Due to its heightened importance in these tight times, we’ve run a couple of posts recently about email marketing: its pitfalls, plus tips for getting more “oomph” from it …so our regular readers may think of this as this as another in that series.
Start from recent research by ReturnPath showing that about 28% of B2B marketing email never reaches the targeted inbox, primarily due to blocking systems implemented by ISPs and corporate IT departments. And it’s not always the same 28%; sometimes your email will reach a given subscriber, sometimes not.
Why does this happen? For starters, because… emails are sent in bulk, they look like spam. Then, there is a whole gauntlet of filters between “Send” and Inbox… from hardware at the receiving gateway, to software on those gateways, to reputation-based filtering services like Postini and Cloudmark; and finally there are filters in some mail clients, such as Outlook 2007.
What to do about this state of affairs? Email expert Stephanie Miller provides a number of suggestions in a post transcribing an interview of her by Mac McIntosh:
To avoid being blocked, improve the reputation of your domain, as well as the engagement of your subscribers. You should want to do these things anyway, because they optimize response and revenue. Engage and delight your email recipients, and they’ll respond with clicks, longer session lengths, downloads and sharing to their networks.
Track your sender reputation. You can get a quick overview of your sender reputation free at senderscore.org or dnsstuff.com. You’ll also want to track your actual inbox placement data – the number representing the difference between what gets reported as “delivered” or “accepted” by your service provider and the open rate. If you can’t get this data from your ESP, you can use a service provider such as ReturnPath.
Map your domain footprint. Chances are that the top 20 domains in your file account for a fairly high percentage of your addresses. If so, you can reach out to each of those companies, find out what sort of filtering is used and try to become whitelisted. OK, so it’s a manual process; but it can be very effective.
Watch rendering. Be sure to know how your message renders – with and without images! – in the various versions of Outlook and on mobile devices. Be sure you create versions specific to the email clients that are most important to you.
Focus on the subscriber. Mail less frequently, but with more value in each message. Keep it simple… no one has time to read a lengthy newsletter; use short, pithy messages and guide those interested to the website. Make your calls to action simple and easy to see.
Highlight/nurture your most active and most socially networked subscribers. Email and social marketing are natural allies; use them together to build relationships and encourage dialog.
Include links to your LinkedIn profile and other social network sites; encourage subscribers to “Share this” by providing auto-status update links at each article.
There is more good stuff in the full interview, so a click on over will be well worthwhile. By way of conclusion, Stephanie says: “The Golden Rule of email marketing is to treat your subscribers the way you would like to be treated – only sending them information that is relevant, timely and helpful.” And above all, “Don’t put your email on autopilot. It’s too important to your revenue and customer engagement and nurturing efforts.”
