Eloqua Demystifies Email Deliverability

Demystifying Email Deliverability Dennis Dayman Chief Deliverability and Privacy Officer, Eloqua #DELIVERIT 1

Demystifying Email Deliverability Inbox Junk 2

Agenda What is a Sender Score or Reputation? What are the factors in that Score? How to improve them? Deliverability 101 Complaints, Bounces, Spam Trap, Volumes, List Management, and Content What does it cost me? 3

What is a Sender Score? Sender Score is a credit score. “Reputation” Just like when the dealership your getting a car loan from checks your financial score Reputation comes down to what other people think of your email methods. What is email based on? Complaints Bounce Rate • Hard • Block • Backlistings Volumes Spamtraps

Sender Score http://www.senderscore.org IP Domain 5

Why is it Important? In 2009, an estimated 95% of all email was classified as SPAM Because of increasingly aggressive filtering technologies • Forgeries, Content Hijackings, growing botnets, etc On average, 27.6% of commercial emails sent to business addresses don't reach the inbox. - Return Path (2009) In North America, only 80% of legitimate email is delivered to the Inbox - Return Path’s Biannual report on message deliverability 90% of delivery issues are related to senders behaviors and NOT content – George Bilbrey, Return Path

Email Deliverability 101 Complaints Bounces Spam Trap Volumes List Management Content 7

Complaints #1 most important factor in reputation Human response to unwanted mail Receivers notices back to senders Feedback Loops Very low threshold 0.01% of all email sent in 24 hour period

Email Clients 9

What You Can Do – Monitor Complaint Rates SPAM Unsubscribe Report Remember keep under 0.01% Trend over time Review ALL changes when things go wrong

All About Bounces High bounces signal bad lists or list management practices Indicative of spammers Send to as many addresses as possible No regard for valid of addresses Don’t stay around for reporting Very hard for receiver to differentiate between bad list management and actual spamming

Dealing with Bounces Hard Bounce Bad email addresses Soft Bounces Mailbox full Blocks/Spam Content URL Technical Failures Server down Out of Offices 13

What You Can Do – Spam Traps Remove them? How? Don’t buy *random* lists Ask for data history if you buy list Get SLA’s Watch e-pending services Remove inactive accounts Quality over Quantity Run re-Confirmation processes Use confirmed opt-in in at capture 14

Volumes Volume is not in itself good or bad, but is an important part of the overall reputation algorithm. A higher score equates to larger volume monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network. = More to measure you on 16

What You Can Do - Volumes Do not send too frequently or randomly Send a steady, consistent volume Send from clean shared range if low volumes Create multiple interests Newsletter Marketing 17

List Management Send to those who asked to receive your email People will complain if they don’t know who you are and did NOT request the content Frequency and Relevancy Recipients should see what they signed up for and at what frequency they signed up for it Meet their expectations of what they signed up for Know your subscriber Use personalization. Read their digital body language Segment & target

What You Can Do - List Management Ensure you don’t look like a spammer when delivering to non-existent accounts Spammers batch and blast to the same list every time Old accounts are sometimes re-used as spamtraps 18-24 months later Remove bad email addresses Reduce the amount of complaints against your IP Watch your spam unsubscribe reports regularly for trends Remove contacts that don’t click-through Ensures spam trap hits are low Don’t buy lists or buy from trusted sources Perform opt-in Send email confirmations Activity filters Remove inactive contacts from your database

Content Content is still important, but not as much as in the past when it comes to “sounding” like a spammer Content preview testing Relevancy Call to action Image to text ratio

What You Can Do – Content Personalization Inserting a person's name into an email increases open rates by as much as 10%. - Jupiter Research (2006) Don’t include video, flash scripts or forms in email Most are blocked by email clients for security Spam filtering is more likely to occur because of HTML coding than the words in your email. - George Bilbrey, iMediaConnection (2006) Make sure your content is readable… On mobile devices In preview panes With images OFF 23

Content Preview Example 24

Why Do You Care? Model = $200K Average Deal Size Eloqua The Competition Emails Sent 220,000 73 Sender Score Emails Sent 220,000 66 Sender Score Emails Delivered 200,000 1% to Inquiry Emails Delivered 180,000 1% to Inquiry Stage Volume Conversion Rates Stage Volume Conversion Rates Inquiries 2,000 4% Inquiries 1,800 4% MQL 80 54% MQL 72 54% SAL 43 53% SAL 39 53% SQL 23 26% SQL 21 26% 6 5 Wins Wins $1.2 Million $1.0 million 25

Why Do You Care? Model = $200K Average Deal Size Eloqua The Competition Emails Sent 220,000 73 Sender Score Emails Sent 220,000 66 Sender Score Emails Delivered 200,000 1% to Inquiry Emails Delivered 180,000 1% to Inquiry Stage Volume Conversion Rates Stage Volume Conversion Rates Inquiries 2,000 4% Inquiries 1,800 4% MQL 80 54% MQL 72 54% SAL 43 53% SAL 39 53% SQL 23 26% SQL 21 26% 6 5 Wins Wins $1.2 Million $1.0 million 26

Digital Body Language™ Drives cleaner leads to website Who opened? Who clicked? Where? Who’s active? Who’s not? What’s most important to them? Segmentation and relevancy Nurture Integration Deliverability PLUS+ 27

What else does Eloqua do to help Provide dedicated or shared IP’s/Branding Dedicated Delivery and Privacy Team 24x7 Monitoring Automatically suppress / report hard bouncebacks Bounceback History Report Automatically suppress / report ISP based complaints SPAM Unsubscribe List report Suppress known bad spelling, known SPAM traps, high level complainers, FCC Wireless Suppression list Deliverability Testing through Return Path Email and Privacy Certification

What you can do Monitor IP reputation http://www.senderscore.org • Create a FREE account • Have you IP or Domain ready Monitor complaint rates and adjust Trend in your email applications Remove them Monitor hard bounce rates and adjust Are you being seen as spam or spammer? Keep lists clean and relevant Remove inactive Quality over Quantity

Getting to the Inbox 30

Social Contact Info Dennis Dayman Twitter: ddayman Blog: http://www.deliverability.com

Eloqua Demystifies Email Deliverability

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