Deliverabilty
Although email marketing remains one of the most cost effective marketing medium, thousands of pounds are still being lost every year in the UK online retailing sector due to failed delivery of emails.
According to our latest annual Email Census, on average 10% of email marketing budgets are still being wasted because of failed delivery. However, this is of course only an average, and whilst some marketers have excellent deliverability rates, others are experiencing extremely high levels of waste, reaching well over a quarter of their budget.
This has to be addressed. At Adestra, we believe that improving deliverability rates is fundamental to boosting companies’ bottom line and our commitment to deliverability has saved online retailers thousands of pounds. For example, as a direct result of our service, leading online gifts and gadgets retailer, I Want One Of Those (IWOOT), has seen its return on investment for email marketing soar, as its deliverability rates have increased by over 50%.
So how can marketers improve their investment in email marketing?
Establishing and then protecting your reputation is fundamental to improving your deliverability success rate. It is crucial that email marketers work to ensure complaints are kept to an absolute minimum, to avoid being blocked. It is surprisingly easy to be consigned to the blacklist. The level of complaint does not need to be substantial. Transparency is vital for email marketers wishing to protect their reputation. Ensure your customers can easily recognize the email that is being sent, make it easy to unsubscribe and check that the function works and never send after an opt-out request has been made. You should also set expectations right from the outset, send a welcome message detailing what the emails will contain and how often they will be sent.
Maintaining a high quality database is also important to ensure your reputation is good. To improve your deliverability success rate, the database needs to be analysed and periodically cleaned and updated. You must keep on top of the churn, such as people retiring from their emails or those who are no longer with us. Do not send to people that have never responded, and always be wary of spam trap addresses, such as hotmail and yahoo.
However, if your reputation has been damaged, be careful about rushing to abort your IP address in the attempt to start afresh with a clean slate. It is usually much better to maintain a permanent IP address and fix your reputation, rather than starting from scratch with no established history.
If you are buying 3rd party data, pay extra care to the quality of the database. Check that they are not web-scraping. This unscrupulous practice, otherwise known as web harvesting, where emails are extracted from websites and then integrated into data systems will produce very poor quality data. With recipients not opting to receive the emails, there is a much higher chance of spam complaints to ISPs. This is likely to result in blacklisting, where staff emails could even be blocked and any good data is rejected, resulting in significantly lower conversions and return on investment.
One of the main differentiators between Email Service Providers is their investment to increase the deliverability of client’s emails and the quality of database they use. Customers should ask how they ensure that the emails do not appear on blacklists, the relationship the ESP has with ISPs for whitelisting, about any authentication policies that are in place and are they involved in industry bodies working in the field of deliverability.
To ensure our clients are offered the most comprehensive and detailed analysis on email deliverability, we have recently partnered with Return Path, the world’s leading email deliverability service provider. This partnership means that Adestra is the only European headquartered Email Service Provider (ESP) that is fully seeding all outbound email campaigns.
This will identify whether the messages at 137 worldwide ISPs have reached the inbox, bulk folder or are being blocked outright. This access to advanced real time analysis on deliverability has enabled marketers and our staff to quickly isolate problems and understand where to make changes in order to improve the effectiveness of their campaign, and therefore significantly reduce failed delivery rate and the resulting budget loss.
In addition, marketers should work with their ESP to build their deliverability reputation, by assessing content, both the copy and the HTML code, to minimise the risk of junking, as well as testing email designs to ensure it suits all major email programs.
Under a backdrop of austerity, accountable marketing is more essential than ever. Although emails are widely known to be the most cost effective marketing channel, it is evident from our research that there is an urgency to improve delivery rates, as users report significant budget loss. ESPs that utilise the latest and most comprehensive deliverability tools can save marketers thousands of pounds, as failed delivery rates become a thing of the past.
Steve Kemish, Strategy and Services Director at Adestra
