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What’s the Secret to Better E-mail Deliverability? Your Reputation

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Deliverability is the first step to e-mail marketing success. If your e-mail never hits the inbox, all those subject line and content tactics to drive up open and click rates are useless. So why do the top e-mail marketers get a 90% deliverability rate, while others languish below 50%? A deciding factor is reputation, as measured by a “sender score,” according to Return Path’s annual “Sender Score Benchmark Report” analysis of 4 trillion e-mail messages.

Sender Reputation Is Key to Inbox Placement

A sender’s reputation score is a number, calculated from 0–100, that mailbox providers use to evaluate whether or not e-mail sent by a particular IP address is likely to be legitimate and wanted. A marketer that sends too much unwanted or spam e-mail is likely to see their reputation drop and their e-mail filtered out of inboxes. Return Path’s analysis finds that e-mail senders with a reputation score above 90 saw an average of 92% of their e-mails reach the intended recipient, but e-mail deliverability drops to 72% for senders scoring between 81-90 and just 45% for senders with a score between 71 and 80. By the way, Gmail and Microsoft were identified as the mailbox providers with the strictest deliverability requirements, and the global inbox placement average is only 80%, or 20% of e-mail wasted. Don’t join the crowd.

Boost Your Sender Score With Good Data

So what are the things to do, and not do, to get and keep a strong reputation score? A recent post by Krista Barrack, for the sendinblue blog, cites six ways you could be damaging your sender score, starting with e-mail list issues. One common error is collecting invalid e-mail addresses in your house list (often caused by typos, especially from mobile users). These create hard bounces to erode your sender score. A second mistake is using purchased e-mail data where people have no opt-in relationship with your brand and so don’t engage or mark your message as spam, hurting your score. That’s why, as responsible data brokers, we don’t sell e-mail data and instead broker list rentals so messages are sent by the list owner with valid recipient opt-ins. A third house list problem is allowing outdated, unmailed addresses to accumulate and become invalid, again leading to score-harming hard bounces. To deal with the problem, set up a program of regular communication and hygiene to prune your list frequently.

Spammer Tactics Tank Reputation

Sender scores not only suffer from poor data quality but also poor content quality. If your e-mail message is not mobile-optimized, is loaded with spam words, is plagued by faulty links, and/or is not relevant or honest, recipients are either not going to open it, will label it as spam or will opt-out. Timing matters, too, and while failure to communicate is marketing folly, the more common sin is embrace of a spammer’s excess frequency. Note that studies show read rates drop with increased weekly frequency–and opt-outs and complaints rise to cut your sender score. Finally, watch for spam traps hiding in your e-mail list. These can get you blacklisted! Spam traps come in two flavors. One type is an e-mail address purposely created by ESPs or blacklist organizers and posted online, which gets in your list via data sources “scraped” or “harvested” from the web without opt-in. (So work with a reputable data broker!) The other type of trap is an ESP-deactivated e-mail address that the ESP recycles months later; if you failed to remove the deactivated address as a hard bounce per best practices, the ESP catches you when you re-send to it.

For more insight on e-mailer reputation, get a copy of the Return Path 2017 Sender Score Benchmark Report.

Why Direct Mail Remains Buoyant in Digital Flood

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In the tidal wave of digital marketing options, prospects for our direct mail lists and support services sometimes worry about investing in an “old-fashioned” mail channel soon to be washed away by changing preferences and digital efficiency. So we like to keep providing data to show that direct mail is actually riding atop the digital crest.

Businesses Have Solid Reasons to Direct Mail Today

For example, a recent business.com post by entrepreneur Brian Roberts cites five basic reasons businesses should use “snail mail.” No. 1, thanks to a drop in mail volumes, mailers today enjoy much less competition for audience attention in physical mailboxes compared with spam-jammed e-mail inboxes or ad-laden web platforms. Plus, No. 2, those mailed communications aren’t going to be culled out by high-tech spam filters as is so much of today’s e-mail. No. 3, once delivered, a physical mail piece is a lot likelier to be opened than an e-mail message. As data firm Experian recently reported, 70% to 80% of direct mail recipients say they open their mail, and, per InfoTrends’ most recent data, a third of U.S. consumers report they read direct mail marketing more than e-mail marketing, and another 34% read both with equal frequency.  No. 4, direct mail allows a lot more creative freedom, unlimited by file size, spam filter triggers or flat visuals. Mail can be dimensional, digitally interactive, multi-sensory, immediately gratifying with promotional rewards, and more. Now that personalization is key, direct mail also outdoes digital, with 70% of Americans saying physical mail is “more personal” than e-mail, per Experian. Finally, at  No. 5, mail is great for geo-targeting and driving traffic to physical locations, with in-store-only promotions at retail stores as an example. Plus, it can drive digital traffic; 60% of direct mail recipients visit a website mentioned in direct mail, Experian reports.

Trends Prove Direct Mail’s Continued Business Appeal

A study by the Boston Consulting Group confirms that total spending on direct mail is expected to rise from 11% to 12% by 2020. The simple reason for snail mail’s survival is its continued marketing power. U.S. Postal Service surveys have found that consumers who receive direct mail spend 28% more than those who don’t, for example. As we’ve noted before, the Data & Marketing Association’s 2016 “Response Rate Report” put direct mail response rates at 5.3% for house lists and 2.9% for prospect lists, the highest DMA-tracked response rates since 2003, and far higher than the less than 1% of various digital channels. That is what sustains mail’s strong ROI. For a great summary of direct mail trends and stats, see the Experian infographic at https://www.edq.com/resources/data-quality-infographics/how-direct-mail-is-winning-in-the-age-of-the-internet/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How E-mail Response Can Survive the Spam Filter Gauntlet

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For e-mail marketers to deliver those open-worthy, click-inspiring e-mail messages, they must pass through a gauntlet of spam filters determined to weed out irrelevant, unsolicited inbox clutter and scam. That’s why, as an e-mail list brokerage, AccuList USA works to not only vet the opt-in e-mail rental lists we recommend but also to insure success by advising on CAN-SPAM compliance, privacy policies, creative and deliverability issues. We’re glad to pass along a recent Target Marketing magazine article with some basic tactics that may help prevent spam filters from draining the response of your next e-mail campaign.

Do You Look Like Spam?

The first step to making sure your e-mail campaign doesn’t run afoul of spam filters is to understand the basics of U.S. anti-spam legislation (CAN-SPAM): no use of deceptive headers, sender names, reply-to addresses, or subject lines; provision, without exception, of an unsubscribe link that remains working for at least 30 days after sending; and inclusion of a physical address. ISPs use spam filters to try to net out potential e-mail offenders and reduce spam complaints. The filters scrutinize and score a range of e-mail elements, and prevent e-mails with high “spam” scores from reaching inboxes. The challenge for e-mailers is that different mail servers use different scoring algorithms, the algorithms are confidential, and filter criteria may periodically change.

Tactics to Get Past Spam Filters

Despite those challenges, Target Marketing article author Michael Lundberg suggests several ways for e-mails to avoid being netted out by spam filters. Since permission-based e-mail is an essential requirement, spam filters try to insure that the sender and recipient are acquainted; this is why personalization of the “to” field, sending from a verified domain, and asking recipients to add your e-mail address to approved contacts are all smart policies. Content counts in spam filter scoring, but the filter algorithms’ exact triggers in terms of specific text or images are unknown, so the best policy is to have a clear, engaging template sent to those who have opted in to receive e-mail, Lundberg advises. Sloppy code and extra tags can flag spam to filters, so use popular e-mail templates or work with an experienced e-mail designer. To avoid the risk of putting all your apples in one e-mail design basket, use A/B or multivariate testing to find the best combination of content and targeting for filter-proofed delivery and inbox engagement, suggests Lundberg. We would add that a high rate of undeliverables and bounces in an e-mail deployment also signals spam to ISPs, so make sure any e-mail list–house database or prospecting effort–meets industry standards in its permission policies and hygiene, which are priorities in AccuList USA rental recommendations.

For the complete article, go to http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/know-avoid-spam-filters/