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E-Mail : Think About Your Rep

Optimizing deliverability in the 2010s

February 2010 By Michelle Eichner

It's a Team Effort
It's become clear that the days of setting up whitelist and feedback loops and then walking away thinking your job is complete are long gone. The old standbys of deliverability—reverse DNS, monitoring hard bounces and blacklistings—no longer are enough, and deliverability specialists no longer can operate in isolation from their marketing teams and strategies. The application of engagement metrics to inbox disposition and greater accountability through domain reputation mean deliverability and marketing teams must work more collaboratively than ever. Most of all, senders need to deploy smart campaigns that inspire users to click on messages to grow and optimize their reputations. Here are recommendations for hitting this target:

• Evaluate your mailing practices, and establish targeting strategies that focus on delivering unique content to engaged customers. Basic selects of e-mail names by product brands, publication titles, geography and demographic data segments require overlays of recency and activity variables to achieve higher response rates and more deliverable campaigns.

• Think about creative and innovative ways to generate clickthroughs. Companies that shun deep discounts, loss leaders or an extra month off of a subscription fee as promotional tactics may consider these approaches acceptable, if only to drive further signs of positive recipient engagement and increased delivery.

• Monitor deliverability like a hawk. As deliverability specialists closely track how many customers are opening e-mails in the spam folder through new technologies such as MailboxIQ, they can flag their marketing colleagues in real time as these levels increase. Sophisticated marketers will take immediate action based on this knowledge, devising new ways to drive activity with the hopes of altering the placement of future e-mails to the inbox. They can identify "hyperengaged" individuals who actively mark their e-mails as "not spam" and deliver customized content to grow the dialogue.

• Although there are marked advantages to domain reputation, some companies may prefer to keep the connection between their mailstreams separate. Different IPs were sufficient for separating mailstreams in the past—however, today mailers may consider setting up completely separate domains for such efforts as list rental, e-mail sponsorships, affiliate programs, e-mail change-of-address and appends programs. Each of these practices is considered risky and may have a negative impact on your overall reputation, subsequently polluting your most valuable campaigns and lists if you use the same IP or domain to deliver these campaigns.

Deliverability 3.0
In 2010 and beyond, smart marketers will adapt to the changes and discover that evolutions in spam filtering technologies are just narrowing the conversation between them and their customers. The Wild West of the late '90s and early '00s was punctuated by a one-to-many style of e-mail marketing. Today, customers demand greater personalization in their marketing communications.

The more personalized you can get, the more in-tune with your customers you ultimately will become, and improvements to your overall deliverability will manifest as greater engagement metrics grow your overall reputation. In the world of Deliverability 3.0, marketers should think less is more, make it personal, and keep the dialogue with customers a fluid and personal conversation.

It's refreshing that users have been empowered—whether they know it or not—with greater levels of control to dictate what should or should not be delivered to their inboxes. However, marketers are now challenged to better segment their lists and engender more user engagement not just to increase response rates, but also to ensure the delivery of their messages to the inbox in the first place.

Michelle Eichner is COO and VP of client development at Pivotal Veracity, an e-mail delivery auditing and optimization firm. She can be reached at meichner@pivotalveracity.com.


 

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Hitting the Email Inbox: Protect your sender rep, clean up your e-list and improve design to add dollars to your email marketing ROI Hitting the Email Inbox covers all the bases of email deliverability, including everything from the very basics, to reputation management, as well as coding and design, and...

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PDF FORMAT "Despite news to the contrary — especially from the social media space — reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated. In fact, as your inboxes most likely show, email is growing and becoming even more sophisticated." -- from The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing It's true....

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