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This is the final installment of a three-part series dedicated to helping email marketers make the best of their campaigns through proper list management and hygiene.

Part 3: The Benefits

While taking the time to clean and maintain your list may seem time consuming, the payoff is more than worth it.  For instance, here are the some significant gains to think about.

Save time and Money

1. You spend less money by not sending to people who don’t engage (open or click) your email. Although email is the cheapest form of digital marketing, unnecessary revenue is wasted cost due to delivery issues.
2. Retain money that can be focused on other marketing efforts such as mobile marketing.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a sender, whether you manage email in house or utilize an ESP like mobileStorm, you may be wondering lately……

Why are my messages being delayed?  Is my ESP to blame? What should I expect and why?

The truth of the matter is, it’s the holiday season and everyone, (YES including spammers), send a LOT of email. As you can imagine, the onset of increasing volumes has created chronic email congestion, resulting in delayed and in some cases non delivery.

To provide a more familiar picture, think back to Thanksgiving day or past holidays where you were caught in a traffic jam (bumper to bumper) and couldn’t seem to get anywhere. As a result, you were late.

Just as holiday road traffic can be a provoking situation for travelers, the same applies to email. However you may be wondering, who is supposed to manage all this traffic and make sure it gets delivered anyway? Isn’t that the ISP’s Job? The answer is yes, but it doesn’t quite work the way you may think.

During the holiday chaos, ISPs, especially AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo, are completely slammed due to the influx of email traffic.  Unfortunately, they have very low resources to manage the inbound capacity (Annalivia Ford from AOL talks about this on her blog tiled “It’s a racket“. Hence, they are forced to use literally every resource available to ensure their members (your subscribers) get “prioritized” mail. Well…what is considered priority to a subscriber?  It’s usually personal email where friends and family wish each other happy season greetings, or other communication among colleagues.

Although these messages are high in priority, ISPs also understand their customers need to receive other types of communication. For example, to ensure messages such as receipts, email confirmations, and itineraries are delivered, they place priority on transactional type of mail. Since bandwidth is limited, ISPs are forced to limit the number of non priority messages by rate limiting or deferring mail (usually a marketer’s campaigns) until resources become available.

However, ISPs do encourage in some cases to retry sending messages. This process may take up to 3 days, (depending on your MTA configuration) before it is actually delivered.  Furthermore, ISPs also look for messages that have good levels of subscriber engagement. This is actually tied to their reputation calculator which contains other metrics, but engagement is an important factor to review when deciding prioritization once resources are available. After all is said and done, there is also the war on SPAM which accounts for 80% of the traffic on the internet.  It is no surprise keeping this forth type of mail out of  the inbox completely hogs up the majority of bandwidth  ISPs have left to  accept and process legitimate email.

As for the ESP, many have asked, what part do they play in this seasonal headache? Are they to blame? Like our traffic jam analogy, ESPs represent the means of transportation used to get to your destination. Although many differ in size, have a variety of features, performance, offerings, and top notch customer service, their basic function is the same.  However, we do work with clients to ensure they are engaged with their subscribers, and send mail that people are expecting and want.

Delayed email during the holiday is something that is a common issue each year and will subside once the season is over.  ISPs have a tough job and so do senders, however, be patient. These guys have a lot of mail to deliver and they will eventually get to yours as long as you plan ahead for delays, constantly review your email program, implement best practices, and keep it relevant.

Until next time…

Deliver and stay engaged

(The following was written by Patrick Knight, Director, Client Deliverability, and myself.)

When you send out an email campaign, you need to know how many of your subscribers actually took the time to click on your message and open it. This measurement is called the “open rate.”

The open rate compares the number of people who opened an email message to the number who did not. It’s a percentage of the number of messages “delivered.” An open rate is dependent on a number of different factors. It could be affected by aesthetic reasons, or it could reflect your data management, which in turn may have to do with deliverability issues.

For instance, if your email is blocked by Yahoo!, and the majority of your subscribers have Yahoo! email addresses, the open rate for your email campaign may be disproportionately low.

On the aesthetic side, an open rate is influenced by things like the subject line, sender identification, HTML rendering (such as how the email is show on a mobile device), bulk folder delivery, relevancy of content, and timing of send.

Sometimes a message might be reported as having been opened multiple times. This may happen for a number of reasons. For example, email clients such as Outlook render HTLM within the preview pane, so that each time the user scrolls through his or her inbox and passes your message, it will count as an open. This happens because each time the user previews the message, the user is actually requesting the embedded image from your server, resulting in the report of an open. Ultimately, this would be counted as multiple opens versus a unique open.

Unique opens are somewhat like total opens. The important difference is that only one user is being counted or reported. For example:

• User #1—opens email 2 times.
• User #2—opens email 4 times.
• User#3—opens email 4 times.

This makes a total of 10 opens. However, there are 3 unique opens.

Whether or not emails are opened consistently is largely based on sender reputation, relevancy, and other factors mentioned earlier. Although open rates render inconsistencies, email is very much about building a relationship with your subscribers. As you achieve this through relevant content, setting and honoring expectations, creating trust with your brand, and following best practices, email open rates tend to increase. Read the rest of this entry »

(The following comes from Patrick Knight, Director of Client Deliverability for mobileStorm.)

In the world of email, bought lists are pretty common. Buying a list is not against the law per se(CAN-SPAM never specifically states it); however it’s not such a safe bet since it’s not necessarily clear how these lists are compiled. In many cases they contain addresses that were collected by third-parties who use pre-checkboxes, `and or contain harvested, spam traps (old addresses used to monitor and identify spam activity) and invalid addresses (addresses that are no longer active and bounce).

Contrary to what many marketers think, purchasing lists is not very cost effective, when you consider the facts. Anywhere from 80-90% of these lists have data that is useless. Not to mention the costs marketers incur by having to resolve issues as a result of using these lists.

There is never a time when you should send messaging to people who didn’t opt in. The question to ask your self is …Did these people request to be on my list? Do they expect to receive emails from you, have you sent emails to these people before. The main point here is consent.  These people did not give you permission to send them messages.

Those marketers who do buy lists run serious risks. Beside the fact these people never sign up to receive your messages, even if you were to perform a permission pass campaign you run the risk of hitting spam traps, and in the end, it’s just not worth the risk.

 A sender’s reputation is based on measuring many variables including, spam trap hits, number of complaints, and invalid addresses.  As mentioned, many of these lists contain addresses that affect these variables negatively which can hinder if not ruin a good senders reputation.

Ultimately, good senders can end up being listed by major blacklists.  IP addresses used to send messages in some cases can be permanently blocked.  Furthermore, subscribers who have given permission to receive messages will most likely not receive it because of blocks place on your IP. It may also take a significant amount of time and resources to repair your reputation. If utilizing an ESP this can also cause collateral damage to your provider.