Nuts & Bolts - Email : Engagement Matters

In 2006, ISPs started to rethink how they evaluated inbound email. AOL, Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo! began to realize the old approach of counting complaints and hard bounces was a poor way to identify spammers. The truth was spammers found "work-arounds" that allowed them to avoid ISP thresholds.

How did a seemingly unrelated event, like changes to email filters, force marketers to rethink application of email marketing best practices?

Companies looking to drive strong revenue via the email channel need to consider new practices and approaches that drive a higher engagement rate from a smaller consumer audience. And those practices need to include:

1. Strong Engagement Programs: A strong engagement program goes beyond a welcome process—it includes understanding how, and over what time, consumers engage with an email marketing program.

2. Intelligent Win-back Programs: A phased win-back program can emphasize automatically targeting consumers early in their disengagement and, more importantly, leverage multiple re-engagement touches.

3. Personalization of Email Deployment: I am not talking about putting a first and last name in the body of the email, but about leveraging a consumer's email interaction time to determine when an email should be deployed to that consumer. That means allowing consumers to dictate, through their open and click behavior, when their emails are deployed.

4. The New Face of Deliverability: Ensure that your deliverability team considers marketing, not just technical aspects of a campaign. Modern deliverability teams need to be able to identify issues with marketing results and suggest changes in marketing tactics that will both drive consumer engagement and ultimately consumer lifetime value.

Quinn Jalli is senior vice president of marketing technology at Epsilon. Reach him at qjalli@epsilon.com.

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