When my nephew was much younger, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas together on VHS until the tape broke. He even thought his name was Jack the Pumpkin King! The soundtrack will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.
Not only is this one of the best movies of all time, but it's a wonderful commentary on the state of email marketing during the holiday season. I don't just mean that trying to get email delivered is a nightmare starting around Halloween or that marketers find themselves in somewhat different situations than they're used to during the rest of the year. The flow of the movie and the soundtrack fit with how email marketing happens during the holiday season. It happens every year.
There's a dramatic uptick in all email marketing, be it legitimate email marketing or spam, that starts when the weather gets cold. Some years, it triples or quadruples normal email volume. And that means slower mail servers, more filters, more complaints, and slower response times. It also means overworked, cranky mail and abuse admins. I know. I've been one of those cranky abuse admins.
The rules surrounding email deliverability, which are confusing enough, get more complicated during this time of year. It feels like every company you have ever driven past and every partner of theirs is vying for your attention. There are a lot of little things that you can do, from holiday ramp-up strategies to promoting special holiday-only marketing campaigns that draw customers in.
I'll leave you for now with this very important thought.
Engagement is more important than ever. If you don't get the attention of your recipients, you'll find your email in the spam folder or blocked during your most crucial sales period.
As I've been writing this, the song "Making Christmas" has been running through my head. It makes me want to ask which mindset do you have for your email campaigns, going into this holiday season?
"Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider legs and pretty bows.
It's ours this time."
(Your focus is on your ideas of what your recipients should want. You reach years back into your subscriber database. You send out email to people who didn't give you permission.)
Or
"This thing will never make a present. It's been dead now for much too long.
Try something fresher, something pleasant."
(Your focus is on what your customers are really interested in. You're interested in actively engaged subscribers rather than the number of subscribers on your list. You use dynamic content to create a one-to-one experience for your customers.)
According to the “2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey” from the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, “The No. 1 strategy for marketers who wanted to improve effectiveness without spending more, according to the June 2009 poll, was shifting from traditional to digital media. More than one-half of respondents also reported shifting spending away from brand-building initiatives, and 38% were putting more spending into lower-cost media.”
And as more marketers shift to digital media, the tactic that is seeing the largest increase in spending is email.
According to the “2009 Media Survey Results & Analysis” study conducted by Round2, “40% of US Marketers reported that they had increased spending on email marketing in 2009.
What This Means for Marketers
Increased dependency on email marketing means three things:
1. Email is no longer optional. It has firmly established itself as the #1 tactic for 1to1 marketing. And email has become the “go to” tactic for word-of-mouth marketing as brands empower email subscribers to “share” email messages and offers with their friends on Facebook, their followers on Twitter, and their connections on LinkedIn.
2. Email marketing will become more sophisticated as marketers move aggressively to integrate email with other tactics and technologies – like CRM, SMS, POS, Websites, and Social Networks -- that are used to keep customers connected to the brand. The cornerstones of effective email marketing will be Integration, Automation and Optimization.
3. ESP (Email Service Provider) selection will become a more strategic decision. Marketers must evaluate and select an ESP by their ability to provide “industrial strength” application functionality plus consulting services including 1to1 marketing strategy, email and landing page design, email deliverability, and application integration.
One of the most frequent questions that we in Deliverability Services get asked is how to keep Comcast blocking from recurring.
Comcast aggressively blocks mail they deem their users don't want--even more so than other receivers. Right or wrong, they have filtering in place that they believe is effective and offers their users maximum protection from spam and unwanted mail. Ultimately, their obligation is to meet the needs of their users and not necessarily to meet the needs of senders.
The two biggest reasons Comcast blocks mail is because a sender's mail earns too many complaints or because a sender is sending to too many invalid Comcast addresses.
Senders are understandably upset when their mail gets blocked at Comcast, but by and large blocks are avoidable and are the result of less-than-great sending practices.
To avoid blocking by Comcast, or any receiver, ensure that you're sending mail to subscribers who have explicitly opted-in, are expecting to receive your mail, and will find the mail relevant.
If your sends keep getting blocked, it's time to review your sending practices. Is your opt-in clear and explicit? Do subscribers understand what you'll be sending to them and how often you're going to send? Are you meeting those content and frequency expectations or are you sending more frequently than you said you would or different content than you said you would? If a subscriber opted-in for your mail six months ago, are they still going to find the mail relevant and look forward to receiving it or has your mail now become just another of dozens they receive daily?
If you answered "no" to any of the questions above, it's time to change your practices to meet your subscribers needs and expectations. That may include less frequent sending, changing your opt-in, making your content more relevant and more of a one-to-one communication, or simply asking your subscribers if they still want to hear from you, which is known as re-engagement.
ExactTarget is excellent at helping clients get wanted and expected mail delivered and helping to maximize delivery and return on investment. However, if you're not meeting your subscribers' needs and expectations or continuing to send to addresses that are no longer valid you're going to continue to experience delivery issues at Comcast and possibly other receivers.
For more email deliverability tips and Best Practices, check out our free whitepaper, "Email Marketing CAN-SPAM Compliance."Click tracking. We all do it. It's a best email practice. We all want to see who is following our links, what draws our subscribers in. Was this targeted email marketing campaign effective? What was the most interesting part of the email? Where are my readers engaged? Was this email campaign better targeted than last week's?
But how you do it makes a huge difference with spam and virus filters. What do I mean? I'll tell you a secret. Phishers and spammers like to use IP addresses and URIs of popular websites in the text of their emails and then put in HTML that makes it look like the recipient is clicking on http://www.bank.com. But you don't do that, right? What you might do is use http://www.partnercompany.com or even http://www.yourbusinesssite.com in the email that you're sending out through your favorite ESP, ExactTarget.
That's a no-no. Definitely not an email deliverability best practice. Why not? Because you want us to track email clicks in those targeted emails. You have a domain set aside just for us and that's the domain that we use for your email campaigns. Your subscribers see http://www.yourbusinesssite.com, but they click on a link to http://email-yourbusinesssite.com.
And that, my friends, looks like you're trying to be tricksy.
"So what do we do, email guru?" you cry in despair. Let me give you a little email design tip that will make a huge difference with filters like Postini and MessageLabs (both of which are used frequently in B2B email), or email providers like Gmail and Hotmail.
Use your words. Wow your targeted opt-in audience with your awesome descriptive powers.
Look how we've grown! or http://www.exacttarget.co.uk/
Come party with us! or http://www.connections09.com
With so many communication channels available between Twitter, RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn, SMS, Email, and not to mention broadcast TV, how do marketers cut through the noise and be heard by their audience? One To One Marketing is your insurance plan of choice. I'm a self-proclaimed Google Reader Junkie and find myself on Twitter throughout the day, but what do I actually read? I stop to read content that is aligned with my personal and professional interests. It's as simple as that. Email deliverability is essential, but so is getting the attention of your reader when they decide to open, read, mark as junk, or click through your message content.As a marketer, if you have done your homework and performed audience segmentation and analyzed the demographics along with their behavior, why waste that valuable information without sending personalized and compelling content? When you create your integrated marketing campaign, I suggest that you begin with a strategy that covers all the key aspects from your toolkit: email, SMS, landing pages, and voice, all mapped out to maximize the user experience.
Content personalization takes your insurance policy to the maximum level. Beyond personalizing their name on the email itself, consider adding dynamic content that is meaningful to the recipient. This will help ensure that your direct marketing program is successful.
Web analytic data helps drive remarketing efforts, as well. Think of the marketing possibilities when you can segment your audience based on their interaction with your website within the last 5 days.
Check out our whitepaper "One-to-One Marketing Field Guide Set" that describes effective use cases and strategies to leverage a comprehensive marketing program with email, SMS, landing pages, and voice. That is what One To One Marketing is all about!
This made me begin to wonder if email clients like Gmail and Yahoo would take a page out of the SSL certificate industry’s playbook. If you go to any of these sites you will notice when you click on “Login” that the address bar in the browser changes. Not only does it go to the https site, but the address bar also appears green with the company’s name and logo in it. Companies pay good money to provide this piece of mind to their customers.
What does the future hold for email deliverability? Will the Googles and Yahoos of the world start charging each company if they want to be put on the whitelist to ensure commercial email is delivered? With many email providers out there, it could get very costly and confusing if you had to work with each one individually to make sure your 1 to 1 Marketing campaign was a success.
Regardless of what the future holds, having a strong Email Service Provider will help alleviate many headaches. To learn more about working closely with you ESP to improve deliverability, check out another great post by Al Iverson, You Control Your Deliverability Reputation, but Your ESP is Critical to Ongoing Success.
The spam that you receive in your inbox on any given day is probably only a fraction of what is actually sent to you. This is because Internet Service Providers (ISPs) evaluate the content of the emails that are sent to you and reject many of them.There are many different factors that an ISP can use to tell if an email is spam. Without knowing all of the criteria that the ISPs judge emails against, it's possible that you could accidentally include content in your email marketing message that causes the ISP to think it's spam.
Content Detective is a tool within ExactTarget that helps you identify spam triggers in your email content. this feature mirrors the logic used by spam-filtering software to identify words, phrases, and patterns that are likely to trigger filters. It then recommends a resolution to each identified problem. After you run the Content Detective, you can then edit the email to remove the triggers.
Typically, having just one potential trigger word or phrase will not affect your email's deliverability. However, if two or more potential triggers are found, you should remove them to improve your email's chances of being seen by the subscriber.
Subscriber engagement refers to recipients caring about the email you send them. Recipients who read your emails, who open them (load images), who click on links, these are your engaged recipients.
Having a low level of subscriber engagement means your deliverability is going to suffer. ISPs notice that recipients don’t care about your mail. The smart ISPs notice which emails, which sending IP addresses, which senders, send mail that people want, and which ones send mail that people don’t want (or don’t seem to care about). These top ISPs use this as one of their “stack rank” measures to decide which mail to deliver to the inbox and which mail to deliver to the spam folder. If your mail has a very low open rate, a very low click through rate, you’re likely to be ranked low enough that it’s going to push your mail to the spam folder.
Gmail, in particular, seems to be very watchful on this front. And, if you run afoul of this problem at Gmail, you really don’t have any options for immediate recourse. They don’t typically respond to sender requests for assistance, and what their users want takes precedence over a sender’s desire for the inbox. Few other ISPs feel any differently.
The ISP won’t fix it, so what do you do? Here’s what I’ve learned: What you need to do is stop mailing to people who don’t care about your emails. You’ve got a wealth of data at your fingertips that tells you who is opening (loading images), who is clicking on emails you send via ExactTarget. Take those subscribers who have opened or clicked at least one recent email from you, and consider them your core of engaged subscribers. Try restricting your sends so that you are mailing only to those subscribers. Continue that process for a few weeks of solid sending, and you’re going to improve your sending reputation at most ISPs.
After you’ve climbed your way back to the inbox, it’s time to figure out what to do with your un-engaged recipients, all those people who have never opened or clicked on any email message you’ve sent. This is where testing and application of marketing strategy can come in handy. I’ve seen test data that suggests that in some cases, sending to unengaged subscribers less often will help to get them more interested and help to get them to open or click on your email messages. (This helps when subscribers were simply overwhelmed by the amount of email you’re sending.) I’ve also seen cases where that’s not enough to keep you out of the spam folder in the long term, and what you need to do is re opt-in (reconfirm) your unengaged subscribers. They’re not looking at your emails anyway, so don’t be afraid to send them off after one last “hurrah” – send them an offer for a discount, freebie, or spiff, and ask them to click on a link to remain on your email list. If they don’t respond, stop mailing them.
What happens after all of this is that you’ve cleaned up your mailing practices so that a greater percentage of the mail you’re sending is perceived as wanted. The net result is that you look like a better sender from an ISP’s perspective, which is just about the only perspective that matters when trying to get your mail delivered successfully.
Here's the most common way you can run afoul of a phishing filter. See this bit of HTML code?
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">www.yahoo.com</a>
That bit of code says it is linking you to Yahoo, but it's actually taking you to CNN. It's a very simple trick, but it is a trick employed by bad guys, and if your URLs look like this -- where the link domain doesn't match the domain written out in your email -- your message will look like a phish or a spoof.
You're much less likely to have this issue, if you make sure the domain matches in both places:
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">www.cnn.com</a>
Even better yet, try not to write out the URL domain at all. Use something like this instead:
<a href="http://www.cnn.com">Visit CNN's website</a>
That way there's no domain to compare to, and you'll avoid a phishing issue, even if you enable link tracking in ExactTarget (and aren't using a custom domain with ExactTarget).
Back on March 10th, I quoted Chip House on why opt-out email append is bad news. That was one of Chip's “5 Ways to Kill your Email Deliverability” from his article in this month's Visibility magazine. Today, I'll talk about another one of the points he raises: Misstep #3: Buying a list.
Chip says: “This is so bad, so insidious, and so detrimental to your deliverability that I don’t know where to start. Where appended lists might have a few spamtraps per million addresses, a purchased list will have hundreds. Nothing will raise your complaint rates more or drive blacklisting more than sending to a purchased list. This will kill your deliverability and your reputation and it will take a long time for you to climb out of the hole.”
Want an example of what can happen when you buy a list? Here's my favorite.
E360 is a company labeled by Comcast, and even by a judge, as being what “some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.” (That quote being from a court ruling that did not go in E360s' favor.) E360 is famously in a number of legal tangles – against anti-spam blacklist Spamhaus, with internet service provider Comcast, and with various individual plaintiffs who allege that E360 spammed them.
Now, E360 has turned around and sued a company called Choicepoint. From what I can tell, Choicepoint is the source of the email data in question, the data that got E360 sued by those various individuals. E360 is alleging that Choicepoint gave E360 email addresses that were people who had supposedly opted-in to receive emails, but had not.
That's the core of the problem here. When you buy a list, you're taking somebody else's word for it that the people really did opt-in to receive third-party emails. There are a lot of liars out there selling lists, and even if the vendor is not a liar, are you sure they're smart enough to have appropriately vetted and validated the addresses themselves and the associated permission? (After ten years in the email industry, I'm still not sure that any vendor I've dealt with is smart enough. “Legitimate” vendors have sold clients spamtrap addresses one too many times.)
And what does it actually cost to buy a list? In E360's case, it cost them approximately $350,000. That's what they ended up spending “defending and/or settling three lawsuits: Ferron v. e360; Silverstein v. e360; and Ferguson v. e360.”
First, try to be quicker about scrubbing bounced comcast.net addresses off of your list. Especially if the list is new, or if you're new to ExactTarget. It's worth manually setting bounced addresses to invalid after your first big send or two, and it's pretty easy to do. Contact the deliverability services team at deliverability@exacttarget.com for an easy cheat sheet that will guide you through the process. If you want, we can enable the system to do this for you automatically in the future. We don't enable that by default, because most clients seem to prefer more granularly-configured bounce processing.
Next, if you have a good history of subscriber activity (open and click data) going back for 3-6 months (or more), then consider pulling back so that you're sending mail only to comcast.net subscribers who have opened or clicked on an email within the past 3-6 months. This way, you'll leave behind a bunch of bouncing addresses, as well as people who aren't opening your emails. (People who don't open your email are more likely to complain, degrading your deliverability.)
These two steps can help to dramatically improve your sending reputation at Comcast. Comcast, like most big ISPs, blocks for two main reason: high bounces, and high spam complaints. Each of these steps help to address one of those two things.
These include:
Misstep #1: Cheating on Permission
Misstep #2: Opt-out Email Appending
Misstep #3: Buying a List
Misstep #4: Assuming More is Better
Misstep #5: Abusing a Subscriber’s Trust
Read the article and do what George Costanza did to change his success. Since spamming isn't working, do the exact opposite.
Chip
From my boss, Chip House, published in the March 2009 issue of Visibility: The Magazine for Online Marketing Strategies. In the article, "5 Ways to Kill Your Email Deliverability," Chip has this to say about opt-out email append:"The database companies of the world who make money by buying and selling your information will tell you that email appending is a good idea and that “everybody does it.” My advice to you is: don’t do it. If you are not familiar with the term, email appending is where a database company appends an email address by making a match on the postal address. Since most companies have a legacy file of customer postal addresses that is much larger than their email file (often 10 – 100x larger) this allows these companies to have a quick fix to grow their list of email addresses. As you know, if it seems too good to be true it probably is."
Click here to read the rest of it. It's very much all good advice.
Asking your recipients to add your email address to their address book, or “safelist” you as a sender, and it’ll help you at other ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo, too. Gmail, in particular, runs a very “subscriber-centric” spam filtering model, and things like address book adds, or “always show images from this sender” seem to help with deliverability.
It’s not always easy to measure the positive boost from an address book strategy. But we do know that whatever boost you get will be positive, and it costs nothing to do. So why not do it?
Anyway, day one of the EEC was a success. The panel I moderated titled: “Email Deliverability Success is a Strategy….Not a Game, and Not an Accident” was a blast, and I think well received by the audience. We had standing-room-only in a room jam-packed with marketers hoping to learn some new nuggets on optimizing their email deliverability. We focused on the 7 steps to developing an email deliverability strategy. I summarized this topic in an article eM+C a few weeks back.
Perhaps it was the opening keynote with DMA’s Ramesh Ratan, Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio and Stan Rapp, founder of Rapp Collins, that got people in the mood to hear more about the topic. Ramesh mentioned DMA data that showed email was the only item that wasn’t cut or reduced from marketers' budget plans for 2009. Planned spending is flat from '08 to '09 at $700MM. Plus, Jeanniey mentioned that “Deliverability is still the most important technical element of a successful email, and that 70% of the “best practices” from 2006 are now wrong.” How’s that for a cool, dynamic industry!?
Stan went on to deliver the most compelling case for email marketing I have ever witnessed in his keynote titled, “It’s the e-Conomy Stupid.” For me, it was something about the fact that Stan brings an amazing history and objectivity to the topic. And, Stan is convinced. In his words, “Email is the tightest link ever forged between buyer and seller. Email is the heart beat of the internet. Emailers: you don’t know how good you are.”
Why all the praise? Stan knows the ad business. Ad’s just don’t work as well any longer, but email works REALLY well, with an ROI far ahead of other channels. He cited the misallocation of ad spend that continues on Madison Avenue and big brands which dedicate over $185 billion in annual advertising budgets, yet dedicate only $1 billion to email.
I agree. To me the disconnect is shocking – maybe criminal. The ROI of email is the highest of all marketing vehicles, yet it only gets 1/185th of the spend. Let’s go people. Let’s take back Madison Avenue!
We all do it. We think we know everything there is to know about what we do. Then something changes or we come across a situation where we're just out of our depth. The same basic concepts have applied in email delivery and online marketing for the last decade, but there are different, better, newer tracking and laws and and and... CAN-SPAM compliance, feedback loops, DNS-based blacklists, right-hand side blacklists, email authentication. The list goes on and on.
Delivery is the act of transferring email from the sender to the recipient. Deliverability is the art of achieving maximum inbox delivery across multiple domains. You cannot approach email deliverability with the same mindset that you approach offline marketing. Email marketing is a powerful, powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but the strategies that apply are more about interpersonal relationships, relevance, and the recipients' preference - the coffee shop relationship.
How do you use combine the basics with new technologies to optimize your email campaigns? What have you done to design the best opt-in email advertising program possible for your company?
Lack of permission = spam complaints. Spam complaints = blocking. Meaning, lack of permission will keep you out of the inbox.
To avoid problems, follow these tips. Don’t buy lists or use third-party signup/registration processes. People getting email from you should have signed up with you directly. Make sure they were told, at the point of registration, about your plans to email them. Make sure you have a checkbox, and not a pre-checked one. Ask for permission, don’t assume. Hiding an email permission statement in your privacy policy might be legal – but it’s certainly not best practice.
And keep in mind that ISPs treat these reports as valid spam complaints. So, if you email your subscribers too often, to the point of annoying your subscriber base enough that they start hitting the “this is spam” button, you can end up in the bulk folder, or blocked, even if you’re staying true to permission.
We’d recommend setting clear expectations up front as to how often somebody is going to receive email from you. Tell them, when they sign up, how often you’re aiming to land in their inbox. And be weary of daily or more often than daily mailings. It may seem like a great idea, but it can end up taking you down the fast path to deliverability woe.
In case you can't read it, this ad says "Want to write something good for the cinema?"
I think this is the way we all feel sometimes. A pile of drab ideas, scrap pieces of paper piled high masking any glimmer of talent we might have had.
(or is it just me??)
It can be particularly hard if you're the only email marketing expert at your company. Or one of only a small team of email marketers. Sometimes you need a fresh face to bounce ideas off -- or just someone who can understand how hard it can be to improve your email list management program.
Someone better than Janice in Accounting.
Well that's exactly why we created ExactTarget 3sixty. Our online user community for 1 to 1 marketing professionals gives you the sounding board you've been craving. Now you can ask questions to the community and get answers from other marketers who've been there, done that.
And that's not all. You can submit ExactTarget product ideas, download hundreds of training resources, and join user groups based on your interests. Curious about email deliverability? Emerging messaging channels? API usage? Email design? You're not alone!
(this is when we start holding hands and sing Kumbaya...)
Nicole
Marketing Communications Associate
Derek Harding from Clickz today summed it up pretty simply with two words: "It sucks."
In his article he goes on to very clearly explain the short term and longer term dangers of this practice. All concepts that line up directly with what our very own email marketing deliverability and strategy gurus Al Iverson and Chip House have recently had to say.
Nice work Derek, and thanks for keeping it buzzword free!
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