Email Delivery
The first challenge for any email marketer is to ensure that their message actually makes it into a recipient's inbox. Constant obstacles - ISP
blacklisting, unused mailboxes, corporate firewalls and personal email
filters - threaten both the deliverability of emails and your company's
reputation. Even the smallest blip in your accountability could affect your
campaign. Plus, a 'one size fits all' approach simply will not work; each
local country has its own set of challenges. In China, for instance, any
large email broadcast (more than 5,000 addresses) results in automatic
blocking by ISPs.
It is important to do all you can to prevent being blocked by the recipient.
Consider some of the following techniques to help strengthen your reputation
and ensure maximum email deliverability.
1. ISP blocks are the biggest causes of email failures. Not only do you need
an approach to avoid being blacklisted, you also need a clear whitelisting
strategy.
a. Check your bounce reports. If you are constantly being blocked by the
same ISPs, then it's likely that you have been blacklisted
b. Read the ISP's spam policy, which is generally posted on its website.
c. Submit a whitelisting request to the relevant contact to exempt your
emails from blocking filters.
d. Keep communication channels open with ISPs and respond to their feedback
promptly.
e. Ensure that you are able to demonstrate best practise through permission
based marketing, relevant and valuable content, and an effective unsubscribe
process.
f. Test content against up to date content filters
g. Use multiple email servers and IP addresses to prevent being perceived as
a bulk emailer.
2. Prevent blacklisting on personal and corporate inboxes. Your reports may
show a high delivery rate, but your email may have been quarantined at a
corporate level or gone straight to junk in a personal mailbox.
a. Include your brand in the sender address and subject line to clearly show
from whom the email has been sent and why the recipient should open it.
b. Always add a clear unsubscribe link and ask users their reasons for
Unsubscribing.
c. Encourage users to add you to their safe sender list.
d. Set a frequency strategy for contact management and test it by sending
relevant messages.
3. Work with specialist companies, such as Return Path and GoodMail, who can
advise you on:
a. Implementing accurate testing processes across all email clients and
devices;
b. Maintaining a positive mail server reputation;
c. Minimizing the amount of email going into junk folders.
Email Opens
Open rates are notoriously impossible to report accurately. As an email open
is not triggered until an image is downloaded from the sender's web server,
only HTML emails with images enabled will be recorded as opens. On the
flipside, emails displayed in a preview pane with images enabled will count
as an open even if the recipient does not read or click to open the email.
It is increasingly difficult to gain accurate reporting for the following
reasons:
* Offline email reading
* ISPs and Outlook 2007 disabling images by default
* Text emails
* Mobile email reading
* Preview panes
* Inconsistency of reporting between different email service providers
* Optimized email design for mobiles
Here are some ideas to help you increase your open rate:
1. Use sender addresses that are recognizable and consistent.
2. Experiment with your subject lines. Try including a call to action or
some key content teasers. If you're undecided, run A/B tests to see what
works the best.
3. Calculate the optimum sending day/time for your audience or database
through testing and tracking and monitor it over time. In our statistics,
while overall open rates have remained static, there is a marked decline in
Friday open rates.
4. Reports on click through rates seem to back up this statistic, so we have
reduced the amount of email we send on a Friday and continue to monitor
trends.
5. Use the preview pane to your advantage. Many people will see a preview of
your email before deciding whether to open it, ignore it or delete it. If
the top third of the email contains compelling content such as a key point
or call to action, you have more chance to entice a reader to open it.
Experiment with pre-headers - the clickable links at the top of an email.
6. Set a strategy for handling dormant emails. Remove anyone who has not
opened an email over a set period of time.
7. Offer unsubscribe with options to receive more relevant emails.
Email Clicks
Most email marketing campaigns include a call to action, which is initiated
by a trackable click. For this reason, click through rates (CTRs) have
become one of the accepted currencies by which to measure the success of
email marketing. They are also one of the most accurate metrics available.
It is important to note that CTRs can vary depending on a number of factors,
including:
1. List recency and data hygiene. The more recent the email data, the better
the response is likely to be. It is important to track performance by email
account. The likelihood of a contact responding to an email if they haven't
registered as an open or click over the last two years is slim. You have
very little to lose by removing these contacts from your database or at
least separating them from your main database while attempting to re-engage
with them via specific campaigns.
If you have been asking for unsubscribe reasons, then you can now use this
data. Whilst many of the email addresses may be inactive, some of your
contacts will simply have "emotionally" unsubscribed because they are not
seeing the value in the emails you are sending them. Tracking and removing
non-responding contacts is part of our list management strategy and we have
seen a marked improvement in performance as a result.
2. Targeting. We have found that by combining demographic segmentation with
behavioural data, it is possible to obtain a much higher return on data,
thus achieving more with less. Consider the following: Who would be most
interested by your offer and does this match your target audience? It is
good practice to check your response expectations against the target
audience: it is far more challenging to elicit response from a CIO than from
an IT helpdesk executive.
3. Incentives. Incentives will undoubtedly increase the quantity of respondents, but how will they affect quality? For a B2B market or specialist product, incentivisation should be treated with caution. Our most effective incentives are white papers or e-books. We have offered iPhones, cameras and other gadgets in certain campaigns that favour quantity over quality. Using them to generate highly qualified interest is less successful, unless you want to create a warm call base for follow-up telemarketing. As always, realistic expectations are essential.
4. Creative. While we have not yet discovered the holy grail of optimizing
email creative, we do have some tricks that work best for us:
a. Repeat your main point at the top, in the middle and at the bottom of the
email.
b. Add in a pre-header, as in Fig. 4, and get the call to action in the
first line of text to help maximize clicks from the preview pane.
c. Use multiple links to provide a greater opportunity for response and to
highlight the key points.
d. Keep the email short and clean. Long paragraphs can be placed on the
landing pages. Bullet points, white space, bite-sized sections and strong
images are easier on the eye and encourage more clicks.
e. Optimize creative for different email clients and mobile devices. A
recent survey of our database revealed that 50% of respondents use their
mobile device to read email.
f. Add links to all images and include snapshots of the white papers,
e-books or other incentive being promoted.
g. Avoid Flash within the creative - not everyone has Flash enabled and it
will have a negative effect on deliverability .
h. If you need to use words such as "Free" then embed them within images to
avoid triggering spam filters.
i. Ensure that the message of the email is clear even with images turned
off.
5. Frequency. What is the optimal number of times to email? When are the
frequency benefits replaced by data fatigue issues? We suggest capping
repeat broadcasts at three per month, and ensure that the creative messaging
makes it clear that this is part of a series of emails.
a. Consider your overall marketing communications: Where else may the
contacts have been exposed to your campaign?
Advertising in different mediums: online, TV, outdoor, print
* PR/news articles
* Exhibitions
* Direct mail
b. Integrate the brand. Research shows that people are more likely to take
action after they have seen a message a number of times. While we do not
encourage saturation via one tactic, we do encourage increasing the
opportunity for your audience to see your message across a number of media.
Social Networking/Viral/Search
By making your email marketing campaigns search and social friendly, you can
extend your reach. Social networking is now one of the most frequently used
forms of viral marketing with LinkedIn and Twitter updates linking back to
micro sites, articles and marketing campaigns. In theory, your database
contacts have networks with similar personal or professional interests.
These networks should be seen as an extension of your database, but with
greater value as the sharer is a friend/peer rather than a marketer. Sharing
to these networks should be facilitated. The age old marketing rule still
applies: content is king. If your content has perceived value, then it is
likely to be passed on. The image below shows how one of our e-book
campaigns for Canon was shared on the O2 Australia fan page on Facebook.
We have plenty of similar examples for campaigns with compelling content. In
order to facilitate social sharing, we have started to add 'Share this'
functionality on our thank you pages, post registration.
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