Naughty to Nice: How to Recover from those Holiday Email Issues
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This document provides tips and best practices for email marketers to maintain strong deliverability during the busy holiday season. It discusses factors that affect deliverability like sender reputation, list hygiene, and content. It recommends focusing on active subscribers, monitoring key metrics, testing campaigns, and avoiding risky data. The document also provides steps to evaluate post-holiday campaign success like analyzing new vs repeat customers, seasonal vs year-round shoppers, and ROI.
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Naughty to Nice: How to Recover from those Holiday Email Issues
- 1. ©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian and the marks used herein are service marks or registered trademarks of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. No part of this copyrighted work may be reproduced, modified, or distributed in any form or manner without the prior written permission of Experian. Experian Public. Naughty to Nice: How to Recover from those Holiday Email Issues Spencer Kollas Bridgette Darling
- 2. 2©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 2 Spencer Kollas VP of Global Deliverability, Experian Marketing Services @SpencerKollas Bridgette Darling Product Marketing Manager, Experian Data Quality @BCDarling
- 3. 3©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 3 Table of contents What is deliverability? Tips to avoid deliverability issues Quick actions to recover from email mishaps Email marketing best practices for the holiday season Steps to evaluate campaign success post-holiday
- 4. 4©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 4 ISPs are responsible for sorting a flood of email
- 5. 5©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 5 Fact – the inbox is crowded Every marketer wants to mail more during the holidays… …so consumer inboxes are nearing capacity.
- 6. What is deliverability, and what are the top factors affecting yours
- 7. 7©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 7 The moving parts of deliverability ESP’SRESPONSIBILITY SENDER’SRESPONSIBILITY Email deliverability components Accreditation Authentication Sending Characteristics Content Sender Reputation List Management
- 8. 8©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 8 Let’s move the scale. These are the weights – good, neutral or bad? “Wrong DNS” “Authentication” “mailbox full” “content” “missing legal” “unsubscribe” “Complaint” “deleted unread” “clickrate” “purchase” “openrate” “incorrect HTML” “Spamtrap” “Softbounce” “Hardbounce” “CSA membership” “not spam” “certification”
- 9. 9©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 9 Top factors marketers experience affecting delivery
- 10. Tips to avoid deliverability issues and keep your campaigns on target
- 12. 12©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 12 Have a solid infrastructure
- 13. 13©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 13 Maintain a permanent home
- 14. 14©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 14 Don’t email the dead
- 15. 15©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 15 Keep complaints to a minimum
- 16. Don’t send to spam traps
- 17. Email marketing best practices for the holiday season
- 18. 18©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 18 Monitor Benchmarks Bounce rates Click-through rates Inbox placement rates Complaint rates
- 19. 19©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 19 Welcome email campaigns with coupons have 2.5x higher transaction rates than those without. Drive User Engagement 3 ways to redeem emailed coupons
- 20. 20©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 20 Test, test, test!
- 21. 21©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 21 Avoid Temptation & Risky Data Validate new emails and remove invalids Avoid buying lists and e-appends Avoid sending to old, inactive subscribers Manage bounces
- 22. Quick actions that you can take to recover from email mishaps
- 23. 23©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 23 Focus on your Active population
- 24. 24©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 24 Listen to what your customers want
- 26. 26©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 26 Who are your new customers vs. repeat customers?
- 27. 27©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 27 Who are your year round shoppers vs. seasonal shoppers?
- 28. 28©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 28 Focus on ROI, not just volume of mail sent
- 29. 29©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 29 Start trending reports to compare to other years
- 30. 30©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 30 Review all email address collection points
- 31. Send campaigns to ask for reviews or recommendations
- 32. 32©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 32 Understand all your sending domains and collection opportunities
- 33. 33©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 33 Ready to get started? Sign up for a deliverability audit
- 34. 34©2014 Experian Information Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. Experian Public. 34
Editor's Notes
- Spencer: Recognized industry leader in email deliverability and subscriber engagement. More than 10 years of experience to Experian Marketing Services in helping companies, both midsize and enterprise, increase the ROI of their overall marketing programs. Responsible for the product development and innovation road map of Experian Marketing Services’ email deliverability services in more than 30 countries around the world. Named a Top 50 Email Marketing Influencer on Social Media by Vocus, Inc. and is quoted frequently in industry publications such as Direct Marketing News, MediaPost, FierceCMO and others. Bridgette: Focus on bringing Experian Data Quality’s email validation product to market. Educated countless customers on the importance of list quality and acquisition best practices and their connection to the success of overall deliverability and email marketing efforts. Passionate about the email marketing space and helping customers solve their marketing challenges.
- Unknown Users
- We distinguish Spamtraps and Honeypots Spamtraps are former active addresses Honeypots have never been used Recycled are addresses that use to be real users but are no longer Spamtraps don‘t click and open E-Mails. They also never sign up for newsletters By analyzing incoming mail traffic, ISPs can determine, if best-practices are followed or not
- The holiday season lasts only 6-8 weeks for most brands. Some brands wait for their email service provider to flag issues, or only check metrics once a week or less. Don’t wait until it’s too late to discover you’ve been experiencing a deliverability issue. Increase the frequency in which you’re monitoring key metrics. Analyze feedback loops and look for spikes in bounce rates or complaints. Ensure you’re inbox placement and click through rates are in line with what you would expect for your brand. Importantly, each ISP has their own algorithms for measuring customers. Pay special attention to the major ISP’s such as Gmail or Hotmail. Monitoring your benchmarks will ensure you can act quickly if there is a problem.
- Another way to increase engagement, a positive weight in deliverability, is to couple your holiday welcome campaigns with incentives. According to the EMS Email Benchmark Report from Q3 last year, welcome emails have a 2.5x higher transaction rate than those without. In addition, use welcome campaigns as a way to drive users to shop through additional channels. EMS found that coupons offering $10 off or 20% off caused a higher click through rate than other promotional mailings. So before cutting into your product margins or service costs, consider smaller coupons and discounts. Coupons should be available for use both in-store and online. Ensure your coupons are easily accessible via a mobile device, so that users can quickly pull them up on their smart phones during check out. If you’re incentivizing your customers to join your mailing list, ensure they are providing a deliverable email address as well. If you aren’t validating email addresses, ensure you do so prior to send. Avoid wasted costs and mitigate the risk of sending to undeliverable users. Give your new customers a little gift with your welcome email. Source: http://www.iab.net/media/file/emailmarketingquarterlybenchmarkstudyq42013.pdf
- During Q4 of 2013, emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays boasted some of the highest open and clickthrough rates. Similarly, emails sent later at night tended to be most engaging. It’s important to try A/B testing different days and times to determine what works best for your audience. If you’re increasing mailing frequency or adding more users during the holiday season, ensure you’re also testing to determine what works best for your brand to drive user engagement. If engagement rates drop as mailing increases, you may want to reevaluate your messages or times of day to determine what is and is not working with your customers.
- Throughout the year, new users collected at POS tend to be the riskiest data points and this is especially true during the holiday season. Both shoppers and associates may be rushed to give out their email address. Typos and spelling mistakes are usually innocent reasons why bounce rates from POS can be upward to 40%. It’s important to reduce delivering to unknown users by validating email addresses prior to delivery. In addition, if you are incentivizing your store associates to collect email addresses – try incentivizing them only for deliverable email addresses. This will encourage them slow down or reconfirm when collecting an email from a customer. It’s always a best practice to avoid list buying lists or doing e-appends of any kind, but the temptation to have a bigger list during the holiday season is especially great. Buying lists or doing appends can often lead to an increase in spam trap hits, complaints, or mailing to unengaged users – none of which will help you during the holiday season. In addition, don’t be tempted to reach too deep into your database for your holiday campaigns. As Spencer mentioned earlier, we don’t advise sending to inactive users. Finally, manage your bounces. Monitor feedback loops and remove unknown users, true hard bounces, immediately. This is a widely accepted best pracice, and one that should be easy to implement by working with your ESP, if they aren’t doing this already.
- Provide them options to reduce frequency
- Let Experian Data Quality’s team of compliance and deliverability experts do an analysis of your deliverability health, and review your long- and short-term deliverability recommendations. This audit will ensure you are using email marketing best practices and your messages are reaching subscribers. Sign up link will be included in our follow up email with the deck and recording.