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By Irene Cherkassky
This past September, New York City-based e-mail service provider Bigfoot Interactive—recently acquired by Epsilon, and now renamed Epsilon Interactive—released its latest e-mail Q2 2005 benchmark results announcing the overall success of e-mail marketing initiatives across all leading vertical and performance metrics. Strategic e-mail initiatives are experiencing continued growth and high performance—this includes contextually relevant, persona-based marketing messaging as well as service, lifecycle and integrated, automated e-mail messaging.
Deliverability across all industries tracked remained extremely strong as well, at 94.4 percent, with retail promotional messaging performing at a 95.5 percent success rate and media editorial messaging hitting the 98 percentile.
What accounts for the great performance? Michael Della Penna, chief marketing officer, Epsilon, says, "Marketers are really starting to understand and see the power of relevance. We are seeing more strategic messaging around customer needs, behaviors and profiles, including persona-based messaging, triggered messaging, and lifecycle messaging."
However, there still are challenges to overcome, particularly as spam is a continuing nuisance. Whereas large mailbox providers such as AOL and MSN have invested millions in antispam approaches and have announced the decrease in the amount of spam reaching their networks and consumers, Della Penna notes local digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable providers still may be playing catch up in terms of reducing incoming spam. The most recent trend noted by Epsilon Interactive, he says, shows the growing number of those local DSL and cable providers with e-mail clients have reduced or set limitations on incoming volume rates and simultaneous simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) connections to their networks as a way to boost their antispam defenses.
Della Penna also offers a few tips to optimize your e-mail delivery rates:
- Audit infrastructure capabilities. Ensure that your e-mail deployment infrastructure can adjust and adapt to volume/connection limitations by receiving domains.
- Segment your list. If you can't simultaneously configure SMTP connections and volume by domain, consider dividing your list into smaller sublists and send in successive waves over a longer period of time.
- Stay on top of the broadband trend—Get ahead of the curve and ask your subscribers about their use of DSL/cable e-mail accounts in surveys.
- Monitor deliverability. Analyze deliverability reporting across all domains that comprise more than 1 percent of your list composition.
- Leverage the move to broadband. The proliferation of broadband increasingly will allow for enhanced features and new creative possibilities. Consider adding a field to your preference center and/or registration page enabling subscribers to opt-in to rich media messaging. However, only use rich media when relevant and appropriate.
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