Email Marketing Deliverability

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) August 13, 2009 -- According to our latest annual Email Census, on average 10% of email marketing budgets are still being wasted due to 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 a 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, check that the function works and never send after an opt-out request has been made. You should also set expectations from the outset, send a welcome message detailing what they will receive and how often.

Maintaining a high quality database is 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 data. 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. this 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. Thus, 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.

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