The email reputation matrix
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on September 05, 2007
It's the hip new drink at the email marketing bar. Reputation.The latest EmailSherpa newsletter, for example, offers 27 action points to fix your reputation.
The recent flurry of articles like those above reflects the realization that your reputation defines your success at getting through to recipients.
And when I say "getting through," I mean both physically and mentally. That's because the concept of reputation pervades your whole email program.
We know about the importance of the reputation of your sending address in the eyes of email's gatekeepers. That's what people like Barry Abel are talking about: your sender reputation and its role in determining whether your email is delivered to the inbox.
Then, as I pointed out last month, we have your reputation in the eyes of those receiving your emails. The all-important subscribers. How do they view your email practices and content?
This "subscriber reputation" has various consequences...
It determines whether recipients decide to bash your sender reputation by reporting you as spam.
And it also plays a role in driving responses to your messages. The decision to open your message, click a link, read your content and/or pass on your email is not just based on the email itself, but the reputation that precedes it.
If your last five emails were all super relevant, people are more likely to read the sixth. If you have a history of irrelevant content, why bother looking at the next one that arrives?
Which is why reputation and targeting are so intimately connected. A point made by both Michael Greenberg and Stefanie Miller, whose articles look at different ways of segmenting your address list.
Targeting means relevancy means better responses and an enhanced reputation with subscribers (in turn protecting your sender reputation, since happy subscribers don't report you as spam.)
But it doesn't stop there.
Relevancy is not the only criterion used by subscribers in forming your reputation. How about style? Engaging emails also enhance that reputation. Consider, for example, Nick Usborne's latest piece on adding personal power to your messages.
What about your email's design? The usability of your opt-in process? The quality of your landing pages?
And so the various elements of an email program interact to build those reputations that let you get through to subscribers...physically to their inboxes and mentally to the right part of their minds.
And just to drive home the point, let's widen our perspective.
Your sender and subscriber reputations affect more than the delivery and clickthrough rates of your emails. They change how people view your broader business. This brand impact is described by Ray Everett-Church at DM News.
Email doesn't work in isolation. Missing emails, emails in junk folders, irrelevant content...they all reflect on your whole business. Unless you think it makes you look good to appear in the junk folder sandwiched between ads for purple pills.
Email matters to your business. And building a successful email program means building reputations.
More on deliverability and reputation | Tags: email deliverability, email reputation, email branding, segmentation, targeting
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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