Archive for the 'Delivery Improvement' Category

The Question

Published
by
laura
25Sep
in Delivery Improvement and Industry
.

Mark Brownlow has a list of 12 questions every email marketer should ask about their marketing program. Buried in the middle is the most important question for delivery.

Do you worry more about what ISPs think about your email than what subscribers think about your email? If you take care of the latter, won’t the former take care of itself?

My answer is if a sender is worried more about what the ISPs think than what subscribers think that sender is going to have ongoing and continual delivery problem. However, if a sender focuses on sending relevant, expected and wanted email then they will have almost zero delivery problems.

3 Comments

The overlooked secret of marketing

Published
by
laura
11Sep
in Delivery Improvement
.

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time

Cherish my time. The second part is closely related. It has to do with respect. You respect my time when you don’t waste it. When you don’t spam me. When you worry about the 100 cars backed up on the road and figure out how to get us moving more quickly. You respect me when you value my time more highly than your own.

One thing I find is that some senders do not value others time very much. They demand attention from their recipients. They demand attention from ISPs. They demand attention from their ESP delivery reps. They are much, much more important than anyone else out their and their time is infinitely more valuable than anyone else’s.

This self importance actually translates through their mailing strategy. They spend infinite amount of time on details like MTA settings and sending rates. What they do not spend time doing is sending mail their recipients want to receive. They send the mail they want to send.

Their time would better be spent valuing the time of the recipients. Instead of figuring out how fast to send the mail and how many connections to open up to an ISP, they should really be focused on sending mail that the recipient wants. My clients who send mail that recipients want and look forward to do not have to worry about the mechanical details of the mail, their mail is expected and wanted and their delivery is spectacular.

0 Comments

Lashback tackles opt-in fraud

Published
by
laura
08Sep
in Delivery Improvement
.

Last week Lashback posted a three part series on opt-in fraud.

One of the issues they commented on is that suppression lists are being passed around and some mailers are actually spamming them. This is something that used to be common, where spammers were harvesting email addresses from opt-out forms and then spamming the addresses or selling them to other mailers. This is why some ISPs and anti-spammers recommend recipients not unsubscribe from mail that they never subscribed to.

In the last few years there has been conflicting data on the prevalence of harvesting unsub or suppression lists. The FTC determined that there was no risk to recipients from unsubscribing. Lashback is now seeing some spam coming into their test addresses.

Overall, there are people who will continue to be suspicious of unsubscribing from mail they do not expect. This will drive up spam complaints and lower delivery. While responsible mailers are not the cause of the negative perception of email, they are competing with the spammers and scammers and sometimes recipients may not draw distinctions. This is why building relationships and trust over email marketing campaigns is such a critical part of delivery.

1 Comment

Results based email marketing

Published
by
laura
04Sep
in Delivery Improvement
.

Two articles showed up in my RSS feed in the last 24 articles that touched on different aspects of the same issue. Senders should improve their email marketing program even when they are working well.

Stephanie Miller over at ReturnPath addresses the lost revenue from current programs.

Consider that if we can earn a nearly $60 ROI by creating email programs that are compelling to just a few subscribers, just occasionally - imagine what we could do if we actually optimized our programs. Your true email ROI isn’t captured by averages. It’s misleading to think about email’s contribution without factoring in the risks of batch and blast which include higher spam complaints and diminished deliverability, list churn and inattentive customers, brand damage and lost future revenue through continued irrelevancy.

Yes. Bad email marketing is profitable now. But the email landscape is not static. Senders must continually improve their programs in order to stay ahead of consumer demands and ISP changes.

Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports addresses companies who currently have successful email marketing programs even though they do not follow all the sender best practices.

Yes, some of the more advanced techniques and tactics rely on access to tools or expertise that, frankly, the majority of us don’t have or can’t find the required investment for.

But there are so many ignored best practices that involve minor tweaks requiring a few minutes of your time. No exaggeration…just a few minutes to make small changes that can make big improvements to your success.

Some of my clients come to me in crisis mode, they were blocklisted or suspended from their ESP for AUP violations. Because their email programs are suspended, they are forced to scramble to make massive changes to their program. This is the absolute worst time to be make changes, when under external and internal pressure. Often the changes that must be made to comply are drastic and immediate. In contrast, when making changes to a currently active and working email program. Internally driven, gradual change will avoid the panic and result is a marketing program more protected against blocklisting or suspension.

0 Comments

Opt-in Reconfirmation in the Wild

Published
by
laura
03Sep
in Delivery Improvement
.

What’s an opt-in reconfirmation email? Also called, as fellow blogger Al
Iverson mentioned lately, a re-engagement email, or a permission pass email.

Al links to DJ Waldow’s write up on Shop.org’s recent re-engagement
strategy, and today I see that Janine Popick, CEO of VerticalResponse,
talking about Coach’s turn at culling their list through this process. What’s interesting here is that, according to Janine, Coach didn’t target this reconfirmation email only at recipients who never open or click. She says she does both, regularly, and received this email message anyway. Another friend of mine, who is also a Coach subscriber, reports to me that she receives regular emails from them (most recently as just about
ten days ago), but that she did not receive this reconfirmation email message.

0 Comments

Getting whitelisted by endusers

Published
by
laura
14Aug
in Delivery Improvement
.

One of the best ways to ensure mail is delivered to a recipients inbox is to encourage the recipient to add the senders from: address to their address book. In cases where an ISP might otherwise bulk folder the email, they will instead put the email into the inbox.

Senders are changing their practices to get recipients to add from addresses to address books. There are a number of companies reminding users to add addresses on the webpage at the time of signup. Most emails have recommendations in each email. Recently, there have been multiple reports of companies who send specific email campaigns to encourage recipients to whitelist the sender.

Cool Email Idea: Customized Whitelisting Instructions from ReturnPath.

How & Why You Need to be Added to Your Recipient’s Address Book from VerticalResponse.

In addition to the direct benefit to the recipient that whitelists the individual sender, there are some hints that ISPs are looking at individual whitelisting as part of their internal sender reputation scoring.

4 Comments

Letting Go

Published
by
laura
11Aug
in Delivery Improvement and Industry
.

Derek Harding has an article over at ClickZ, discussing the importance of letting subscribers go.

Many marketers are embracing the concept of a list exit strategy. That is, developing and managing a process to identify and gracefully remove recipients for whom a list is no longer valuable. Many lists have a long tail of recipients who have been on the list for a very long time but who also have not responded for a very long time. Apart from unconfirmed new registrants, these recipients are the most likely to bounce, complain, or to contain spam traps. Just as confirmation should be used at the beginning of list membership reconfirmation can be used at the end of the lifecycle to separate those recipients who wish to remain from those who have passed their “best before date.”

This is a really important part of list hygiene and one that many senders are just now starting to understand how important. Failure to keep recipients active and engaged does negatively affect delivery at some large ISPs now. As filtering knowledge and measurements filter down from the big ISPs, I expect more and more receiver domains to adopt similar filtering schemes.

Derek provides specific examples of how to use engagement, including triggers. When I have worked with customers on engagement campaigns, determining the right triggers is one of the challenges. The more data a sender has about customers, the more selective the sender can be about selecting triggers. Finding the right triggers and the right way to engage with subscribers is vital.

1 Comment

Delivery thoughts

Published
by
laura
07Aug
in Delivery Improvement
.

I have spent quite a bit of time over the last few days working with new clients who are asking a lot of basic, but insightful questions about delivery problems. I have been trying to come up with a model of how spam filtering works, to help them visualize the issue and understand how the different choices they make change, either for better or worse, their delivery.

One model that I have been using is the bucket model. Spamfilters are like buckets. Everything a sender does that looks like what spammers do adds water to the bucket. Reputation is a hole in the bottom of the bucket that lets some of the water flow out. When the bucket overflows, delivery is impacted.

I think this analogy helps explain why fixing any technical issues is so important. The less water that is added to the bucket by technical problems, the less likely it is that the water from content filters will overflow the bucket.

3 Comments

Strategic email marketing

Published
by
laura
06Aug
in Asides and Delivery Improvement
.

Mark Brownlow has an interview with Simms Jenkins the author of The Truth about Email Marketing. Well worth a read for anyone who is sending email.

1 Comment

Engaging recipients critical for delivery

Published
by
laura
04Aug
in Delivery Improvement
.

One of the issues I have touched on repeatedly is the changing face of blocking and filtering at ISPs. Over the last 12 - 18 months, large, end-user ISPs have started rolling out more and more sophisticated filters. These filters look at a lot of things about an email, not just the content or the sending IP reputation or URLs in the message but also the recipient profile. Yes, ISPs really are measuring how engaged recipients are with a sender and, they are using that information to help them make blocking decisions.

There were two separate posts on Friday related to this.

Mark Brownlow has a great blog post speculating about a number of things ISPs might be looking at when making decisions about what to do with an incoming email. He lists a number of potential measurements, some of which I can definitively confirm are being measured by ISPs.

  1. recipients never click on a link in the email
  2. emails are never moved to a folder or archived (”trash” or “junk” folders don’t count)
  3. recipients delete the email
  4. the emails are never rescued or opened when delivered to the junk folder
  5. recipients never scroll down the email
  6. recipients don’t forward the email
  7. recipients don’t use the interface’s print facility
  8. recipients over-use unsubscribe links
  9. recipients never unblock images or add sender to address list

Successful email marketing is no longer simply about permission. Senders must send engaging, wanted email. Not only does this improve recipient response and ROI, but engaging users is vital for getting delivery in the first place. As an aside, a buddy of mine who works at an ISP was very, very pleased with Mark’s post.

DJ over at Bronto blog posted Friday about a re-engagement campaign done by Shop.com. This was a 2 email campaign specifically designed to engage recipients. The takeaway:

Shop.org was so so close to a perfect execution of an email re-engagement campaign. Timing, subject line, copy, creative, calls-to-action, welcome message - all were brilliant. But…the initial dead links may have lost many. It’s hard to tell if this was a temporary issue or one that was going on for some time. How many potential reactivations did they lose? Overall, I’d consider Shop.org’s reactivation campaign a raving success. Well done Shop.org!

Engagement is no longer simply about getting a recipient to respond. Campaigns with engaged recipients are campaigns that have good delivery. Senders who ignore recipient preferences more and more see their mail trapped in a maze of delivery problems. Send good mail that recipients want and delivery problems melt away.

2 Comments