Today, ensuring that your emails both reach and are read by your customers is a complex issue that’s high up on the marketing agenda. With Experian Marketing Services analysis showing that an average of only five emails are opened per inbox visit, but that there are 500 million email-driven website visits per month, marketers must ensure that their communications are hitting the right notes.
Whilst previously it may have only been discussed amongst tech-savvy circles, developments in the way that the majority of ISPs now filter emails means that customers are able to take control of their inboxes and are able to discard or block all but the most relevant messages. Now more than ever, email campaigns are required to generate maximum profit; so it is essential that emails need to be hitting the top of the inbox and not the junk folder.
To stay ahead of the curve, marketers need to understand three pillars of successful deliverability:
Data integrity
Email campaigns are only as effective as the data they’re built on. In a 2012 Experian survey, more than 90% of companies suspected that up to 25% of their data was inaccurate. When applying these figures to an email database, any campaign will have lost a quarter of potential returns before it even begins.
Take the time to audit and validate your data; ensure that you’re capturing the right information to drive campaigns; cleanse it to remove duplications, and consider enhancing it with additional data sources that can give you a greater cross-channel insight into your customers.
Relevance
In such a fast paced environment, brands rarely get a second chance. You need to deliver relevant content first time, every time. Remember that email is there to help foster a relationship, and all good relationships are about listening. In the information age, knowledge is power, so it’s wise to treat any data that customers provide as a valuable commodity. By capturing, analysing and learning from customers, your emails can be delivered at the correct frequency, be optimised for the right device (desktop or mobile devices, for example) and provide the most attractive offers to encourage click through and transaction rates.
Reputation
ISPs are constantly changing the way they filter emails to protect their customers from spammers and phishing attempts. By using methods of authentication, signing up to feedback loops and enlisting in certification programmes, marketers can enhance their reputation and deliverability success. This should be combined with richer customer understanding, as more ISPs are looking at engagement metrics that go beyond openings, clicks and conversations.
In addition, the opt-out process needs to be made as easy and transparent as possible. This might sound counter-intuitive, but ease of opt-out can be crucial in protecting your email reputation. To mitigate the risk of losing contact with customers altogether, marketers can offer the opportunity to ‘opt-down’ rather than opting-out by allowing customers to quickly and easily reduce the frequency of emails or opt-out of some discussions but also opt-in to new ones.
Whilst taking into account the above aspects, email marketers should also consider the 7 golden rules of deliverability:
- Capture the data that drives your marketing goals and ensure that it’s constantly validated and always up-to-date
- Use your contact databases to store more than just addresses, incorporate information on permissions, propensities and preferences for example
- Start a real dialogue with customers to learn from them at every opportunity, building trust and reducing the likelihood of disengagement
- Move with your customers, with communications that are always targeted at their changing needs, and meet their expectations in terms of frequency, timing and channel
- Create content that encourages dialogue in the short, medium and long term
- Keep abreast of technology changes such as graymail that may affect your ability to deliver emails
- Work closely with ISPs to ensure that you are a responsible marketer and your emails don’t end up in the spam filter.
In addition to the above, marketers must remember that the initial contact with a customer often sets the tone for future dialogue, with Experian Marketing Services research showing that open rates are 63 per cent higher and unique click through rates that are 105 per cent higher for welcome emails.
Email may now be an established channel in the marketing mix, but it’s constantly evolving. The age of Big Data is honing email into an instrument of precision that can target customers in ways that maximise returns on your marketing investment.
It’s a huge opportunity, but as email becomes more complex, so too does the business of successful delivery. Getting your message to customers in a way that delivers meaningful results, demands rich customer and ISP understanding, in-depth analysis and highly targeted content.
At Experian CheetahMail we’ve given this topic a great deal of thought – if you would like to read an in-depth whitepaper on this topic, please click here.
