The From Line

Incentives are a great way to motivate new signups - and they often work. However, using incentives for the sole purpose of growing your email list can lead to problems. The quality of these addresses will likely suffer since many use fake addresses just to get their hands on the incentive.

Those fake addresses (whether made up or belonging to someone else), will lead to high bounce rates, complaint rates and have a negative impact on your sender reputation. Before you know it, you have a major deliverability problem on your hands.

Email deliverability is the most crucial part of your marketing plan. You can have the world's most talented copywriters and the most eye catching graphic designs, but if your email ends up in the spam folder, or perpetually floating around cyberspace, your hard work is all for nothing. But how do you know that your emails are reaching their destination? Most importantly, what do you do when you find out they aren't?

According to the Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report by Return Path, “only 81% of all permission based email makes it to the world’s inboxes. Globally, one out of every five emails lands either in a spam or junk folder (7%) or simply goes missing—blocked by ISP level filtering (12%)”. Though an 81% deliverability rate is certainly respectable, over time, that 19% difference can make a big impact on your bottom line.

Consider this: if you send out 1,000 emails, that is 190 customers who will never hear your message. 190 missed opportunities to make a connection with a person who might be looking for exactly what you are selling. If you snowball this as your email lists continue to grow, you could soon be looking at thousands of lost clients.

To combat this, monitor your email deliverability closely by analyzing bounce back errors, and act to rectify the problems as they arise. If the subscriber’s mailbox doesn't exist, you can remove it from your list. However, if it is a temporary issue, the email address can continue to be monitored and sent mailings periodically. List cleansing and email verification services like LeadSpend exist to aide marketers in this.

Originally created by ISP’s to help identify senders of spam email, feedback loop management can be a great way for a marketer to effectively manage their email campaigns and send their subscribers messages they want to see.

Many ISP’s provide feedback loops to email senders as a way to help proactive companies cut down on spam complaints the ISP receives. Whenever someone tells their provider they’ve received a spam email, it’s basically like a “complaint” to the ISP. While each ISP’s threshold differs, the outcome is the same with all of them. Too many complaints will have a negative effect on all of your email campaigns, making it more difficult for subscribers who actually want your information to receive it.

With more and more email messages being sent, it’s important to understand what causes recipients to flag your message as spam. Common reasons for flagging email messages as spam include:

• Irrelevant content
• Receive too many messages
• Recipient doesn’t remember opting into your list 

Even implementing email campaign best practices, you’re likely to get some subscribers who complain. While receiving some unjustified spam reports is unavoidable, there are some very practical ways you can use this information to improve your email campaigns.

List cleansing

When you review your feedback loops, you should unsubscribe any visitor who has reported your message as spam. This will make you look better in the eyes of the ISP’s and help keep your overall complaints low.

Message Testing

Feedback loops can also be used to help you identify what messages your list wants to receive and help you better target your message. Messages that receive a lot of complaints are clearly and indicator of the type of message your list does not want. The simple solution is to send more messages like what your list wants to receive and fewer of those that they don’t.

It’s easy to dismiss spam complaints as having come from unhappy people, but when used correctly, the information provided by feedback loops is invaluable for helping your refine your email marketing campaigns. For more information regarding feedback loops or any of your other email messaging needs, please contact us. Also, please feel free to check out one of our previous posts, It includes one of the most detailed FBL lists around!
 

Despite enormous efforts on the part of marketers, email deliverability rates have halted after the first half of 2011, coming in at 81%, according to a study released on September 20th by Return Path. 

Although reasons for this are numerous and often situational, a certain amount of blame in this case can be placed on “priority inbox”. This lovely little tool, created last year by Google, essentially puts a brain within your email account. It sees and records every action and configures message placement accordingly. So what we’re seeing are high reported delivery rates that don’t necessarily reflect the number of messages actually delivered. Technically the provider may have accepted it, but it doesn’t mean it’s landed in the customers’ inbox.

Really Dumb Moves By B2B Marketers

The B2B marketers who didn’t learn their lessons with traditional email marketing systems are making the same mistakes with marketing automation.  “Dripping out text messages to purchased lists from marketing automation systems will yield the same sub-par results” says Michael Weisel, Chief Technical Officer of Gold Lasso.  As a veteran in the email deliverability space, Michael thinks investing more money in better technology will have no effect on email deliverability and conversion rates for the long run.  By purchasing lists, B2B marketing executives are attempting to justify their latest technology purchases quickly.  This tactic often results in dire consequences that no business can afford such as email blocking, loss of software licensing and the squandering of a marketing budget.