Tips For Successful Email Distribution
From ipinfinity.com
Heightening delivery rates for email is an increasingly big challenge for marketers. But some of the latest email techniques can dramatically improve distribution and campaign success.
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Beware of consumer unsubscribes
Poorly targeted communications may be delivered, but it’s a high risk strategy as unsolicited mail will be marked as spam by the consumer, disallowing any further contact. If you work to the theory that “if you throw enough mud at the wall, some will stick”, ISPs will become suspicious too many complaints and they will block your emails completely.
Ensure your emails are relevant
Matching lifestyle and interests with pertinent timing and relevant content is the sure fast way to avoid being unsubscribed. Quality email data providers are able to link addresses back to lifestyle and demographic criteria, enabling greater segmentation and thus more relevant content.
‘Throttle’ campaigns
Avoid sending out campaigns in one huge chunk and look to have a ‘throttle’ facility which staggers a campaign over several days. This will lessen the chance of the ISPs perceiving your communications as spam based on volume.
Avoid Blacklisting
ISPs are the key to delivery. Get blacklisted by them and your emailing days are over! A reputable ESP should look to understand the nuances of and foster relationships with each of the main 21 ISPs in the UK marketplace.
Sender Score
Membership of such a body also enables an ESP to test emails prior to mailing in order to determine a “Sender Score” to denote whether the campaign is being perceived as spam by the ISPs. A negative score gives the ESP the chance to change copy or image content any number of times until the score sits in a positive ranking. Obviously, this gives greatest opportunity for delivery through ISP blocking protocols.
Renderability
Each ISP will have different viewing protocols what looks good in Hotmail, for example, may look poorly presented with AOL. Testing creative prior to mailing for Renderability with all the main ISPs enables adaptations for perfect viewing in every environment.
Test Links before Mailing
Any links used within a campaign need to be rigorously tested before mailing. Why risk losing business from a successfully delivered email purely because the links are inactive!
Reporting
From the outset, ensure reporting products can gauge rates for delivery, click throughs to offers and eventual purchase. It’s essential to incorporate these reports with key client ROI, revenue and profit levels so that response reporting is clearly relevant to the business measures of the client.
Test, Learn and Feedback
Controlled mailing and post campaign analysis enhanced with lifestyle data enables mailings to be constantly refined. As in offline, building up a picture of customers and prospects is essential raw email addresses are not enough. Feeding and tagging response data back into the overall customer database positions email marketing as an integrated part of customer insight and is a major factor in increasing deliverability over time.
