Email Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability and Response If an email message lands in the junk folder and no one sees it, does it count as “delivered?” Clearly, no. The foundation to every response optimization strategy is to first reach the inbox and render as intended. Find out why commercial messages get blocked as spam, how to read data for good decision-making, how to make a business case for more email marketing resources, and get a bevy of ideas and resources to increase response and revenue from this channel.
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Slide 1 Email Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability & Response Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path @stephanieSAM [email protected]Email Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability and Response If an email message lands in the junk folder and no one sees it, does it count as “delivered?” Clearly, no. The foundation to every response optimization strategy is to first reach the inbox and render as intended. Find out why commercial messages get blocked as spam, how to read data for good decision-making, how to make a business case for more email marketing resources, and get a bevy of ideas and resources to increase response and revenue from this channel.
Email Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability and Response
If an email message lands in the junk folder and no one sees it, does it count as “delivered?” Clearly, no. The foundation to every response optimization strategy is to first reach the inbox and render as intended. Find out why commercial messages get blocked as spam, how to read data for good decision-making, how to make a business case for more email marketing resources, and get a bevy of ideas and resources to increase response and revenue from this channel.
What do subscribers want from us? They want us to help them.They want to be more productive, more beautiful, get a raise, be a better dad. They want information that is timely, actionable. They want to be treated like people. With a name, a history with your company, a unique set of interests.
Slide 6 Subscriber Covenant. There is a covenant in email marketing. Our customers and prospects sign up to receive email from us, and we promise to be interesting. Relevant. Fun. Helpful.
Yet, most of the content that we send is the opposite of that. It’s generic, irrelevant, poorly timed and badly formatted.Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at some of the results of recent email marketing studies that we’ve conducted.
This unnecessarily long delay will negatively impact these marketers’ programs.
If you are not sending email right away, people forget or may have already engaged with someone else or made a purchase. Especially when instant-messaging, immediate gratification, and short-term satisfaction are prevalent, waiting any extended period of time to respond to a subscribe request only serves to damage your brand reputation and ultimately your response rates.
To compound this negative experience, 60% of companies surveyed failed to send a welcome message.
Particularly if you are not planning to include the subscriber in regular campaigns right away, a welcome message is vital, At a minimum, it confirms the subscription success, and acknowledges the subscriber. With no welcome message, many subscribers are left wondering: Did I fall into a blackhole?
While 70% of marketers made a valiant effort to collect meaningful data at the point of subscription – including everything from zip code to birthday to product line preferences,
75% of them never used the data for any kind of campaign personalization or customization. Leaving the subscriber to wonder: Why did I fill this out?? I thought I was going to get valuable information from this company! What a waste of time!
While there has been a lot of buzz in the industry about relevance, we found that many marketers simply continue to do what has always been done.
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free shipping enter to win free stuff grand prize drawing50% off your first order free ground shipping 10% off
free upgraded shippingcontest win a spa vacationbuy one get one free half-off
win a new car 25% off getaway sweepstakes
Amid scores of emails across various companies, all the offers were frighteningly similar - - free shipping, $ off, sweepstakes prizes. The “special” effect was quickly diluted, as each company vied for the subscriber’s attention.
Many email marketers send at very high frequencies.
For both buyers and inquiries (non buyers) in a purchase study we released this year, the retailers we studied during this pre-holiday period from September-December 2008 sent an average of three messages per week. Over these four-months, some companies sent as many as nine messages per week.
59% of retailers sent their promotional emails to inquiries at the same frequency as they sent to buyers, with 23% sending the buyer more email and 18% sending the inquiry more email.
However, the mean frequency of three messages per week could have contributed to customers unsubscribing and perhaps even hitting the spam button as the result of such heavy volume. Certainly that would have been true where subscribers were receiving messages once or twice a day.
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31%
31% of companies added purchasers to their email lists without requesting permission. Meaning, no mention of email marketing messages was made during the checkout process but then following the purchase, the messages just started coming.
A complaint is generated every time someone clicks the Report Spam button. These are offered by all the major North American ISPs like Hotmail, Y!, Gmail, AOL, Cox, Roadrunner, etc. Also by some major European ISPs like Orange and T-Online.
This seemingly innocent little button has a lot to say in email marketing. In fact, it can destroy your response rates and put your revenue in peril.It is the single biggest factor why commercial messages get blocked. And when your messages are blocked at a major domain, they stay blocked until the ISP sees that you’ve corrected whatever the problem was.
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Silverpop Study 2008
If that sort of doomsday is the result, why would any subscriber click that button?Many of us wonder if subscribers know
the impact on marketers.
Silverpop did a study of subscribers late last year (2008). Find the study at www.silverpop.com (registration required) It’s called Spam: What Consumers Really Think.
Eight out of 10 consumers didn’t know that hitting the spam button could result in all of that sender’s emails being blocked by ISPs, meaning that other people who want to receive emails from that company wouldn’t be able to.
That’s why complaints mean so much to email marketers. Even a small number of complaints can get your program blocked at the major ISPs like AOL, Hotmail, Y! and Gmail. Even 5 out of 1,000 messages puts you at the edge of the threshold.
Slide 23 For most marketers, 20% never reaches the inbox.
You might be surprised by exactly how big the problem really is.
Non-delivery (messages not put into inbox – not delivered at all or put into junk/bulk folder) – has started to level off around 20%. This is a problem for both B2B and B2C marketers.
What’s important to understand about this metric is that it is an average. That means that some marketers do far worse than this – seeing 30, 40, even 50% or more of their email diverted out of the inbox. However the good news is that many marketers also do far better than this, enjoying inbox delivery rates of 90% or better. We certainly have many clients that enjoy near-perfect delivery on nearly all the email they send.
Slide 24 If an email doesn’t
land in the inbox, can
it get a click?
Why should that worry you? Simply: Email that doesn’t get to the inbox doesn’t get a response.
The good news is that all the factors that go into reaching the inbox are under the control of the marketer. You. You can balance your need to drive more revenue with the kinds of practices that keep you from getting blocked.
You have a Sender Reputation, even if you don’t know what it is or manage it. It’s like a credit score on your personal wealth. The ISPs and Blacklists are aware of your Sender Reputation and they use it to block you. It’s made up of things like the number of complaints, the quality of your list, your volume and cadence, if you are authenticated and if you are processing bounces properly.
Whitepaper on Sender Reputation: http://www.returnpath.net/downloads/resources/deliverability_081508.pdf
Key Factors in your Sender Reputation:ComplaintsUnknown UsersBlacklistsSpam TrapsInfrastructure & Message StructureAuthenticationHTML configuration/renderingContent (a much smaller factor)
ISPs manage a flood of email messages every minute. Every day.
Now if it seems that ISPs make it too easy to complain or put too high a penalty on this, try to consider their point of view. The flood of email messages is overwhelming.
Of all that flood of email messages, the commercial email that is represented by folks here today is less than one percent of the total. (0.63%)Complaints thus become a proxy for subscriber satisfaction
With tens of thousands of legitimate marketers like all of you sending bulk messages, the ISPs can not take the time to know each of us by name. So they let the data do the talking for us.
And complaints are a huge part of that data. Complaints are a proxy for subscriber satisfaction. They provide the subscriber view. Remember that ISPs share a customer with us – the subscriber. WE all care about their satisfaction.
Slide 29 Your Sender Score is a measure of your reputation. The score is out of 100, so the higher the better.You can look up your sender score for free anytime at www.senderscore.orgIt will show you how your sending practices translate to the ISPs – a high score means you are less likely to get blocked.
Other places to find info on your sender reputation:www.senderscore.orgwww.senderbase.comwww.dnsstuff.com
Let’s go over again the key elements that make up a sender reputation.
Complaints are tracked every time someone clicks the Report Spam button.Complaints are the single biggest factor in sender reputation.How to reduce complaints? Become more relevant.
How to track complaints? Sign up for feedback loops from the various ISPs.More info: http://www.returnpath.net/habeas/Knowledge-Base/Delivery-Resolution/http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/01/return-path-extends-antispam-f.php
Factors to review when you see high complaints:• Frequency• Permission• Segmentation/Messaging• Relevancy• Brand recognition
• Sign up process• Sources of data• Working unsubscribe• Shared IP address (if other mailers
share the pipe with you, your sender reputation is affected by them.)
2. Have a solid infrastructure Most ESPs and all the MTA vendors have good infrastructure. Your IT team may also be highly qualified. But eitherway, you want to be sure that you have someone technically apt working on email. It’s a specialty.
Things to watch out for:Reverse DNS recordValid MX record (give and receive)MTA settings according to ISP guidelinesComplaint processingBounce processingMessage ID and Header
Blog post that summarizes: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/02/return-paths-new-year-communit-3.php
3. Avoid spam traps.List hygiene is vital to sender reputation.A blog posting: http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/01/return-paths-new-year-communit-1.php
4. Don’t email the dead When or if to win-back “lost subscribers” is a question of great debate.Generally, the best practice is to:• Remove subscribers who are not
active after a period of reasonable time, probably 12 months for most businesses, sometimes sooner.
• Before you remove, give them an update and provide some incentive (e.g.: download, coupon, survey) to catch their attention
• Don’t let it get to 12 months in the first place. Review your data and look for areas of fall out – if a lot of subscribers go dormant after 3 months, that is when you need a specific messaging strategy to reach them THEN, rather than waiting.
The Sender Score Correlates to Inbox Deliverability.
Higher deliverability rates tend to result in a higher Sender Score. So if you’re deliverability is weak, it’s because of your sending behavior.
You can think of your Sender Score just like your personal credit score. It’s a reflection of your overall sending practices just as your credit score is a reflection of your financial activities and choices. When you have good credit you are more likely to qualify for mortgages and credit cards but strong credit doesn’t entitle you to these products. Similarly weak credit doesn’t automatically disqualify you for loans and other financial services but it does make it more difficult to gain approval.
Your Sender Score works the same way. High Sender Scores correlate to good practices which lead to good deliverability.
Basic inbox deliverability reporting will tell you:• inbox, junk and missing stats for
each domain. This covers the US, Canada, Europe, Asia-PAC, B2B.
• By campaign• Over time by domain or IP address
When you know this information, you can then figure out what to do. It’s important to look at the individual domain data. Here we see that the total inbox deliverability is only 59%. But it’s isolated to three ISPs. Now that we know that we can take action.
www.returnpath.net | Confidential, do not reproduce
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2. Deliverability data can show the power of email marketing’s effect on website traffic, search and social media.
-When your inbox deliverability is high, your site traffic is optimized. Show the correlation between these, and the impact of frequency on site traffic in a given week.- Look at the spikes in traffic to search, website and even call centers on the days that email goes out. - Calculate the effect of 20% of your email going missing on all your other metrics. Now, you’ve got the attention of your team!
The Boss likes higher website traffic and sales.
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3. Segment out new subscribers and adjust the welcome message to lower complaints.
- Look at complaint data by segment or source. Treat the segments that are most fragile and highest value differently than other segments.- Now you can set up tests to improve your response and inbox reach per segment:content, cadence, timing.
1. Complaints seem to be impacted by factors outside of sending pattern. - Highest volume day, Friday, does not have the highest CR- Highest CR data, Weds, has among the lowest volume
2. Complaints seem to occur when messages "build up" in the inbox. - Weekends, with high volume, have low CR - wonder if this is partly impacting Monday's high CR?
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Mean Stats of the Message Type = A 2,213,168 6,201 0.32%
Mean Stats of the Message Type = Renewal 3,452 10 0.36%Mean Stats of the Message Type = Reg Confirm 77,919 2,101 2.45%Mean Stats of the Message Type = B 331,562 366 0.11%Mean Stats of the Message Type = Series 1 353,446 8,984 2.54%Mean Stats of the Message Type = Series 2 223,152 2,062 0.92%Mean Stats of the Message Type = Series 3 155,963 866 0.56%Mean Stats of the Message Type = Series 4 139,672 590 0.42%Birthday Reminder 297,110 518 0.17%
Volume Complaints Complaint Rate The largest volume messages, actually are in the right range for complaints. However, the overall program sees high complaints
First, you see that there are two types of messages that earn significantly high CR, although the first is not a high volume, the second is.
The first message in this series is not particularly welcome. Although those who do like it, complain at much lower rates, although still rates too high for the average. This program needs an overhaul.
A very relevant message – Birthdays –earns a very low CR.
Which sources are best for our business? Where should we pay for quality?What messaging can be adjusted, at what stage of the lifecycle, to lower complaints?
Creative, Timing, FrequencyWould making the unsubscribe button higher in prominence earn higher ROI?Is our welcome stream too fast/too slow?
Which mail streams can be combined to lower the overall rate? Which need to be separated to protect the highest value mail streams?
.
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3. Save money by becoming a more informed negotiator.
Look at complaints by source. Those sources which have the highest complaints are less valuable.Use this data to renegotiate acquisition and data deals. Or drop bad ones altogether.
The Boss likes cost savings.
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There is no magic to this approach. Mostly, it’s a new attitude, and a bunch of data crunching, which is the stuff we direct marketers love.
Sender ReputationAll of us here today are good mailers. We care about our subscribers and we don’t do malicious things with our files. Yet often, the yin and yang comes into play. Even good mailers sometimes send more messages than subscribers expect from us
Or send to files where the permission grant was so soft that the subscriber didn’t know they were being opted in for promotional email. Or when you send a new type of message to everyone on the file, without expressly alerting them or asking for permission.
The cost shows up in your Sender Reputation.
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“Revenue is down.
Just send another million email messages. Tomorrow.”
Problem solved.I’m brilliant. Again.”
How many of us have had this conversation with the CFO or even the CMO?
Improving Sender Reputation by 19% can increase sales by $1.5 million this year year
Instead, what we need to do is prove to the executives that sender reputation matters, and that we can make a lot of money if we manage it well.How much of a hero would you be if you could walk in and say this to your execs this week?
As an example, consider a retailer that has one million email addresses in its database, sends out three email messages per week and whose deliverability rate is limited to 80% due to sender reputation problems. An approximate 200,000 messages per campaign will not reach the inbox, and thus will not get any response at all.
By improving deliverability through better email practices, the company could increase deliverability from 80%to 99% (a reasonable goal based on Return Path experience). Given an average response rate 2% and a
value/response of $35, that company could increase sales by $1.5 million in a year.
You can calculate what your company might achieve with improved emailing practices to buyers by using your own figures in a similar calculation. Chances are the revenue potential will be significantly greater than the cost of improving your practices.
How will you put this into action in the coming weeks?
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3 Ideas to Steal
Let me help you get started. There are lots of other great ideas being discussed here at the OMS, as well.
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ZigWhile Others Zag
Remember that the biggest impact on sender reputation is complaints. That is all about relevancy and subscriber satisfaction.
1. Think about your content strategy.How can you do something unique, even SOME of the time, in order to break through.
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Create lifecycle-based
emails.
Fisher Price has a strategy that so clearly matches their target market –kids that grow. Using the age of the subscriber’s child, which was requested at subscribe, they delivered fully customized messages – specific to the year and month of the child. Including their own product promotions along with parenting tips and family activity ideas was a great way to build brand equity and drive subscriber value. It’s also smart for the marketer - - once the creative template has been designed, the content can be used over and over, year after year without losing effectiveness.
Remember too that YOUR prospects and customers grow too. Make sure your email program grows with them.
Introduce the idea of a series.
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2. Show up…..
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…the way you intended. Rendering is complicated by image suppression (99% of your subscribers will see the images off version) and the different email clients from Y! to Gmail to Outlook. We all have to manage to the lowest common denominator.
Always test rendering in various email clients BEFORE you send your messages. Ask your ESP for a service to automate this, or get it from your deliverability service provider.
There are some great design checklists available at the DMA/Email Experience
Council. Visit www.emailexperience.org. They are in the Whitepaper room under the “Resources” tab. There are five of them:
• Get – and keep – permission. An important distinction.
When communicating with subscribers who have purchased from you, this practice is even more important. Ideally, you want them on your list for life; you certainly do not want them complaining about you.
31% of retailers in our purchase study did not ask buyers about their interest in email and still sent email without permission. A handful of retailers mentioned during the purchase process that the buyer would receive promotional emails, but did not allow the buyer to choose whether or not they wanted to receive these messages.
While this practice is compliant with CAN-SPAM, it is not a good marketing practice. It does not respect or nurture the subscriber relationship. When customers get email that they have not requested, they perceive it to be spam,
regardless of what the letter of the law says. As a result, some will ignore it or unsubscribe. Others will complain about it, which will have a negative impact on the marketer’s sender reputation, and therefore on their ability to get into the inbox, aka deliverability.
We recommend that all retailers explicitly offer buyers the option to sign up for email during check-out. If a pre-checked box is used, it should be quite visible, and the option to uncheck should also be obvious. No email should be sent without specific buyer consent.
So, this of course applies to non-retail marketers as well. For example, if a visitor to a B2B website completes a form in order to download a whitepaper and is required to provide an email address, the marketer should not assume they have permission to start emailing that person. A checkbox requesting permission should be provided.
Best Buy stood out from the pack with their first promotional email to the buyer, based on their recent purchase.
After buying a Nintendo DS game, the purchaser received an email that featured a selection of other Nintendo DS games. The email’s subject line was: “More for your Nintendo DS.”
From the study: those who sent a promotional message to their subscribers:
•None used the subscriber’s location or other subscriber-level data collected during the purchase process to target their first promotional message to buyers.•Only 15% used past purchase information (the item category) to target their first promotional message to buyers.•58% of the retailers we studied sent the same first promotional email to buyers as to inquiries
Why?We’ve talked about sender reputation and mining data.We’ve talked about permission.We’ve talked about cadence and frequency.But really what we are doing is earning the respect and trust of our subscribers.That is why we bother. To connect with subscribers – who are our customers, after all.
Checklist to Optimize Email List GrowthChecklist to Optimize Email List Growth
Be clear about what you’re offering at sign-up. State the benefits, the content of the emails, the frequency and when the subscriber should expect the first email.
Although the Federal CAN-SPAM law requires only an opt-out, we recommend getting express permission from every subscriber. Also note that other countries have stricter permission standards. Be sure that opt-in is 100% clear and voluntary –don’t pre-check the box. Follow up with a welcome message with opt-out instructions within 24 hours of sign-up. (NOTE: always check with legal counsel for any compliance issue)
Use your website to promote your email program: include sign-up forms in the header, footer and/or product pages of your site. Test form placement and a custom invitation on your most heavily trafficked pages.Make email capture a priority on your search landing pages.
Design subscribe forms that encourage sign-up. Don’t create data collection obstacles. A short form with a few fields (i.e. name, email address) is most effective.
Include links in your transactional emails that cross-sell your newsletter or promotional mailings.
Optimize Email List Growth (Optimize Email List Growth (cont.)cont.) Expand list growth efforts through targeted mailings to rented lists as part of third-party offers, lead
generation and co-registration campaigns.
Be sure to vet potential data partners. Choose partners with good reputations and compliant sending practices.
Make the unsubscribe process instant, perfect, and painless – test it often.
Respect varying levels of permission. For example, unless it is explicitly stated, submitting an
Respect varying levels of permission. For example, unless it is explicitly stated, submitting an email address for shipping notification is not the same as opting-in for marketing email.
Keep permission current. Reach out to subsets of your file who are not opening or clicking every quarter or so. Ask if they would like to receive something different, or provide feedback on your email program.
The right mechanics for forward-to-a-friend mean nothing if your content is not interesting and forwardable. The most popular viral content is often humorous, witty, off-beat or related to current events.
Go multi-channel with viral campaigns – using blogs, social networking sites and other promotions to build support for the campaign.
Plan ahead to measure performance. Make sure your email broadcast system (vendor or in-house) can report the metrics you need
Identify the metrics that matter most to your business for tracking the success of your program.
What to Track
Be careful with open rates. Most are tracked using invisible images and can only be tracked in HTML emails, not text-only. Despite this, open rates can be used:
To determine optimum timing and cadence of campaigns.
Click-through rate (CTR) is all clicks on any link expressed as a percentage.
Click to Open Rate is also a useful metric – this helps you measure the success of your call to action by telling you how many subscribers who opened then engaged.
Conversion rate. Your conversion rate is based on the number of people who take a desired actions (i.e., buy, subscribe, forward). The overall success of your program is determined by looking at opens, clicks and conversions in relation to each other. Watch where subscribers are “abandoning” the process – e.g.: if you have low opens, your subject lines or content is not compelling. If you have low CTR, your call to action is weak or invisible.
Subscribe and unsubscribe rates. Track your subscribe and unsubscribe rates over time and watch how your list is growing (or shrinking): Over the long term; After individual campaigns; After changes to your website.
Setting the denominator: A more accurate measure is to use “inbox deliverability” instead of “sent” when calculating open rate and CTR, as this is the number of messages that actually have an opportunity to be viewed. Use caution when comparing your results to any industry benchmarks, as many systems and vendors report differently.
Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of messages that did not get delivered divided by your total list size. Bounce rate does NOT equal inbox deliverability.
Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of messages that did not get delivered divided by your total list size. Bounce rate does NOT equal inbox deliverability.
Inbox Deliverability. This is different than your bounce rate – it’s the number of messages that actually make it to the inbox. Up to 20% of permission email never reaches the inbox, preventing your message from success.
Complaint rates. This is a key factor for inbox deliverability and is based on subscribers clicking the “report spam” button. Calculate by dividing the number of complaints received over a set period by the number of subscribers mailed during that same period. Even a 0.10% complaint rate can put you on the ISP radar screen for filtering.
Online capture rate. For an opt-in email program, this is the number of people who come to your home page versus the size of your list. You want the number of unique visitors per month to your website and the number of new email program subscribers to be as close as possible.
