Email Marketing Campaigns, Stephanie Miller, Vice President, Strategic Services, Return PathEmail Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability and Response If an email message lands in the junk folder and no one sees it, does it count as “delivered?

Email Essentials: Optimizing Inbox
Email Essentials: Optimizing
Deliverability and Response
Inbox Deliverability & Response
If an email message lands in the junk
Stephanie Miller, VP, Return Path
@stephanieSAM folder and no one sees it, does it count
as “delivered?” Clearly, no. The
stephanie.miller@returnpath.net

foundation to every response
optimization strategy is to first reach
the inbox and render as intended. Find
out why commercial messages get
blocked as spam, how to read data for
good decision-making, how to make a
business case for more email marketing
resources, and get a bevy of ideas and
resources to increase response and
revenue from this channel.

Here’s the plan for today.
Make a Commitment.
• Understand why even permission
• Today, I will consider new ways to based email messages get blocked.
improve the subscriber
experience (and earn • Learn what you can do to ensure
more revenue). your messages reach the inbox.
• Learn what a sender reputation is,
• Today, I will steal a number of
cool ideas from this presentation. and how to manage it.
© 2009 Online Marketing Connect Institute 3
• Test ideas on how to use
deliverability data to improve your
email program results.
• Consider why email marketing
professionals are sometimes under
pressure to do things we know are
not best practices.
• Learn one way to make a business
case for better email marketing
practices.

Slide 4 Email marketing is based on a very
simple concept. If you give your
subscribers what they want…..
….they will give you what you want.

We love email because IT WORKS!
This is a really powerful and unique
4
direct marketing channel.

What do subscribers want from us?
They want us to help them.
They want to be more productive, more
beautiful, get a raise, be a better dad.
They want information that is
timely, actionable.
They want to be treated like
© 2009 Online Marketing Connect
people. With a name, a history with
your company, a unique set of interests.

Slide 6 Subscriber Covenant. There is a covenant in email marketing.
Our customers and prospects
sign up to receive email from us, and
we promise to be interesting. Relevant.
Fun. Helpful.

Slide 7 Yet, most of the content that we send is
the opposite of that. It’s generic,
irrelevant, poorly timed and badly
formatted.
Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at
some of the results of recent email
marketing studies that we’ve
The Truth.
conducted.

30% of marketers in a subscriber study
we did in 2008 never sent us any email
at all.
I sign up on For those that did….
Monday. Chances
are I won’t get an
email …
© 2009 Online Marketing Connect 8

Slide 9 It took an average of 9 days after sign
… until next up for that first message to arrive.
Wednesday.


Slide 10 C’mon. This unnecessarily long delay will
I don’t remember what negatively impact these marketers’
I had for breakfast programs.
this morning.
If you are not sending email right away,
people forget or may have already
engaged with someone else or made a
purchase. Especially when instant-
messaging, immediate gratification,
and short-term satisfaction are
prevalent, waiting any extended period
of time to respond to a subscribe
request only serves to damage your
brand reputation and ultimately your
response rates.

60% of companies don’t To compound this negative experience,
send a Welcome Message 60% of companies surveyed failed to
send a welcome message.

Particularly if you are not planning to
include the subscriber in regular
campaigns right away, a welcome
message is vital, At a minimum, it
confirms the subscription success, and
acknowledges the subscriber. With no
welcome message, many subscribers
are left wondering: Did I fall into a
blackhole?

So you may be thinking….

70% of While 70% of marketers made a valiant
marketers effort to collect meaningful data at the
collect point of subscription – including
enough everything from zip code to birthday to
information product line preferences,
to
customize
messages.

Slide 13 75% of them never used the data for
75% any kind of campaign personalization or
customization. Leaving the subscriber
of to wonder: Why did I fill this out?? I
them thought I was going to get valuable
don’t information from this company! What
use it. a waste of time!

Slide 14 While there has been a lot of buzz in
As for content,
the industry about relevance, we found
we are in a rut that many marketers simply continue to
do what has always been done.


free shipping enter to win Amid scores of emails across various
free stuff grand prize drawing companies, all the offers were
50% off your first order free frighteningly similar - - free shipping, $
ground shipping 10% off off, sweepstakes prizes. The “special”
free upgraded shipping
effect was quickly diluted, as each
contest win a spa vacation
buy one get one free half-off
company vied for the subscriber’s
win a new car 25% off attention.
getaway sweepstakes 15

Slide 16 Many email marketers send at very
high frequencies.

For both buyers and inquiries (non
buyers) in a purchase study we released
this year, the retailers we studied
during this pre-holiday period from
© 2009 Online Marketing Connect Institute
September-December 2008 sent an
average of three messages per week.
Over these four-months, some
companies sent as many as nine
messages per week.

59% of retailers sent their promotional
emails to inquiries at the same
frequency as they sent to buyers, with
23% sending the buyer more email and
18% sending the inquiry more email.

However, the mean frequency of three
messages per week could have
contributed to customers unsubscribing
and perhaps even hitting the spam
button as the result of such heavy
volume. Certainly that would have
been true where subscribers were
receiving messages once or twice a day.

31% of companies added purchasers to
their email lists without requesting
permission. Meaning, no mention of
email marketing messages was made
during the checkout process but then
following the purchase, the messages

31% just started coming.

Slide 18 What happened to that covenant?
No wonder our subscribers get
fatigued. Sometimes, they even get
angry.

But there is a penalty in email
marketing that does not exist in those
other channels. It’s called….
Complaints.

A complaint is generated every time
someone clicks the Report Spam
button. These are offered by all the
major North American ISPs like
Hotmail, Y!, Gmail, AOL, Cox,
Roadrunner, etc. Also by some major
European ISPs like Orange and T-
Online.

This seemingly innocent little button
has a lot to say in email marketing. In
fact, it can destroy your response rates
and put your revenue in peril.
It is the single biggest factor why
commercial messages get blocked. And
when your messages are blocked at a
major domain, they stay blocked until
the ISP sees that you’ve corrected
whatever the problem was.

If that sort of doomsday is the result,
why would any subscriber click that
button?
Many of us wonder if subscribers know
the impact on marketers.

Silverpop did a study of subscribers late
last year (2008). Find the study at
Silverpop Study 2008

www.silverpop.com (registration
required) It’s called Spam: What
Consumers Really Think.

Eight out of 10 consumers didn’t know
that hitting the spam button could
result in all of that sender’s emails
being blocked by ISPs, meaning that
other people who want to receive
emails from that company wouldn’t be
able to.

Slide 22 That’s why complaints mean so much
to email marketers. Even a small
number of complaints can get your
program blocked at the major ISPs like
AOL, Hotmail, Y! and Gmail. Even 5 out
of 1,000 messages puts you at the edge
of the threshold.

You might be surprised by exactly how
For most marketers,
big the problem really is.
20% never reaches
the inbox. Non-delivery (messages not put into
inbox – not delivered at all or put into
junk/bulk folder) – has started to level
off around 20%. This is a problem for
both B2B and B2C marketers.

What’s important to understand about
this metric is that it is an average. That
means that some marketers do far
worse than this – seeing 30, 40, even
50% or more of their email diverted out
of the inbox. However the good news is
that many marketers also do far better
than this, enjoying inbox delivery rates
of 90% or better. We certainly have
many clients that enjoy near-perfect
delivery on nearly all the email they
send.

Slide 24 If an email Why should that worry you? Simply:
Email that doesn’t get to the inbox
doesn’t
doesn’t get a response.
land in the
inbox, can
it get a
click?

The good news is that all the factors
that go into reaching the inbox are
under the control of the marketer. You.
You can balance your need to drive
more revenue with the kinds of
practices that keep you from getting
blocked.

Let’s talk about how that works.

Slide 26 You have a Sender Reputation, even if
you don’t know what it is or manage it.
You have It’s like a credit score on your personal
a sender wealth. The ISPs and Blacklists are
aware of your Sender Reputation and
reputation. they use it to block you. It’s made up of
things like the number of complaints,
the quality of your list, your volume
and cadence, if you are authenticated
and if you are processing bounces
properly.

Whitepaper on Sender Reputation:
http://www.returnpath.net/downloads
/resources/deliverability_081508.pdf

Key Factors in your Sender Reputation:
Complaints
Unknown Users
Blacklists
Spam Traps
Infrastructure & Message Structure
Authentication
HTML configuration/rendering
Content (a much smaller factor)

ISPs manage a flood of Now if it seems that ISPs make it too
email messages every easy to complain or put too high a
minute. Every day. penalty on this, try to consider their
point of view.
The flood of email messages is
overwhelming.


Slide 28 Legitimate Of all that flood of email messages, the
commercial email that is represented
Unknown .63% of all
legitimate can
Illegitimate be classified as
commercial

Legitimate, 19.70%
by folks here today is less than one
percent of the total. (0.63%)
Complaints thus become a proxy for
Illegitimate, 46.30%

Unknown, 33.90%
subscriber satisfaction

With tens of thousands of legitimate
marketers like all of you sending bulk
messages, the ISPs can not take the
time to know each of us by name. So
they let the data do the talking for us.

And complaints are a huge part of that
data. Complaints are a proxy for
subscriber satisfaction. They provide
the subscriber view.
Remember that ISPs share a customer
with us – the subscriber. WE all care
about their satisfaction.

Your Sender Score is a measure of your
reputation. The score is out of 100, so
the higher the better.
You can look up your sender score for
free anytime at www.senderscore.org
It will show you how your sending
practices translate to the ISPs – a high
score means you are less likely to get
blocked.

Other places to find info on your sender
reputation:
www.senderscore.org
www.senderbase.com
www.dnsstuff.com

Let’s go over again the key elements
that make up a sender reputation.

Slide 30 1. Keep Complaints are tracked every time
complaints to someone clicks the Report Spam
a minimum button.
Complaints are the single biggest factor
in sender reputation.
How to reduce complaints? Become
more relevant.

How to track complaints? Sign up for
feedback loops from the various ISPs.
More info:
http://www.returnpath.net/habeas/Kn
owledge-Base/Delivery-Resolution/
http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/
01/return-path-extends-antispam-f.php

Factors to review when you see high
complaints:
• Frequency
• Permission
• Segmentation/Messaging
• Relevancy
• Brand recognition

• Sign up process
• Sources of data
• Working unsubscribe
• Shared IP address (if other mailers
share the pipe with you, your
sender reputation is affected by
them.)

Slide 31 2. Have a solid infrastructure Most ESPs and all the MTA vendors
have good infrastructure. Your IT team
may also be highly qualified. But either
way, you want to be sure that you have
someone technically apt working on
email. It’s a specialty.

Things to watch out for:
Reverse DNS record
Valid MX record (give and receive)
MTA settings according to ISP
guidelines
Complaint processing
Bounce processing
Message ID and Header

Blog post that summarizes:
02/return-paths-new-year-communit-
3.php

List hygiene is vital to sender
3. Avoid spam traps. reputation.
A blog posting:
01/return-paths-new-year-communit-
1.php


Slide 33 4. Don’t email the dead When or if to win-back “lost
subscribers” is a question of great
debate.
Generally, the best practice is to:
• Remove subscribers who are not
active after a period of reasonable
time, probably 12 months for most
businesses, sometimes sooner.
• Before you remove, give them an
update and provide some incentive
(e.g.: download, coupon, survey) to
catch their attention
• Don’t let it get to 12 months in the
first place. Review your data and
look for areas of fall out – if a lot of
subscribers go dormant after 3
months, that is when you need a
specific messaging strategy to reach
them THEN, rather than waiting.

70%
Inbox delivery rates plummet with a
67%
60%
58% 58%
single spam trap hit or blacklist.
50%

40% 44%

30% 35%
38%
Delivered rate for blacklisted, spam
Avoid spam traps by keeping a clean
list. Avoid blacklists by following best
trap hits and high unknown user
rate
20%

10% Delivered rate with no blacklists, no
spam trap hits and low unknown
user rate
practices for permission, frequency and
0%
Blacklist Spam Traps Unknown User
Rate
list hygiene.

Slide 35 Wait a minute. Doesn’t my ESP handle
all this for me?

Blog post:
http://www.returnpath.net/uk/blog/20
07/11/dont-expect-your-esp-to-have-
t.php

See also – checklist of items to review
with your ESP in the checklist appendix.

Slide 36 Um, okay.

But how do I
know what my
email reputation
is?
www.senderscore.org
www.dnsstuff.com


The Sender Score Correlates to Higher deliverability rates tend to result
Inbox Deliverability. in a higher Sender Score. So if you’re
100
90 87
deliverability is weak, it’s because of
your sending behavior.
80
70 72
60
56
55 47 Inbox
50
45 Sender Score
40
30
20
26
23
You can think of your Sender Score just
10
0
like your personal credit score. It’s a
Commercial Legitimate Unknown
Illegitimate
reflection of your overall sending
practices just as your credit score is a
reflection of your financial activities
and choices. When you have good
credit you are more likely to qualify for
mortgages and credit cards but strong
credit doesn’t entitle you to these
products. Similarly weak credit doesn’t
automatically disqualify you for loans
and other financial services but it does
make it more difficult to gain approval.

Your Sender Score works the same way.
High Sender Scores correlate to good
practices which lead to good
deliverability.

Slide 38 ISP whitelists & 3rd Party Accreditation
Services = higher inbox placement; +
images & links on by default.
www.senderscorecertified.com
www.goodmail.com
www.sureitymail.com
Take Advantage of a
Good Reputation

What To Do About Sender Reputation What You Can Do About Your Sender
Know your Reputation.
Reputation
Manage it – understand the root causes of any
deliverability failure at the domain, campaign
and subscriber levels.
Obtain permission. Give subscribers a choice.
Keep your list clean and updated.
Keep it relevant. Test.
Advocate for the Subscriber’s Interests.
Get as much accreditation as you can afford and
qualify for.
Use the data to make good decisions.

Slide 40 Let’s talk about how deliverability data
can be used for getting the attention
and support of the executive suite.
What Kinds of
Decisions?


Slide 41 • Deliverability data is like the ham to
your basic email response data
reporting.

What happened when we suddenly see
a campaign do really well, or do
really poorly?
We blame the creative.
Actually, it may be that the campaign
never reached the inbox.
Remember, 20% of marketing
messages get lost or go to junk,
even when you are doing most
things right.

Sample email campaign.


Slide 43 Basic inbox deliverability reporting will
tell you:
• inbox, junk and missing stats for
each domain. This covers the US,
Canada, Europe, Asia-PAC, B2B.
• By campaign
• Over time by domain or IP address

When you know this information, you
can then figure out what to do. It’s
important to look at the individual
domain data. Here we see that the
total inbox deliverability is only
59%. But it’s isolated to three ISPs.
Now that we know that we can take
action.

2. Deliverability data can show the power
of email marketing’s effect on website
traffic, search and social media.

-When your inbox deliverability is high,
your site traffic is optimized. Show the
correlation between these, and the impact
of frequency on site traffic in a given week.
© 2009 Return Path, Inc.
- Look at the spikes in traffic to search,
website and even call centers on the days
44 2009 Online Marketing Connect
© www.returnpath.net |
Confidential, do not reproduce

that email goes out.
- Calculate the effect of 20% of your email
going missing on all your other metrics.
Now, you’ve got the attention of your team!

The Boss likes higher website traffic and
sales.

Slide 45 3. Segment out new subscribers and adjust
the welcome message to lower complaints.

- Look at complaint data by segment or
source. Treat the segments that are most
fragile and highest value differently than
other segments.
- Now you can set up tests to improve your
response and inbox reach per segment:
content, cadence, timing.
45

The Boss likes bigger revenue numbers.

Complaint Analysis Complaint Analysis

49,112,414 144,446 0.29%
1. Complaints seem to be impacted by
factors outside of sending pattern.
WEEKDAY SENDS COMPLAINTS COMPLAINT RATE
SUNDAY 6,133,897 13,000 0.21%
MONDAY 5,744,281 20,758 0.36%

- Highest volume day, Friday, does not
TUESDAY 7,386,666 20,538 0.28%
WEDNESDAY 5,854,336 28,293 0.48%
THURSDAY 7,361,944 26,942 0.37%
FRIDAY 8,753,814 19,822 0.23%
SATURDAY 7,877,476 15,093 0.19%
have the highest CR
- Highest CR data, Weds, has among the
lowest volume

2. Complaints seem to occur when
messages quot;build upquot; in the inbox.
- Weekends, with high volume, have
low CR - wonder if this is partly
impacting Monday's high CR?

Slide 47 Mean Stats of the
Volume Complaints Complaint Rate
The largest volume messages, actually
Message Type = A

are in the right range for complaints.
2,213,168 6,201 0.32%

Mean Stats of the
Message Type = Renewal 3,452 10 0.36%
Mean Stats of the
Message Type = Reg
Confirm 77,919 2,101 2.45%
However, the overall program sees high
complaints
Mean Stats of the
Message Type = B 331,562 366 0.11%
Mean Stats of the
Message Type =
Series 1 353,446 8,984 2.54%
Mean Stats of the
Message Type =
Series 2
Mean Stats of the
Message Type =
223,152 2,062 0.92%
First, you see that there are two types
of messages that earn significantly high
Series 3 155,963 866 0.56%
Mean Stats of the
Message Type =
Series 4 139,672 590 0.42%
Birthday Reminder 297,110 518 0.17%

47
CR, although the first is not a high
volume, the second is.

The first message in this series is not
particularly welcome. Although those
who do like it, complain at much lower
rates, although still rates too high for
the average. This program needs an
overhaul.

A very relevant message – Birthdays –
earns a very low CR.

Which sources are best for our
business? Where should we pay for
quality?
What messaging can be adjusted, at
what stage of the lifecycle, to lower
complaints?

Creative, Timing, Frequency
Would making the unsubscribe
button higher in prominence
earn higher ROI?
Is our welcome stream too
fast/too slow?
Which mail streams can be combined
to lower the overall rate? Which need
to be separated to protect the highest
value mail streams?

.

Slide 48 3. Save money by becoming a more
informed negotiator.

Look at complaints by source. Those
sources which have the highest complaints
are less valuable.
Use this data to renegotiate acquisition and
data deals. Or drop bad ones altogether.

The Boss likes cost savings.
48

Slide 49 There is no magic to this approach.
Mostly, it’s a new attitude, and a bunch
of data crunching, which is the stuff we
direct marketers love.

49

Sender Reputation
All of us here today are good mailers.
We care about our subscribers and we
don’t do malicious things with our files.

Yet often, the yin and yang comes into
play. Even good mailers sometimes
send more messages than subscribers
expect from us

Or send to files where the permission
grant was so soft that the subscriber
didn’t know they were being opted in
for promotional email.
Or when you send a new type of
message to everyone on the file,
without expressly alerting them or
asking for permission.

The cost shows up in your Sender
Reputation.

Slide 51 How many of us have had this
“Revenue is down. conversation with the CFO or even the
Just send another CMO?
million email
messages.
Tomorrow.”

Problem solved.
I’m brilliant. Again.”

51

How does that sort of request make
you feel?

52

Slide 53 Instead, what we need to do is prove to
Improving
Sender the executives that sender reputation
Reputation matters, and that we can make a lot of
by 19% can money if we manage it well.
increase How much of a hero would you be if
sales by you could walk in and say this to your
$1.5 million execs this week?
this year year

Slide 54 As an example, consider a retailer that
Deliverability Opportunity has one million email addresses in its
File Size
Reaches Inbox
1,000,000
80%
database, sends out three email
Missing Email 200,000 messages per week and whose
Response Rate 2% deliverability rate is limited to 80% due
Value per Response $
Today's Value/File $
35
6,720,000 to sender reputation problems. An
Opportunity $ 1,596,000 approximate 200,000 messages per
campaign will not reach the inbox, and
thus will not get any response at all.

By improving deliverability through
better email practices, the company
could increase deliverability from 80%
to 99% (a reasonable goal based on
Return Path experience). Given an
average response rate 2% and a

value/response of $35, that company
could increase sales by $1.5 million in a
year.

You can calculate what your company
might achieve with improved emailing
practices to buyers by using your own
figures in a similar calculation. Chances
are the revenue potential will be
significantly greater than the cost of
improving your practices.

Slide 55 Lost revenue opportunity
Try our ROI calculator:
www.returnpath.net/calculator
$1.5 million
Calculator:
Try this with your own numbers www.returnpath.net/calculator
with this ROI calculator at
www.returnpath.net/calculator
55

Slide 56 How will you put this into action in the
coming weeks?


Let me help you get started. There are
lots of other great ideas being
discussed here at the OMS, as well.

3 Ideas to Steal

57

Slide 58 Remember that the biggest impact on
sender reputation is complaints. That is
Zig all about relevancy and subscriber
While satisfaction.
Others
1. Think about your content strategy.
Zag
How can you do something unique,
even SOME of the time, in order to
break through.

Slide 59 Fisher Price has a strategy that so
Create clearly matches their target market –
lifecycle- kids that grow. Using the age of the
subscriber’s child, which was requested
based at subscribe, they delivered fully
emails. customized messages – specific to the
year and month of the child. Including
59
their own product promotions along
with parenting tips and family activity
ideas was a great way to build brand
equity and drive subscriber value. It’s
also smart for the marketer - - once the
creative template has been designed,
the content can be used over and over,
year after year without losing
effectiveness.

Remember too that YOUR prospects
and customers grow too. Make sure
your email program grows with them.

Introduce the idea of a series.

Slide 60 2. Show up…..

60

Slide 61 …the way you intended. Rendering is
complicated by image suppression (99%
of your subscribers will see the images
off version) and the different email
clients from Y! to Gmail to Outlook. We
all have to manage to the lowest
common denominator.
61

Always test rendering in various email
clients BEFORE you send your
messages. Ask your ESP for a service to
automate this, or get it from your
deliverability service provider.

There are some great design checklists
available at the DMA/Email Experience

Council. Visit
www.emailexperience.org. They are in
the Whitepaper room under the
“Resources” tab. There are five of
them:

They are free for members of the eec.

Slide 62 • Get – and keep – permission. An
important distinction.

When communicating with subscribers
who have purchased from you, this
practice is even more important.
Ideally, you want them on your list
for life; you certainly do not want
them complaining about you.

Slide 63 31% of retailers in our purchase study
did not ask buyers about their interest
in email and still sent email without
permission. A handful of retailers
mentioned during the purchase process
that the buyer would receive
promotional emails, but did not allow
the buyer to choose whether or not
they wanted to receive these messages.

While this practice is compliant with
CAN-SPAM, it is not a good marketing
practice. It does not respect or nurture
the subscriber relationship. When
customers get email that they have not
requested, they perceive it to be spam,

regardless of what the letter of the law
says. As a result, some will ignore it or
unsubscribe. Others will complain
about it, which will have a negative
impact on the marketer’s sender
reputation, and therefore on their
ability to get into the inbox, aka
deliverability.

We recommend that all retailers
explicitly offer buyers the option to sign
up for email during check-out. If a pre-
checked box is used, it should be quite
visible, and the option to uncheck
should also be obvious. No email
should be sent without specific buyer
consent.

So, this of course applies to non-retail
marketers as well. For example, if a
visitor to a B2B website completes a
form in order to download a
whitepaper and is required to provide
an email address, the marketer should
not assume they have permission to
start emailing that person. A checkbox
requesting permission should be
provided.

Best Buy stood out from the pack with
their first promotional email to the
buyer, based on their recent purchase.

After buying a Nintendo DS game, the
purchaser received an email that
featured a selection of other Nintendo
DS games. The email’s subject line was:
“More for your Nintendo DS.”

From the study: those who sent a
promotional message to their
subscribers:

•None used the subscriber’s location or
other subscriber-level data collected
during the purchase process to target
their first promotional message to
buyers.
•Only 15% used past purchase
information (the item category) to
target their first promotional message
to buyers.
•58% of the retailers we studied sent
the same first promotional email to
buyers as to inquiries
Slide 65

So, the real
question is …
65

We’ve talked about sender reputation
Why? and mining data.
We’ve talked about permission.
We’ve talked about cadence and
frequency.
But really what we are doing is earning
the respect and trust of our
subscribers.
That is why we bother. To connect with
subscribers – who are our customers,
after all.

Slide 67 Why is that so important?

It’s not about you.
It never was.


Slide 68 Remember. It’s worth making the
Good email business case to help you test out some
is
of the best practices we discussed
inexpensive.
today.
Bad email
costs a
fortune.

How did we do?
• Today, I will consider new ways to
improve the subscriber
experience (and earn
more revenue).

• Today, I will steal a number of
cool ideas from this presentation.


Slide 70 The Return Path studies we discuss in
Get Started Now
this presentation are here. See more
• Know your sender reputation at
www.senderscore.org
resources in the handouts.
• Drop off your card or email me for a soft copy of
the checklists and deck.
Creating Great Subscriber Experiences
• Let me know how you are doing
stephanie.miller@returnpath.net or
@stephanieSAM
Study, 2008
Purchase Study, 2009
http://www.returnpath.net/blog/white
papers.php

The Return Path Blog:
www.returnpath.net

Slide 71

Your Questions

Deliverability Checklists &
Resources

You are in charge of your reputation
You control complaint rates You control infrastructure

 Sign-up/data collection process and  Whitelists and Feedback Loops
setting appropriate expectations
 Researching and meeting ISP expectations
 Messaging strategy
 Volume and consistency
 Content relevancy
 Authentication
 Content frequency  Response mechanisms for ISPs and
subscribers
 Processing “report spam”
 Measuring delivery metrics
You control data quality
You control content
 Bounce processing
 Relevancy and frequency
 Unsubscribe process
 Testing for rendering
 Quality of the data you buy
 Testing for spam filters
 Use of aged/inactive subscriber data
 Encouraging “add to address book”

Email Deliverability Checklist
 Know your Sender Reputation by visiting www.senderscore.org or
www.dnsstuff.com
 Track complaints and remove complainers by signing up for all feedback loops
from the ISPs/receivers.
 What is the origin of and our relationship with everyone on the list?
 What is our permission policy? (opt-out, single opt-in, confirmed opt-in or double
opt-in)
 When people sign up for our email, do they know what they’re signing up for?
 Do we maintain a master calendar of emails sent by subscriber?
 Is our email being regularly blocked by ISPs?
 Are we on any blacklists? If so, why?
 Are people complaining about us?
 Will our newsletter pass through most spam and corporate filters?
 Who is checking the various unsubscribe mailboxes for customer complaints?
Are these response techniques working properly?

Source: Return Path, Inc. Questions? Email stephanie.miller@returnpath.net
Questions?

Checklist to Optimize Email List Growth
 Be clear about what you’re offering at sign-up. State the benefits, the content of the
emails, the frequency and when the subscriber should expect the first email.

 Although the Federal CAN-SPAM law requires only an opt-out, we recommend
getting express permission from every subscriber. Also note that other countries
have stricter permission standards. Be sure that opt-in is 100% clear and voluntary –
don’t pre-check the box. Follow up with a welcome message with opt-out instructions
within 24 hours of sign-up. (NOTE: always check with legal counsel for any
compliance issue)

 Use your website to promote your email program: include sign-up forms in the
header, footer and/or product pages of your site. Test form placement and a custom
invitation on your most heavily trafficked pages.
Make email capture a priority on your search landing pages.

 Design subscribe forms that encourage sign-up. Don’t create data collection
obstacles. A short form with a few fields (i.e. name, email address) is most effective.

 Include links in your transactional emails that cross-sell your newsletter or
promotional mailings.

Questions?

Optimize Email List Growth (cont.)
(cont.)
 Expand list growth efforts through targeted mailings to rented lists as part of third-party offers, lead
generation and co-registration campaigns.

 Be sure to vet potential data partners. Choose partners with good reputations and compliant
sending practices.

 Make the unsubscribe process instant, perfect, and painless – test it often.

 Respect varying levels of permission. For example, unless it is explicitly stated, submitting an
email address for shipping notification is not the same as opting-in for marketing email.

 Keep permission current. Reach out to subsets of your file who are not opening or clicking every
quarter or so. Ask if they would like to receive something different, or provide feedback on your
email program.

 The right mechanics for forward-to-a-friend mean nothing if your content is not interesting and
forwardable. The most popular viral content is often humorous, witty, off-beat or related to current
events.

 Go multi-channel with viral campaigns – using blogs, social networking sites and other promotions
to build support for the campaign.

Questions?

Email Measurement Checklist
Before You Start
 Plan ahead to measure performance. Make sure your email broadcast system (vendor or in-house) can report the
metrics you need

 Identify the metrics that matter most to your business for tracking the success of your program.

What to Track
 Be careful with open rates. Most are tracked using invisible images and can only be tracked in HTML emails, not
text-only. Despite this, open rates can be used:

 To highlight high variances or erratic behavior.

 As an indicator of deliverability issues.

 To track success of subject lines.

 To determine optimum timing and cadence of campaigns.

 Click-through rate (CTR) is all clicks on any link expressed as a percentage.

 Click to Open Rate is also a useful metric – this helps you measure the success of your call to action by telling you
how many subscribers who opened then engaged.

 Conversion rate. Your conversion rate is based on the number of people who take a desired actions (i.e., buy,
subscribe, forward). The overall success of your program is determined by looking at opens, clicks and conversions in
relation to each other. Watch where subscribers are “abandoning” the process – e.g.: if you have low opens, your
subject lines or content is not compelling. If you have low CTR, your call to action is weak or invisible.

Questions?

Email Measurement Checklist (cont.)
(cont.)
 Subscribe and unsubscribe rates. Track your subscribe and unsubscribe rates over
time and watch how your list is growing (or shrinking): Over the long term; After
individual campaigns; After changes to your website.
 Setting the denominator: A more accurate measure is to use “inbox deliverability”
instead of “sent” when calculating open rate and CTR, as this is the number of
messages that actually have an opportunity to be viewed. Use caution when
comparing your results to any industry benchmarks, as many systems and vendors
report differently.
 Bounce rate. The bounce rate is the number of messages that did not get delivered
divided by your total list size. Bounce rate does NOT equal inbox deliverability.
 Inbox Deliverability. This is different than your bounce rate – it’s the number of
messages that actually make it to the inbox. Up to 20% of permission email never
reaches the inbox, preventing your message from success.
 Complaint rates. This is a key factor for inbox deliverability and is based on subscribers
clicking the “report spam” button. Calculate by dividing the number of complaints
received over a set period by the number of subscribers mailed during that same period.
Even a 0.10% complaint rate can put you on the ISP radar screen for filtering.
 Online capture rate. For an opt-in email program, this is the number of people who
come to your home page versus the size of your list. You want the number of unique
visitors per month to your website and the number of new email program subscribers to
be as close as possible.
Questions?

Recommended Resources
• Books: • Whitepapers:

– Sign Me Up! (Blumberg, Miller) – Deliverability 101
http://www.returnpath.net/downloads/reso
– The Truth About Email Marketing (Jenkins) urces/deliverability_081508.pdf

– Email Marketing: An Hour a Day – Authentication guidelines:
(Mullen/Daniels) http://www.maawg.org/about/whitepapers/

• Associations • Know Your Sender Reputation:

– OMS Email Council - – www.senderscore.org
http://blog.onlinemarketingconnect.com/ca
tegory/email-marketing – www.dnsstuff.com

– DMA/Email Experience Council – • Check to See if Your Domain is Authenticated
www.emailexperience.org (DMA Members Only)

– Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group – – http://reputationregistry.the-
www.maawg.org dma.org/signup.php


Recommended Resources
 Feedback Loops:
 http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net
 http://fbl.usa.net/
 http://feedback.comcast.net/
 http://postmaster.info.aol.com/fbl/fblinfo.html
 http://postmaster.msn.com/Services.aspx#JMRPP

 Great Email Deliverability Blogs
 www.returnpath.net
 www.deliverability.oom
 http://www.gettingemaildelivered.com/
 http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog.php/al-iverson

 Great Email Marketing Blogs
 http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog.php
 http://www.subscribersrule.com
 http://smith-harmon.com/blog
 http://www.outperformance-marketing.com
 http://www.retailemailblog.com
 http://theemailwars.com
 http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com
 http://www.newsweaver.co.uk/emailnewsletters

Email Marketing Campaigns, Stephanie Miller, Vice President, Strategic Services, Return PathEmail Essentials: Optimizing Inbox Deliverability and Response If an email message lands in the junk folder and no one sees it, does it count as “delivered?

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