Archive for September, 2011

Bring Your Zombies Back To Life

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

How to increase your email deliverability

There’s a new development in email marketing that could have a negative impact on the deliverability of your messages.

An increasing number of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are now monitoring engagement statistics to determine where your email will land in a recipient’s inbox. This protects the deliverability of emails that are consistently wanted, segmenting them from email with low engagement statistics.

What does this mean for you?

If the emails you are distributing are acquiring a high number of known opens and click throughs, for example then the ISP will send your email into the recipient’s inbox. On the other hand if your email activity is suffering from high bounce rates and minimal known opens then the ISP’s are more likely to file your email in the junk folder.

To improve your email deliverability, we recommend the following actions:

1. Boost click-throughs

One of, if not the most telling sign of positive engagement is someone clicking through from one of your emails. Even users clicking on the ‘view in browser’ link will improve your reputation with ISP’s. As a result it has become quite common for companies to flood their emails with links however this can look too over facing to the recipient.

One way to avoid this is to distribute single call to action emails broken down into three sections, all ending with a link to the relevant content on your website:

• A sentence summarising the content.

• Followed by a Bulleted List highlighting the benefits to add more incentive to those who require a bit more encouragement.

• Finally, the full blurb providing a detailed explanation of the benefits that await them by clicking through.

2. Boost ‘not junk’ responses

One of the ISP’s measurements of engagement is to monitor which emails are moved from the junk folder to a recipient’s inbox. This is a real vote of confidence in your email reputation and will help increase deliverability of your whole campaign. It is quite common for companies to ask people to sign up for email content on their website, during this process you should include details of the address your emails will be coming from and even the subject line, preferably on the sign up landing page and the welcome email. This should provide enough motivation for the new sign up to search their junk box, if the welcome email has not already landed in their inbox.

3. Segment your email communications

In response to the ISP monitoring, many companies are starting to segment their email lists by the level of engagement. This allows you to cater the email content to each segment, therefore increasing the relevance. The email marketing industry has identified 3 levels of engagement:

• The Zombies

• The Fence Dwellers

• The Converted

Here is our advice on how to tackle each segment:

The Zombies – Those who have not opened one of your emails for over 6 months. These have most likely abandoned their email accounts, perhaps they have moved job and the address hasn’t been shut down. If they do still exist you will tend to have very little rapport and therefore it would be best to remove them from your email list. If this sounds a little bit dramatic maybe try sending them one last email with a sensational subject line.

The Fence Dwellers – These people are regularly opening your emails and reading your content but don’t feel the need to click through very often. A little more encouragement is required to get them to jump down from the fence and engage in your emails. Content is key, perhaps make the call to action a little softer, a little more fun and elaborate.

The Converted – People who always open and nearly always click through, without even thinking about it. The converted really like you, so let them help you convert others. Make it easy for them to socially share your content (Twitter, Facebook icons, ‘tell a friend’ buttons), it’s more likely to go viral and send newcomers to your website.

A little segmentation can really bring your emails to life.

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