This post was written by John Landsman, Director of Strategy and Analytics at eDatasource and was originally published by eDataSource, the leading global provider of independent competitive intelligence for email marketing, social media and ecommerce activity.
Gratuitous though it may be, we will point out that there’s only negative value in deployed email that doesn’t reach a recipient’s inbox. This is never a happy subject, but it’s particularly critical as we head into the most important retail selling season. There is no worse time to encounter deliverability issues or actual inbox blockages.
We keep hearing that 20% of permission-based emails get blocked. This is a somewhat misleading statistic, because it may include emails in the performance-marketing and lead-generation industries, where formal permission is not always clear.
According to eDataSource’s research, deliverability on average in the B2C brand marketing world ranges for a vast majority of senders between 90% and 96%. If yours is at or better than that, congratulations! If your deliverability is less than that, you should assess your send practices for opportunities to lessen the risks they are creating.
Not to put too fine a point on it, email marketers are always the parties most responsible for creating the deliverability problems they encounter, even and especially by engaging in practices they’ve been told not to do.
The most important issues that may negatively affect your email delivery are:
– Addresses that are inaccurate and undeliverable
– Delivery to addresses that are no longer valid and have been converted to “spam traps” or “honey pots,” meaning that sending to these addresses will give your overall deliverability and history a damaging strike
– Complaints (spam button hits)
– Ineffective removal of unsubscribed or undeliverable addresses
– Black lists
– High volume/frequent delivery to low (or no) activity addresses
– Inconsistencies in list sizes and frequencies; e.g., not sending emails for a couple of weeks or months, but then sending every day; or periodically sending to your non active file, as by suddenly including non-active subscribers in large deployments, before major promotional periods. This is a common temptation before the Holidays, and it usually ends in disaster.
Best practices are thus the reverse:
– Make sure that new addresses are permissioned, verified and correct, most easily achieved by sending a confirmation email upon signup
– Clean up and remove inactive subscribers (meaning those that have not opened an email in 3-6 months)
– Remove any unsubscribe and bounces immediately
– Work yourself into higher mail frequencies. Higher frequency should never be used to combat lower engagement, and any frequency increases should occur over time rather than suddenly. eDataSource research shows that most senders with reasonable open/read rates can send up to one message a day per subscriber without a problem, and even more in the Holiday period.
– Send email your subscribers will be interested in opening, because it’s targeted and populated with content based on subscriber location, preferences or behavior.
In short, ISP’s like senders with predictable, well thought-through email programs that inbox users don’t complain about. You can’t outsmart ISP’s in the long run by utilizing multiple IP addresses, piggy-backing on shared IP pools, or constantly changing IP addresses or sub-domains. These are all short-term, unethical approaches to fix deliverability. While they may sometimes work for a week or two, the only long term solution is to follow best practices, which in turn isn’t really that difficult.
All you need is a little bit of discipline.