Emaillabs' Guide to Successful Email Delivery
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High Performance Email Marketing Introduction Unlock the Secrets to Better Deliverability Deliverability is still the marketer’s top challenge when attempting to optimize their email marketing efforts. Recent changes in email clients and at major ISPs have put the end recipient in more control of their inbox than ever before. Therefore, proper list hygiene combined with reputation are the most important areas for marketers to manage. The dreaded “spam complaint” button has become a favorite tool of email recipients when dealing with unrecognized or irrelevant messages. Regardless of whether you are a B-to-B or B-to-C marketing professional, you are reading this white paper because you are interested in enhancing your email deliverability. Your delivery results will depend greatly on the quality of your opt-in list. Why? Because your list quality affects your deliverability and deliverability affects returns. Quite simply, a little investment into your email marketing process will reap a lot of return for your program. Fortunately, there are numerous easy and effective ways to manage your permission-based list and get the most out of the subscribers you already have. ISPs now make little distinction between spam and unwanted email. How do they tell if an email is unwanted? They’re watching how people interact with your emails. Having a large list of inactive recipients (those who don’t open or click on your messages for long periods of time) or a list that generates excessive invalid address bounces or spam complaints is seen as spam and routed to bulk folders or blocked. This goes far beyond the permission standards previously applied, and unwanted email is now treated as if it were spam. To help you optimize your deliverability, we compiled nine best-practice articles on how to boost deliverability, utilize permission practices, manage your reputation, drive recognition by recipients of your messages, keep your list clean, and improve your unsubscribe process all in an effort to reduce spam complaints. For a collection of more than 150 articles on email marketing best practices, as well as tools and statistics, please visit our Resource Center at http://www.emaillabs.com/resources/. And don’t forget to sign up for our monthly best-practices newsletter, The Intevation Report, at http://www.emaillabs.com/resources_enewsletter_subscribe.html to stay up to date on email marketing trends and get timely best-practice tips. We hope you’ll enjoy these articles and find them useful for your email marketing program. We are always happy to speak with marketers about their email marketing programs and recommend specific improvements. Please contact us at 866.362.4522 to talk to one of our representatives. ~ EmailLabs 1 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1. Unlock the Secrets to Better Deliverability...........................................................................................................................1 GENERAL 1. Permission: Standard or Best Practice?..............................................................................................................................4 2. The Seven Best Ways to Boost Deliverability in 2007.........................................................................................................5 RECOGNITION 1. Recognition is the New Email Must-Have............................................................................................................................6 REPUTATION 1. Make the Most of a Good Reputation..................................................................................................................................8 2. Whitelisting: A Privilege Worth Earning................................................................................................................................10 3. Can You Pass an E-Mail Reputation Audit?.........................................................................................................................11 LIST HYGIENE 1. E-Mail Permission, Privacy Best Practices..........................................................................................................................13 2. Why Easy Unsubscribing Really Is Better............................................................................................................................15 3. Many Opt-In Sources, One Permission Standard................................................................................................................16 4. Spam Complaints: ISPs Aren’t the Enemy...........................................................................................................................18 High Performance Email Marketing 2 www.emaillabs.com 1.866.362.4522 General GENERAL Permission: Standard or Best Practice? We believe permission is the engine driving the email marketing train. So, it’s a rude shock to wander back into the dining car and find people still arguing opt-out as an acceptable strategy. Permission -- opt-in, double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, whatever form you use -- is no longer one of several options for responsible email marketers. It’s even evolved beyond being a best practice, something to shoot for or debate at conference workshops. Permission is now a required practice and is critical to your email program’s success. Sending email without permission hurts three critical facets of your email program: deliverability, customer brand experience, and ROI (define). Deliverability Major ISPs require all bulk email sent to their users to be permission-based. From the AOL bulk-email guidelines: All bulk email to AOL members must be solicited, meaning that the sender has an existing and provable relationship with the email recipient and the recipient has not requested not to receive future mailings from the sender. Documentation of the relationship between the sender and the recipient must be made available to AOL upon request. AOL’s whitelisting service requires permission, as does its feedback-loop service, which alerts you to email blockages and failures. MSN’s policy reads: You may not use any MSN services to send Spam. You also may not deliver Spam or cause Spam to be delivered to any of Microsoft’s MSN Services or MSN customers. And Yahoo’s policy states: Don’t send unsolicited email. Make sure that all email addresses are confirmed with an opt-in process that ensures the recipient wants to receive your mail. Permission is also the standard for accreditation and trusted-sender services, which helps email pass through filters and get delivered to the inbox instead of the junk folder. Some even specify the highest level of permission: double/confirmed opt-in. Customer Brand Experience The ill will a recipient feels toward your unsolicited email can transfer to your brand. A 2003 Harris Poll found 79 percent of Americans were “somewhat” to “very” annoyed by spam, which included not just the typical financial and pharmaceutical mailings but also any unsolicited email, even from brand-name advertisers. Annoyed customers inflict long-term damage, too, when they click their spam-reporting buttons and submit your email to blacklists. That can get your email blocked entirely or filtered to the junk folder. This is the most direct link to deliverability damage. ROI Permission-based lists significantly outperform unsolicited mailings. Sure, the contrarians argue, but permission-based lists are much smaller than lists built through unsolicited means. True, but every analysis we’ve done or seen demonstrates the higher response rates from permission email deliver more sales, leads, and desired actions than does unsolicited email to larger lists. 3 General Companies that send to permission-based house lists typically receive CTRs (define) of 5 to 15 percent or higher. An exceptional response to non-permission-based email from house lists would be 1 to 2 percent. E-Mail Marketers Take the Pledge Another argument that permission is a standard: The Email Sender and Provider Coalition (ESPC) now requires “prior affirmative consent” for members who send or manage email programs. This amounts to an industry mandate, because the ESPC’s membership represents all sides of the email-marketing equation: senders who run their own programs or manage campaigns for an estimated 250,000 businesses representing hundreds of millions of addresses; ISPs that decide whether to block or pass the email; and MTAs (define) and reputation services serving both senders and recipients. The ESPC recently updated its Member Pledge to include prior affirmative consent as defined by the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the European Commission’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive: 1. Unsolicited commercial email must not be sent. 2. Commercial email must not be sent to an individual’s email address [without]... prior affirmative consent of the individual... as defined by the CAN SPAM Act of 2003... or prior consent of the individual... as defined by the European Commission Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. The Debate Continues Despite these arguments, not all marketers agree permission is a requirement for email success. We’re asked in best-practice workshops, discussion-group chatter, and questions from prospective clients: why is email held to a higher standard than other marketing channels such as broadcast, print, or direct mail? Our reply: It costs no money and very little time to skip a TV commercial, pitch a catalog, or read past a print ad. Deleting spam wastes the recipient’s time and access charges or per-message fees, and degrades