The Five Essentials That Make or Break E-mail Campaigns

January 2006 By Elaine O'Gorman

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Whatever you do, don’t take bounces lightly. ISPs don’t like bounces and a high percentage can get your entire mailing blocked.

Deliverability: Get Your Message Through

According to JupiterResearch, despite the fact that, year-over-year, delivery rates have gone up, increasing to 88 percent in 2005 from 82 percent in 2004, deliverability is still the number one challenge for e-mail marketers. However, poor deliverability can seriously undermine the performance of a campaign. E-mail marketers should spend extra care in this area.

While a top e-mail service provider can help your deliverability rates tremendously, all the technology in the world won’t get your e-mail into recipients’ inboxes if your lists are riddled with bad addresses. A high percentage of undeliverable mail is a hallmark of spammers, so keep close tabs on your bounce rate and keep it low.

Also keep in mind that e-mail addresses churn at an incredible rate. If you don’t communicate to your list regularly, bad addresses will collect over time, resulting in skyrocketing bounce rates. To keep your list fresh, e-mail everyone on it regularly—at least once every 90 days.

Additionally, The Direct Marketing Association urges all members to implement authentication standards, which can benefit delivery rates. All e-mailers should be considering the implementation of SPF, Sender ID and DomainKeys as part of their deliverability program. Also, have in place a list hygiene policy that deals with issues like opt-outs, bounces, reply/inbound handling and address formation validation. It’s also important to realize that in order to get a really firm handle on your true deliverability rate, you should periodically employ the services of a delivery auditing company. You simply send e-mails to their list of monitored e-mail addresses to see what percentage actually arrive, and what percentage, if any, is blocked.

Frequency: Know How Often Is Too Often

One of the reasons marketers love e-mail is because it’s so inexpensive. Unfortunately, because cost isn’t a limiting factor, many marketers mail without regard for frequency. Rather than blasting away within a given budget, the question to ask yourself regarding frequency is simply: “How often do I have something to say that my recipients want to hear?”

The goal in setting frequency is to squeeze the maximum return-on-investment from the fewest e-mails by making each message highly relevant, targeted and customized. Do that by evaluating your messages from your customers’ point of view. You should bring an understanding regarding their level of engagement with your brand, and evaluate the persuasive power of the intended messages accordingly. If you let your customers control how often they hear from you through the use of preference centers, you’ll greatly diminish the risk of over-mailing and alienating them altogether.

Ultimately, the only way to determine optimal frequency is to test. Testing should always be integrated into e-mail marketing programs. Without it, improving campaigns becomes a hit-or-miss operation. Despite the importance and benefits of testing, JupiterResearch found only 40 percent of marketers regularly test their e-mail campaigns. Yet marketers who test on a regular basis are more likely to have e-mail conversion rates that exceed industry averages. Segment off small portions of your list and test different frequencies. Run the test for four to six months in order to get complete results. Measure and compare conversions, and note any activity drop-off.

List Growth: Quality Over Quantity

While it may give you bragging rights at the next e-mail marketing seminar you attend, a huge list can actually be quite worthless if nobody on it wants to hear from you. There are a number of excellent ways to increase the size of your in-house list with the e-mail addresses of people who actually want to receive your e-mail messages. The first one is surprisingly overlooked by marketers: place a highly-visible e-mail opt-in on your Web site. In fact, Silverpop’s “2005 Retail E-mail Marketing Study” found 23 percent of companies failed to include e-mail registration information on the company’s home page. Ideally, because search engines often take visitors to internal pages, opt-in information should be added to every page in your Web site.

But don’t just plug in a button marked “subscribe” or “opt-in” at the bottom of the page. Give visitors a reason to allow you to communicate with them. Silverpop’s Retail E-mail Study found that one-fourth of the companies reviewed failed to offer Web-site visitors any benefit to registering for their e-mails.

During the opt-in process, marketers must weigh their desire for personal information from a prospect that will help them offer relevant products, services and information against a prospect’s desire for privacy. The best approach is to keep the opt-in page clean, simple and painless to complete. Be sure to convey in the most persuasive ways possible the value recipients will receive in exchange for trusting you with their e-mail addresses. Then deliver the value you promised.

Legislation: Compliance Is Required And Can Improve Results

The CAN-SPAM Act attempts to draw a line between irresponsible spammers and legitimate, permission-based e-mail marketers. Ensuring your e-mail program is legally compliant is a first and basic step toward successful e-mail marketing. Legal blunders can not only be costly, they can seriously damage your brand and company reputation. Keep in mind that annoyed consumers will hit the “this is spam” button—even from messages they have opted-in to receive. If an ISP blocks your mailing as a result of spam complaints, not only will it damage the campaign caught in the filter, it can ultimately impact your overall e-mail marketing program.

While CAN-SPAM was created to avoid a mish-mash of state laws restricting e-mail marketing, new child protection legislation targeting e-mail recently passed in Utah and Michigan. The laws prohibit sending certain types of e-mail messages to addresses listed on registries maintained by an outside company on behalf of each state. Both states created registries for minors as well as schools and organizations that serve them. Companies may not send those on the registries messages that advertise or link to goods or services that are illegal for a minor to buy or possess.

This legislation has been extremely controversial, and at least one lawsuit has been filed in Utah. E-mail marketers must monitor such legislation and be aware of the pitfalls that can sink not only an e-mail campaign but an entire brand if they run afoul of such laws.

Building on Core Competencies

E-mail campaigns built upon a solid base can be enhanced further by content and timing that improve relevance and show dramatic improvement over industry average return-on-investments. A solid base allows e-mail marketers to build into their campaigns advanced practices such as lifecycle targeting, dynamic content and more. With attention to the five core competencies upon which all successful campaigns are built, e-mail marketers can add the embellishments that can drive significant results without worrying that their campaign could collapse at any moment like a proverbial house of cards.

Elaine O’Gorman is vice president of strategy, for Atlanta, Ga.-based e-mail marketing solutions, strategy and services provider Silverpop. She works closely with various Silverpop clients, providing advice on managing risk in today’s volatile legislative and legal environment, creating enterprise e-mail governance policies, maximizing deliverability and optimizing campaign effectiveness. She can be reached at elaineogorman@silverpop.com

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