team behind Mindware, one of the companies that won Honorable Mention in the email marketing category. Mindware is a multi-channel retailer of educational toys. They wanted to recapture cart and checkout abandoners during the holiday season using an intelligent abandonment campaign. They created two primary segments: visitors who added to the cart then abandoned, and visitors who started checking out but did not buy. The campaign produced compelling results, including a 7% lift in 2011 site-wide average revenue.

As an email consultant, we’re not always on the front lines of our clients’ email marketing campaigns, but we are always on the backend doing our part to help our clients succeed. Awards like these validate that client-first effort. Congrats to Footwear Etc. and Mindware, thanks to Smarter Remarketer for the partnership, and thanks especially to eTail for recognizing email industry leaders like these companies.

The Bermuda Triangle of Productivity by Fuchsia Macaree

Where does your email marketing fit into your subscriber’s busy day?

Any email expert will tell you it’s probably not at the top of their to-do list or priorities.

For a reality check on where email does into people’s attention spans, see this wonderful map of the Bermuda Triangle of Productivity by Fuchsia Macaree.

If work (i.e. productivity) falls into the void of this legendary triangle of social media distractions, where does your email marketing fit? It probably fits somewhere in the middle, maybe even with the flailing arms of work trying to stay afloat and on course.

Although the map makes us chuckle–glad we’re not the employer fighting the mysterious forces of social media distracting our employees and impacting our productivity–it should also give us pause as email marketers, laughing while also acknowledging that we too are fighting against those same distractions.

How do we overcome the sucking sound of social? The same way we’ve learned to overcome clutter in the inbox: through relevance and engagement.

If ever an email expert were to argue for relevant and targeted email communications, now would be it…perhaps with this map in hand to help persuade email marketers to change their thinking.

People already had reason to ignore us in the inbox, as they juggled more email than they could manage and learned to do email triage on their handhelds before ever even sitting down at a laptop or PC. Then when Facebook and Twitter arrived on the scene, email marketing was even easier to ignore. Being relevant, timely, engaging and wanted will make sure your email messages are always afloat and on course.

5 Must-Know Tips to Increase Email Deliverability

There seems to be a lot of rejection these days.

No, I’m not talking about your Facebook friend requests. Rather, it’s your email that’s getting the snub.

In a March 2012 study by Return Path, only 76.5% of commercial emails reached their intended inbox in the second half of 2011, down from 81% from the first half of the year.

Furthermore, in North America, overall inbox placement rates fell from 86.5% to 79.3%, spam increased 30%, and blocked email increased 57% during the same time period. Europe and Asia Pacific are seeing similar trends.

This is not good news for email marketers. Crafting amazing email copy and subject lines are no longer enough. Now we must compete with an influx of spam and pass grouchy ISP-level filters.

But there are steps you can take to avoid this fate. Follow these 5 tips to improve your email deliverability:

1. Understand key email deliverability terms. Before we dive into some of these tips, it’s crucial to understand how email deliverability works. Understanding spam traps, honeypots, black lists, and other important terms will improve your email effectiveness. You can find a list of 19 Email Deliverability Terms and their definitions here.

2. Keep your email list healthy. According to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year. Keeping stale or bad emails in your database can hurt your deliverability. That’s why it’s increasingly important to scrub your email list to keep it clean and healthy. Best practices for list hygiene include:

• Deleting duplicates
• Ensuring unsubscribes and hard bounces are automatically removed (repeatedly emailing bounced emails can cause your IP address to be blacklisted)
• Not storing alias emails (i.e. contact@company.com)
• Reaching out to inactive subscribers to see if they still want to be included on your list
• Requiring a double opt-in subscription process to ensure emails are valid

3. Just say “no” to purchased lists. I can’t stress this enough – don’t buy or rent lists, or scrape websites for email addresses.  Ever.  Buying lists is the easy way out. Sure, it has short term benefits but it hurts you in the long-run. If you don’t believe me, then learn from the list-purchasing fiasco from the folks at Javelin Marketing; “Upon emailing to 100,000 of the records, 85,000+ bounced, clogged up the mail server, and I was fired by our web-based email provider.” Ouch.

The best way to grow your email list is with permission-based marketing, i.e. an opt-in strategy.  Acquiring opt-in addresses improves email performance simply because you are sending email to people who actually want to hear from you. Imagine that.

4. Avoid spam trigger words in your email copy. Is your clever email copy ending up in the junk folder? Be careful about using spam trigger words in your subject line and email copy. Don’t use words like “free,” “guarantee,” and “no obligation.”  Some email marketing software providers include a spam check tool, but I also suggest ingraining these into your brain so you can avoid writing them all together.

5. Maintain a good sender score. Do you know your sender score? Knowing your sender score is a great way to gauge the deliverability and reputation of your outgoing emails. Return Path reports that 83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation. To check your Sender Score, visit Return Path’s registration page.  Some best practices to improving your sender score include:

• As mentioned above, keep your list healthy, avoid spam words and only send email to people who have given you permission.
• Email unengaged recipients less frequently, and then, over a certain period of time with no activity, remove them from your list all together. Keeping a lot of inactive emails on your lists makes it appear as if it’s poor quality.
• Segment your lists for targeted sends. Often times very large bulk sends can be seen as spam. Plus, targeted sends generally perform better (higher open rates and click-through rates), which helps to improve your sender score.
• Check for spam complaints and make sure you’re not blacklisted. DNSstuff.com lets you check whether you are a blacklisted sender.
• Control the frequency of your email sends. If you send email for a week straight, then go silent for a month only to pick back up again, you might be penalized with a lower sender score. ESPs like controlled consistency when sending email. As you perfect your email marketing machine, you’ll be able to test the optimal email sending frequency for your recipients.

Getting into the inbox isn’t rocket science, but knowing what it takes to improve deliverability makes all the difference. If you take the time to follow these five best practices, you’ll be your way to achieving an awesome deliverability rate and a high sender score.

This is a guest post by Jessica Meher, an inbound marketing manager at HubSpot. HubSpot makes inbound marketing software that helps you generate and manage your leads more effectively.

Content That Sticks: The Lasting Value of Email

Does email marketing have a hidden value, one not obvious to the metrics seekers and data collectors but important none the less?

I would argue yes. And that this hidden value is yet another reason to invest properly in your email marketing program. The hidden value? Longevity.

While reading a MarketingSherpa blog about a study, I was particularly struck by the headline: “Twitter has highest amplification rate, email has highest conversion rate.”

Other studies I’ve seen recognize the value in an email share over a social media share. The social media channels tend to have higher rates of sharing, but the email shares tend to have higher rates of conversion. And in the end, conversion is the name of the game, because neither a Facebook like nor a tweet are money in the bank. Sales are.

That got me thinking about the other aspects of email that are unique when compared to social media as a marketing tool. Let’s consider the lifespan of different forms of information, for example. I’ve heard experts say a Facebook wall post has a lifespan of about 15 minutes. Of course that varies from company to company and brand to brand, but still, we all know that Facebook post is more of a here today gone tomorrow kind of marketing. Tweets have even shorter lifespans. And both Facebook and Twitter have a lot of clutter and competition, maybe even more so than the inbox email marketing competes in.

An email, on the other hand, can hang around for a long, long time. I personally will keep an email in my inbox until I either get around to reading it (an email newsletter), responding to it (a personal email) or acting on it (a marketing email). I even keep emails to re-read, particularly inspirational ones. My inbox is like a little archive or library of content as well as a to-do list and a place of ongoing correspondence. Emails can stay in my inbox for weeks or even months. Many times I have held onto a promotional email because I wasn’t ready to buy yet but knew I would be someday. And I’m not unusual, as an email consultant or a consumer.

That kind of longevity can never happen with social media. Shares and tweets might raise immediate awareness, but the lasting power belongs to email alone.

Social media has its place, for sure. The power of retweets and Facebook shares is real, and easily measured. But email still trumps social media when it comes to conversions. And I argue that it will always trump social media when it comes to longevity too. It’s a lasting value social media simply can’t offer. And one more reason to invest appropriately in your email marketing program.

Need help? Call on the expert email consultants at ClickMail.

Bring Your Emails to “Life” With Lifecycle Messaging

Has your email marketing team made the transition from batch-and-blast to lifecycle messaging? If not, your program could be suffering from low email deliverability rates or poor ROI.

Rather than plug along with disappointing results, maybe your next move should be hiring an email expert. Or perhaps attending the BlueHornet Lifecycle Messaging Conference is just what you need to take your email marketing program to the next level.

Lifecycle messaging is so much more than the basic approach to email marketing. It’s one that evolves, adapting and changing to stay relevant to subscribers’ actions over time. When you use lifecycle messaging as a key component of your email marketing campaigns, you collect data, automate targeted emails, segment, and become more relevant and timely…in the eyes of your subscribers, the ones who really count.

Lifecycle messaging saves time and increases relevance, therefore leading to higher ROI.

Ready to learn more? Block out the dates, May 14-16, 2012, for your trip to the conference. Not only will you gain valuable insight into lifecycle messaging, but you’ll enjoy a few days in Los Angeles. Need more incentive? The conference will be held at L.A. Live, billed as “the most entertaining place on the planet.”

Whether you’re new to lifecycle messaging and just getting started, or need to refine your program, this conference is for you. Sessions will be offered for beginners to advanced, and topics will be relevant to you no matter your role in the email marketing program at your company, from designer to manager to CMO.

And you could very well walk in a novice and walk out a lifecycle email expert.

Learn more about the conference here.