Email Marketing Deliverability

What's the biggest challenge facing your email marketing?

If it's the quality of your email database, you're not alone. According to a new study by Econsultancy, 50% of surveyed marketers cited database quality as the biggest troublemaker in their email marketing strategies. Even more compelling, database quality has held that position three years running. So why is database quality such a big problem? 

Much like gourmet chefs working with spoiled ingredients, marketers working with outdated or unqualified databases have their chances at success handicapped from the start. If your database...

My colleages and I have dispensed a lot of deliverability tips on this blog throughout the years. But wouldn't it be nice to have the most useful nuggets of delivery-related wisdom compiled for easy reference? Well, your wish is our command.

Over the next few posts, we will, ahem, "deliver" the top ten tips to get your email campaigns to subscribers' inboxes in today's email ecosystem Let's start it off with the first two tips ...

Tip #1 - Subscriber Engagement Is Critical to Email Success
In years past, permission was seen as the key to having mail accepted. But we know things are changing. As...

Regardless of how long you’ve been using (or not using) a marketing automation tool, you should always be on the lookout for ways to improve your marketing efforts—whether it’s by implementing drip campaigns, exploring the wonders of dynamic content, or creating highly targeted email blasts for specific audiences. The point is, there are always new and exciting things to try, especially with all of the extra time that you free up by implementing an automation system in the first place.

But how do you know what the next step is?

The best way to make sure that you’re always progressing with your...

When people talk about the basic elements of a successful email marketing campaign, there are a lot of facets to consider—responsive design, relevant messaging, personalization, pertinent send time, and beyond. But one facet of a successful email campaign that many marketers regrettably overlook is deliverability. After all, no matter how great the email, if it doesn’t reach the inbox, it can’t be effective.

Which brings us to Sky Angel.

Sky Angel came to ExactTarget in 2007 after experiencing deliverability issues sending emails from their internal servers. As a faith and family television...

Are you a digital marketer? Do you work for a travel brand? If you answered yes, then this blog post is for you!

ExactTarget recently released Reaching Today’s Digital Traveler, a compilation of tips and tactics that are critical for digital marketers in the travel and hospitality industry. Here’s the list of tactics, plus the questions you should ask yourself to keep your digital communication strategy on track.

1. Grow Your Subscriber list

To determine why your brand might be missing out on conversations with interested and ready-to-purchase travelers, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you...

If you’ve mastered marketing automation 101, and even tackled our 9 steps to go beyond the marketing automation basics, then you’re ready for a few of our expert tips. At this point, you should be delivering highly relevant and dynamic email content, sending out drip emails to nurture prospects over time, and managing your social profiles using real-time and scheduled posts.

Sound about right? If so, then read on to find out how you can continue to improve your marketing automation efforts with these 8 steps, inspired by the Mastering the Art of Marketing Automation eBook:

1. Don’t get lazy. At...

A client recently asked, "Are there any deliverability issues with using images hosted on third party CDN whose domain does not match the domain of the sender?"

If you're not aware, CDN means Content Delivery Network. A CDN is means of making your web pages and/or web applications load faster, by caching content on multiple servers, then requests for that content can be fulfilled by the nearest or most responsive available server. I might be oversimplifying it a bit, but in my personal experience with various CDNs, that's how they tend to work. Akamai might have been the first one-- they...

A useful update was posted today by Lili Crowley on AOL's postmaster blog indicating that they have recently tweaked their anti-spam filters. As a result, they will be issuing more CON:B1 errors for senders who exhibit "a spike in unfavorable e-mail statistics." (The CON:B1 error is defined by AOL here.) It certainly sounds like the filter change aims to increase their spam catch rate as it relates to a sender's reputation.

While mailbox providers like AOL routinely update their anti-spam defenses, it is uncommon for them to give notice to the email community of such a change. This official...

A friendly agency client of ours dropped the team a note today, explaining that when they reached out to Hotmail regarding a client's blocking issues, Hotmail's response included a recommendation that the sender enroll in the JRMP program. What is that, the client asked? Are we enrolled?

JMRP stands for "Junk Mail Reporting Program" and this is just the name Microsoft uses for their feedback loop mechanism. An ISP feedback loop, if you weren't already aware, is the mechanism by which an email is reported back to the sender (or the sender's email service provider) when an ISP user clicks the...

Nostalgia is fun. One need only look at BuzzFeed’s Rewind or Facebook groups celebrating the tenets of growing up in the ‘80s to notice the popular Internet trend of commemorating childhood favorites. It’s a rush of fond memories and “walking-uphill-both-ways” pride when we recall the objects and attitudes we prized in years gone by.

One piece of nostalgia that anyone with Internet in the ‘90s can remember is the hilarity and virality of those terrible ‘90s chain emails. These emails made their unwarranted way to the inboxes of early Internet users of all ages, and they defined the...

3sixty Live April meetings are coming to a city near you! 

• Connect professionally with the most innovative marketers in your area who also use the ExactTarget software
• Provide a place for sharing both strategies for marketing and ways of technically implementing them on the platform
• Connect directly with ExactTarget resources and people who can help you do your job better
• Innovate with...

Everything was going fine. You had set up your email marketing campaigns properly, all of your subscribers were double opt-in, you were sending emails on the right frequency, and your content was exactly what you had promised.

As far as you knew, people loved this stuff.....

But then, out of the blue, Gmail and the other ISPs started blocking your emails! But why? Why? Because those subscribers aren't interacting with your email anymore. They've become disinterested. They've become what are now known as 'the un-engaged.'

Just sending email to your subscribers isn't good enough

Just sending email...

I ran across this article yesterday, sharing an example of how one marketer engages with his readers to try to figure out if they want to truly continue receiving his messages.

It’s interesting, but I think that it misses the mark.

The goal, from a deliverability perspective, is to drive engagement. To get subscribers to interact (engage) with your email messages. If you can get a subscriber to actually respond, why would you drive that response toward something negative, like an unsubscribe request? Why wouldn’t you drive that response toward purchasing something, or clicking through to your...

What is the easiest way to comply with ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy?

First things first... What is ExactTarget's Anti-Spam Policy? If you have a look at the policy, you'll find that we expect that our customers "will use our software only to send emails to customers and prospects that have directly consented (opted-in) to receive email."  In a nutshell, the answer is found in two simple words: "No surprises."

Clients often ask about the propriety of engaging in buying or renting lists, or engaging the services of an append house. All of these are against the Anti-Spam Policy.

To understand why,...

When I am dealing with blocklist issues, it is not unusual for someone to ask me, "Well, why doesn't the blocklist operator just tell us what the spamtrap addresses are?" At first blush, this would seem to be an outstanding question.

But, the issue isn't really quite that simple. These lists of addresses are the bread and butter of the blocklist operator. (See, now the picture makes sense!)

Blocklist operators look at their lists of spam traps as sources of information--and the source of their livelihood. They view them the same way that journalists view their sources of information. In fact,...

I recently got an email asking what we would call an email address that used to belong to a person but no longer does. The answer is that these addresses are still called "spam traps"--the big difference is that we have several categories of spam traps now.

These days, we seem to be dealing with three main types of spam traps:

1. "Pure" traps: These are accounts that never existed and aren't used to sign up for any mail streams. If they are published, they're published in hidden places (such as comments on web pages).
2. "Typo" traps: These are relatively new traps that we have had to start dealing...

About 18 months ago, I blogged about some impending changes to cookie laws in the EU, and potential ramifications for marketers. As it turns out, those laws didn't cause the world to end, some Governmental sites weren't even compliant, and to this date I do not believe the legislation has been truly enforced on any individual or organisation.

That being said, the latest proposed updates to the EU Data Protection Regulations have potentially much more widespread impact for all marketing, and indeed any company which handles or processes customer data.

If the legislation were to be passed in its...

The online masses were first introduced to the wonders of webmail in the mid-90s, and one of the pioneers in that space was a service dubbed HoTMaiL, which launched to the general public in 1996. Their moniker’s odd use of letter case called out the technology that powered the service: HTML. From that point on, the market and landscape for webmail has immensely proliferated and evolved. (Microsoft eventually acquired HoTMaiL in 1997.)

Out with the old, in with the new. In July 2012, Microsoft launched a preview of Outlook.com, their new email service that’s the planned successor to Hotmail....

You may remember my recent post wherein I mentioned that a client had a rather unique problem with Gmail delivery; their ability to get ExactTarget-served mail to the inbox ultimately seemed to be negatively impacted by mail being sent by them OUTSIDE of ExactTarget. In response, a reader asked, "How does one ensure that 3rd party affiliates are not pulling you down? Would a redirect protect the parent domain name?"

I'm not entirely sure that you can work with third party affiliates and ensure that their activities referencing your brand and domain won't have any impact on your core mailing...

The margin for error in Marketing has become razor thin. Here are five "MegaTrends" that underscore why marketing professionals need to be at the top of their game in 2013.    

MegaTrend #1: Customers are More Informed, More Influential, and Less Patient

Today’s customers are better connected, more informed, and more technically savvy than even 3-5 years ago. They have considerably more access to information to make smarter purchase decisions. They are much less patient with brands that do not deliver the information and offers they want. And they are much more vocal in expressing satisfaction –...