Email Marketing, some tips and tricks: Chapter I “Deliberability really Matters”
“Users check their email, and they’re dealing with multiple request for their time, including messages from their boss, colleagues, and family. People just want to be done with most emails, and quickly move past anything that is not absolutely essential.”
Norman Nielsen
Today, reaching the inbox is more tough than ever, then stay in the inbox isn’t getting any easier, build relationships with your customers, uf! A big challenge. Marketers have to recognize the importance of: Deliverability, Mobile, Big Data (increases and taking care of it), clicks and finally conversion rates, as the main values if they want to have a chance to improve the impact of Email Marketing and the capabilities to build stronger relationships with their customers. Let´s starts with Deliverability.
1. Spam Battle: Spam tactics continue evolve, then mailbox providers are forced to constantly refine their filtering technology to keep unwanted mail out of the inbox. That’s means that the algorithms and filtering tactics from mailbox providers never ends. According with the “Deliverability Benchmark Report” (2015, Return Path), global inbox placement rates are decreasing. Worldwide, just 79% of commercial emails lands in the inbox, most likely blocked by the mail box provider.
2. Reputation as a Sender: “The FROM” is the real power of your brand, this is the first WHY that you give to your customers to open it, the first Why for mailbox providers to open the door to your emails. Your reputation as a sender depends basically on your good behavior. As a sender you must keep your lists clean, take the time to understand your audience. You are responsible for what you send and to whom it’s sent. Be transparent, be a good player: if you send relevant messages to a willing opt in list, you’ll build a good deliverability reputation.
3. From 1 to 10, How healthy is your Data Base?
a) Check regularly your IP´s in black lists sites: black list is a process of actively monitoring the Internet for reports of senders sending unsolicited commercial email. Many ISP’s and mailbox providers use these black list as a reference filter to applied to their inbound mail servers in order to prevent spam. Besides, believe me, that it’s easier to send emails to spam notification (one click), then click in the opt out or unsubscribe link even if your customer initially opted in to receive them. Shared or dedicated IP? One or more IP’s? that’s depends on the volume sender. In my opinion, it´s always healthy manage a dedicated IP, and if your volume sender is more than 80.000 registers, you need to move one step more and go for more than one IP sender.
b) Measure, and measure again: Churn rate < BBDD´s grown rate: Churn rate or attrition rate, tells you how quickly your customers are leaving your (in this case) data base. In simple, with churn rate you could know how many, and how quickly are you loosing clients/prospect in a given time. There are different ways to measure it. My way?
(Bounces: soft + hard bounces)
The important thing here is that you have to manage your churn rate always. Be transparent, if one client clicks in yours opt out link, delete it from your database.
4. Engagement Level Matters: How your recipients engage with your emails is a major factor in deliberability. Mailbox providers knows clearly, and analyze which emails their users open and click through, and which others are spam.
5. Be careful with “trigger words”: Free, sale, up to, 30% discount…There was a pretty good chance they would never reach the inbox.
The best tip I could give to you is simple. Look at the emails in your own spam folder. Don’t do what they are doing!!! Look for patterns, test, and try it again. Enjoy it!
