Make Content Part of Your Email Deliverability Best Practices

Among your email deliverability best practices, be sure to include content. I don’t mean the “buy now” content. I mean content with a little meat to it…

Your emails are intended to generate money for your company, right? That’s the end goal of your department: generating email marketing ROI. But you can’t only and always sell. You’ll wear out your welcome in the email inbox sooner rather than later if that’s the approach you take. And that will hurt your email deliverability rate.

I get frequent emails from a local restaurant chain. And frankly, I’m tired of them. I have seen enough two-for-one deals and free-cup-of-chowder deals to last me a lifetime. When I first signed up for the emails a couple of years ago, I was excited to get the special offers, and I’d dutifully print them out, arrange a meal out with a friend, and use those coupons. But they got old. Fast.

That’s what email marketing does when it does the same old thing. Yes, people want special deals, exclusive offers and limited time promotions. But if that’s all you’re delivering, you’re going to wear out your welcome and end up with unsubscribe and spam complaints.

And that hurts your email deliverability.

So consider adding editorial as an email deliverability best practice. Your company has plenty to say, trust me. No one knows your product as well as your company. No one knows the features and multiple uses as well as your company. You have loads of potential content to tap into to help customers do a better job of using whatever it is you sell. Plus you’ve learned from your customers, right? They’ve told you stories about unusual ways to use your product. And every company has the glowing testimonial from the customer with the really tough problem that you were able to solve. All of that information is useful to your other customers too. Your customers want to know!

If you add editorial to your email marketing, you’ll add value too. Your subscribers will appreciate the “free” information, and they’ll recognize that you’re being helpful, not just trying to sell them one more cufflink or pair of shoes.

With that kind of content, you just might find a bit more sharing going on, as subscribers pass along your valuable information via email or their social networks.

And isn’t that the best kind of email deliverability best practice? The one that not only ensures you make it to the inbox, but you make it beyond too?

As the webinar pointed out and we covered in our last email marketing blog post, email delivery is a huge concern among email marketers, and reputation is the key to deliverability.

To take that to another level,it is important to realize that opt in is the most important thing you can do to protect your reputation and therefore your deliverability. Permission-based email marketing will always result in a better sender reputation, meaning it’s imperative that you put the effort into growing your number of opt ins, not just your number of emails. Remember that a quality email list will serve you better than a quantity email list. The list will be smaller but more receptive to your offers, resulting in more conversions. And less likely to report you as spam, which will protect your reputation.

For more information on protecting and managing your sender reputation, see this month’s ClickMail Marketer.

The webinar pointed out that as concerned as email marketers are with maximizing their email delivery rates, they still aren’t paying enough attention to reputation.

According to the webinar, actions taken by email marketers to improve email delivery in 2008 included:

·    Modifying the email design template
·    Use of a third-party accreditation/reputation service
·    Adopting authentication (SPF, SenderID, DomainKeys)
·    Switching from a shared to a dedicated IP address
·    13% switched from in-house to an email service provider (ESP)
·    Another 13% switched ESPs

All of these can help improve your email delivery, but reputation is king in the world of email marketing. And that makes the webinar a preview to our February ClickMail Marketer newsletter on taking care of your sender reputation to increase your email delivery rate .

Keeping your reputation clean will increase the likelihood that ISPs will let your email through. But managing that reputation can be complicated. There are several critical factors that ISPs consider when determining your sender reputation. This month’s newsletter goes over some of those factors and what you can do about each to make sure you look good to the ISPs.

Read the latest ClickMail Marketer by clicking here.