Email Deliverability Consultant Guides You to Email Deliverability Best Practices

As we’ve said in this blog so many times: Improving your email deliverability best practices—and therefore improving your deliverability rates—even a half a percentage point can improve your email marketing ROI.

That’s why we spend so much time as an email deliverability consultant teaching clients how to do things just a little bit better. As a friend of mine likes to say, if you improve by just 1% every day, in 100 days, you’ll be 100% better. Think what that can mean to your ROI!

Unfortunately, even organizations that follow email marketing best practices can be thwarted, with 30% of the emails they send ending up in a spam folder or—worse yet—getting completely blocked, according to a Pivotal Veracity benchmark study of 1.2 million emails done in June 2009.

That’s because improving email deliverability is a highly specialized and ongoing process. It’s a balancing act involving business practices, technical practices and management of the email ecosystem both inside and outside of your organization. This balance is supported by email deliverability tools, expertise, reporting, regular “tune-ups” and monitoring.

As an email deliverability consultant, ClickMail Marketing helps organizations improve email deliverability best practices, and therefore results, with the ClickMail Deliverability Assessment (CDA). The CDA includes:

• Specific Deliverability Results Report for IP addresses and Domains
• Detailed Sender Reputation Report and the key contributing factors
• An Infrastructure Scorecard comparing your infrastructure to best practices
• A Process Scorecard comparing your practices to best practices
• A Certification Gap Analysis indicating steps necessary to achieve GoodMail certification
• A Value Analysis to help management

The CDA combines best-in-class Pivotal Veracity email deliverability tools with ClickMail email deliverability consultant expertise. Pivotal Veracity is the industry’s “gold standard” provider of platform independent tools and benchmarks. And ClickMail has experience with over 20 different platforms, giving us unique insights into technology differences as they relate to email deliverability.

For example, as part of the CDA, ClickMail does an email deliverability check to provide a benchmark. We’ll send an email to a seed list representing 250 domains and 68 countries. You’ll get detailed information on the core performance of your email delivery process across the ISPs, covering both B2C and B2B mailboxes. This email deliverability check is done using the leading independent tool in the industry: Pivotal Veracity’s eDelivery Tracker. The email deliverability check will also compare your company’s performance to industry-respected benchmarks based on over 5 billion messages per month. You’ll also get a comprehensive view of your true email delivery rates at top ISPs such as AOL, MSN/Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo!, Shaw, Cogent, Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Sina and more.

Best of all, ClickMail teaches as we go, preparing email marketers to move forward armed with the knowledge and email deliverability tools they’ll need to monitor and improve delivery…and ROI…over time.

Read more about the benefits of a ClickMail Deliverability Assessment for improving your email marketing ROI.

Why? Because every percentage point of improvement in your email deliverability is a potential improvement in your email marketing ROI. You might think there’s no real difference between an 81.5% email delivery rate and an 82% email delivery rate. Not really, you say, that’s such an insignificant number. But if half a percentage point equals 1,000 more inboxes, and you have a conversion rate of say, 2%, that’s 20 customers you’ll never ever reach. Simply because you didn’t improve email deliverability.

As an email deliverability consultant, ClickMail’s job is to improve email deliverability for clients in whatever way possible. Sometimes that means tweaks. Sometimes that means overhauls. In either case, our email deliverability service is focused on figuring out the problem, developing a solution, and positioning your company to move forward ready to monitor and continue to improve email deliverability on your own.

We won’t hand you a fish to eat. We’ll hand you a fishing pole, sit by your side and show you how to use it, and make sure you can feed yourself (and your email marketing program) for a lifetime.

And it’s not just about improving email deliverability to improve ROI. These days, as ISPs start measuring engagement to filter email on consumers’ behalf and people start experiencing the Priority inbox in Gmail, you might just see a dramatic rise in email delivery problems…without changing a thing.

That’s where email deliverability best practices can also help, to keep you from getting filtered and blocked…because the best practices of the past are not the best practices of the present!

Don’t go it alone. Get expert help. With an email deliverability consultant like ClickMail on your team, you’ll make the tweaks (or overhauls) that improve email deliverability today, and keep it optimized despite the changes that will inevitably happen tomorrow. Contact ClickMail today.

But the next step is to get your email marketing opened and acted upon. For tips, tricks and expert advice on increasing your email marketing ROI after you get to the inbox, download our popular email marketing whitepaper titled, “You’ve made it to the inbox. Now what? Driving ROI once your email is delivered” available here.

Pulled together by top email marketing consultants, this whitepaper is even more helpful now as subscriber engagement becomes a key factor in how ISPs look at your email marketing: as spam or not.

Make all of these email best practices part of your email marketing process today by downloading the whitepaper here.

A top-tier email service provider (ESP) might cost a little more, but, as we’ve pointed out in another email marketing blog post, the increased revenue more than makes up for the increased cost.

Switching to a top-tier email service provider can increase your:

1. Deliverability: The top-tier ESPs tend to have better deliverability rates, and even a 1% improvement in your delivery rate matters.

2. Open rates, click-throughs and conversions: The more emails that get delivered, the more chances you have to get your emails opened and responded to.

Granted getting more emails delivered can also increase your unsubscribe rate, but remember, that’s a good thing. An unsubscribe is feedback you can use to improve.

For an actual example of the email marketing improvements that resulted from switching from an in—house email marketing solution to a top tier email service provider, see Jeanne Jennings Nov, 2007 article in ClickZ.

For advice on making the switch from an in-house email marketing solution or lower-end ESP to a top-tier email service provider, contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com . ClickMail is the largest purveyor of email service providers, and we can be completely objective for that very reason.