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.

Increase delivery and Strengthen brand reputation

1. Your delivery will increase and as a result reach a larger portion of subscribers who are interested in your message
2. You increase the chances of subscribers purchasing your product or attending your event
3. Build a positive reputation with ISPs (also contributes to better delivery)
4. Strengthen your relationships with subscribers
5. Increase the market value of your brand

Check out mobilestorm’s case study on how implementing best practices increased delivery by 20% here.

So…what’s next?

As an email marketer, maintaining your list is clearly the most logical thing you can do for your business.  Let’s face it, in this economy, none of us can afford to waste money especially because of something that we can prevent. If you are not sure how to maintain or clean your list, mobilestorm can help.  We have trained account managers with years of experience that can work with you on implementing techniques to ensure you are getting the best out of your investment.

The New Year is here and along with it is an opportunity to get your email list into shape.

Until next time, keep it clean!

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

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.

An increasing email open rate is indicative of a campaign’s success, even if it’s not absolute. A number of factors can increase open rates, which are the starting point of determining the true impact of your campaign. Increasing email open rates can depend on a variety of factors. For example, open rates only account for HTML emails, not plain text.

Other things to consider: Is the origin of your list in-house or not? Have you emailed these people before? Are you sure this is the content they want to receive? The more you follow best practices and keep up list hygiene, so too will open rates be more optimal. At mobileStorm, we have experienced professionals who can provide guidance on best practices and offer strategic services to ensure that you stay whitelisted as a sender. With our constant monitoring of deliverability statistics and relationships with ESPs like Google, AOL, and Yahoo!, you have the best chance of getting delivered.

Four of the most important factors a marketer can control in terms of increasing open rates are:

• To build ongoing relationships.
• To develop a trusted “from address.”
• To create relevant subject lines and content.
• To encourage recipients to add you to their safe senders list.

True, by itself an open rate can’t serve as a complete gauge of the impact of the campaign. It is only a starting point, because an “opened email” doesn’t necessarily equate to a “read email.” Moreover, it doesn’t tell you whether or not the recipient completed the marketer’s desired action. Other metrics such as the render rate can help create a more complete picture, with data such as click-through information, delivery failures, conversion data, etc. Having said all that, however, it’s important to know that along with other metrics, the open rate gives you a starting point to determine how your campaign performed.

(The preceding was originally a two-part series that appeared in mobileStorm’s email newsletter about digital marketing, Outside The Inbox. Such articles offer in-depth instruction to messaging marketers, new and experienced alike. To make sure you don’t miss any of this valuable advice, subscribe to Outside The Inbox today!)

(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.