Adestra

We all know how costly and time-consuming it can be to build your email lists.

If collecting organically, getting the balance of collecting commercially viable data without adding a huge barrier can be tricky (one for a blog topic in its own right).

Buying in data can seem like the easy way out, but there is a considerable risk of bringing in poor quality data that can negatively affect overall results and the deliverability of your campaigns as a whole. It can be a bit of a minefield but by using the right suppliers and data collection techniques you can get it right.

What do you do as an organisation to protect the quality and useful life your list? Once you have built a good list do you look after it? It’s easy to think of a list as a resource that is there to be tapped into when required. It is often overused or conversely, neglected. To maintain the life of a responsive list you need to use it consistently and use it well or 6 months later you will be asking yourself why your results are declining and you will be looking to bolster your list again

This probably sounds familiar to you. I know many of my clients experience these problems. They put all their time and effort into obtaining new data but then 6 months later find that despite their hard work the list has become unresponsive.

How can you prevent this?

There are some simple steps you can take to keep your list responsive and reduce the impact of list churn

Keep subscribers active and engaged. Empower them to distribute your content

• Manage expectations from point of signup (What will they receive? When?).
• Welcome them immediately to ‘start the conversation’ and use this message for initial ‘housekeeping’ such as add to safe senders.
• Contact them consistently as per the initial expectations. If you said it would be a monthly communication make sure you deliver (where possible without sending poor / irrelevant content).
• Your subscribers are likely to have access to many contacts working in the same field or interested in the same topics and they will know far more about their colleagues/friends than you could possibly know. Utilise this by providing opportunities to send to a friend and sign up to your services (perhaps at a discounted ‘friends referral rate’)

Reach out to inactive subscribers

• Ask them if they are still interested? If they are not perhaps you can cross promote another communication / product. Failing that, they unsubscribe but at least they leave with a good perception of your brand – perhaps you can cross promote another service on the unsub page?
• Forcing people to stay on your list will lead to ‘emotional unsubscribers’ – not good for your results. Don’t make it difficult for recipients to unsubscribe or change their preferences.
• Allow them to change their email address.
• Consider offering ‘breaks’… perhaps they are going away for a while. Allow them to suspend their email for x weeks / months to give them added confidence in your email marketing ethics whilst your competitors are seen as spammers!
• Make use of Adestra MessageFocus ‘recurring campaigns’ to contact inactive contacts with a gentle reminder that you are still there “We miss you!”

Hopefully these pointers will help, feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts and experiences.

Rob Hunter

Client Strategy Consultant

I spoke at a SIPA email marketing network evening with two other speakers from Electric Word and Incisive Media.

A really interesting evening, it was very refreshing to see the comments being made about what work and doesn’t work reflecting the recommendations we’ve been making for quite a while.

The main points were

Be relevant, it works:

Target don’t blanket: pushing out emails to loose selections can often be the easiest solution. However, this bad direct marketing practice pushed up unsubscribe rates. If you are working for an organisation with a large number of marketers, all of whom share the database, having a high number of unsubscribers is not good for anyone.

Third party data rentals for email are dangerous:

Attendees reported limited success, but many highlighted experiences of low response rates. This is particularly prevalent if the list is quite high profile and rented a number of times. Some senders had got into problems with getting emails delivered due to black listing issues which caused some serious consequences.

Emotionally unsubscribed are useless:

Review your database. There will be a number of people who have not read any email you have sent them for a number of months. There is some research that extols the brand benefit of simply being in a person’s inbox. However, the budget you are wasting and the dilution of your campaign results this creates means that this benefit has to be out weighed.

When thinking about over what time period you should use to remove people, there is no golden rule, but we’ve been recommending 3 months if you’re sending weekly emails, and the analyse to see if anyone you suppressed resigns up! If there are a considerable number, then extend the time period.

Designs can be improved:

An excellent presentation highlighted that tweaking from names, subject line, the layout of body copy and actual copy tests can impact on campaign results significantly.

Is there an industry best time to send email marketing?

No! Many marketers are sending their email campaigns out through habit- “we always do our newsletter on a Friday as we always have!”. To discover the best time for you to send your email marketing look at your web logs over the past 3 months. See when people have already chosen to come to your site and use that as an indicator.

It is always interesting to be in the presence of people who have such a refreshing approach to testing and are committed to improving their email marketing. I for one took a number of new ideas from it, and are looking forward to the SIPA conference in July and learning more.

60% say they don’t need to improve, yet 80% can’t measure how much they are losing through poor deliverability

The largest survey of email marketers in the UK, The E-consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census March 2008, shows deliverability is a major problem with more than half having trouble getting into recipients’ inboxes AND 80% having no idea how much sales revenue they are losing through poor deliverability. Of those that could measure it, email marketers estimated they were losing 11% of their budget and agencies put this figure higher at 14%.

Paul Crabtree, Marketing Director at Adestra, says: “By fixing deliverability UK email marketers could boost their sales revenue by at least 11% – for UK businesses that equates to over £550million.”

60% of emarketers say they don’t need to improve deliverability, yet 80% cannot measure how much they are losing through poor deliverability. Ensuring emails are delivered into inboxes is such a fundamental objective, yet it is their lowest priority – it appears emarketers would rather be doing more appealing things like behavioural targeting, dynamic content and strategy.

“Deliverability is being largely underestimated by marketers – but it is absolutely critical. The bottom line is deliverability equals sales revenue–a one per cent improvement, or even less, will boost revenues significantly. If email marketers don’t get this fundamental process right there is no point spending any more of their budget on email marketing–they may as well flush it away,” adds Paul.

With the value of sales generated by direct marketing running at £125billion, and of this total online sales via the internet reaching £52billion (source: DMA Economic Impact Analysis 2006), Adestra estimates email marketing to generate around 10%, or £5billion worth, of sales.

Emarketers need to be tracking, and staying on top of, deliverability on an ongoing basis as it can fluctuate up and down. It is not a ‘one-off fix’ – improving deliverability in the short term does not mean it is permanently improved. Best practice methods need to be implemented.

How to improve deliverability

There are a number of proven methods to improve that all-important deliverability rate. Applying a series of data management and technical ‘standards’ can make a significant difference in a matter of days.

Work with an ESP that has the tools to identify and suppress previous bounce backs
Implement good deliverability policies including:

1. Technical: implement authentication and certification schemes.

2. Data: suppress hard bounces and ‘report as spam’ requests from ISPs

3. Pre-send testing: Check your message content via spam tools pre-send

4. Monitoring: tracking deliverability rates to identify and remedy problems

5. Invest in data cleaning campaigns and ensure accuracy in your database

The report also highlights the fact that a worryingly high number of marketers are not getting the basics right – a quality database, relevant content, good deliverability and follow-up trigger mechanisms are all essential for email effectiveness.

*The full E-consultancy report is available now from www.adestra.com/census

One of the reasons for the failure of NatMags’ Jellyfish magazine has been blamed on email distribution problems.

What lessons does this hold for email marketers?

Read the full post on the eConsultancy web site here

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant

B2B or B2C, the chances are that you are relying on delivering a significant number of emails into web mail. New versions of web mail systems are being released with different methods of filtering and handling messages.

We’re recommending you conduct an audit of your database, to understand how concerned you should be about web mail.

Read the full article on the eConsultancy web site:

Rob Amos, Client Strategy Manager

Investments on deliverability should be driven by sensible, well thought-out commercial reasoning rather than by ‘scare’ stories in the industry press.

Following E-consultancy’s report that shows that the email platforms and services market is set to grow by 20% to an estimated value of £178 million by the end of this year, I’m convinced that one of the main drivers of this growth is deliverability – email marketers are investing in achieving better deliverability rates.

I’m torn between whether email marketers are spending on deliverability as a result of not wanting to be the star of the next ’scare’ story in industry press (such as have appeared on this very site!) or through sensible, thought-out commercial reasoning.

Interestingly, DMA research (The Email Service Provider Distribution Report) shows a real difference in the level of deliverability achieved by UK email service providers.

[This is only half the story too. There are also companies with in-house email systems - how are they faring? In my experience, many are not even measuring them to find out.]

The survey of Email Service Providers (ESPs) identified that they are achieving different rates of false positives of between 0.5% to over 5%.

The difference in these ‘blocked in error’ email rates shows how even those dedicated to email broadcasting are experiencing varying success rates. This is something all email marketers should consider when deciding on an ESP partner.

Why worry about deliverability?

Last week over lunch, I was chatting with one of our clients who operate in the online retail sector. This large brand was still mulling over whether deliverability investments were worthwhile and was struggling to concoct a way of proving the business case to colleagues.

We ended up doing some simple maths to work out ROI in order to come to a decision. These sums can be used by anyone and are shared below:

With a low deliverability rate

In this example, 100,000 people are mailed and 95% are delivered (the worst rate in the DMA research) meaning 95,000 are delivered.

Of them, say 5% click through (4,750 visits) and 10% convert on site. This leads to 475 orders

With a higher deliverability rate

Using the same numbers but just increasing the deliverability rate, 100,000 people are mailed again and 99.5% are delivered (best rate in DMA research) This means that 99,500 are delivered.

Of them, 5% click through again meaning 4,975 visits and 10% convert on site = 498 orders

The difference is 23 orders. Just using the average transaction value of a typical order, you can calculate the absolute return. If this increase in revenue is higher than the investment into better deliverability rates, then the decision is easy.

Looking at the flip side, should your deliverability rate worsen, then the potential to miss out on orders is a sobering thought. Email marketers experiencing erratic rates may want to consider this and work with their ESP to implement a monitoring policy or measures to take away the uncertainty.

[In addition to this, there are concerns about how emails are displayed and the impact on brand, but this is something for another blog entry.]

Anyone interested in finding out more about deliverability can do so in white paper can get a copy via the Adestra web site:

Henry Hyder-Smith is Managing Director of Adestra.