The new email marketing: Venn and the art of Reputation Maintenance
Latest posts | Feed | | By Mark Brownlow
[We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.]
X marks the spot.
Your sender reputation is your ticket to the ball. It's the stamp of approval that helps you get through the ISP gates and into the inbox.
Unfortunately, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, reputation is a delicate thing...easily bruised, easily lost:
"It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it."
Traditionally, we've limited our understanding of sender reputation to the established reputation criteria used by ISPs to help decide what to do with your email.
But there is another kind of sender reputation out there: your reputation with recipients. Their perception of your email efforts helps them decide whether to open and respond to your next email, delete it, or mark it as spam.
The two reputations are connected. And this connection will get stronger as time goes by.
Why?
Because ISPs filter incoming email to give their customers (email users) a cleaner, clearer, smaller, safer, more relevant inbox. That's what those customers want.
So the ISPs are inevitably incorporating customer wants into their definition of reputation: a reputable sender is one who sends email that recipients want and value.
The clearest example of this connection between ISP and recipient reputation is clicks on the "report spam" button.
Your reputation with these recipients plays a powerful role in determining the number of spam reports you get. The greater the proportion of recipients who report your emails as spam, the worse your sender reputation with ISPs.
But it's not just about spam reports.
If ISPs are using their customers as a guide to what counts as reputable email, then what about all the other criteria that define a valued email?
A few weeks ago I speculated that the big webmail services would likely incorporate other subscriber-email interactions into their assessment of your reputation. If recipients don't interact with your email, then your sender reputation and deliverability would suffer.
Just last week, deliverability consultant Laura Atkins cited evidence that AOL are doing exactly that:
"No longer is reputation all about complaints, it is about sending engaging and relevant email. The ISPs are now measuring engagement. They are measuring relevancy. They are measuring better than many senders are."
AOL itself owns up to, for example, taking "not spam" reports into account when assessing your reputation. In other words, do people look for your email in the junk folder and mark it as "not spam?"
So the new email marketer looks to improve deliverability by focusing on the red area in our Venn diagram above: where the two reputations meet.
The new email marketer tackles their reputation with ISPs directly, by keeping lists clean of dead addresses etc. And indirectly by improving their reputation with recipients.
The new email marketer builds a solid reputation and relationship with recipients by doing all the things we've covered in this series.
These recipients engage with the emails. The ISPs take note. And your sender reputation - and delivery rates - rise accordingly.
It matters now more than ever before.
Analysts warn (again) that people are getting too much marketing email.
The holiday season is on us. And people turn to email marketing as a cheaper way to market in a time of declining budgets and a down economy. The inbox flood is likely to get worse, not better.
Email users and their address providers will not reward those who add to that flood with "me too" messages.
They will reward those that value their reputations, by providing value to their recipients.
As Benjamin Franklin also said:
"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
Part 18 coming soon...
Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, sender reputation
X marks the spot.
Your sender reputation is your ticket to the ball. It's the stamp of approval that helps you get through the ISP gates and into the inbox.
Unfortunately, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, reputation is a delicate thing...easily bruised, easily lost:
"It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it."
Traditionally, we've limited our understanding of sender reputation to the established reputation criteria used by ISPs to help decide what to do with your email.
But there is another kind of sender reputation out there: your reputation with recipients. Their perception of your email efforts helps them decide whether to open and respond to your next email, delete it, or mark it as spam.
The two reputations are connected. And this connection will get stronger as time goes by.
Why?
Because ISPs filter incoming email to give their customers (email users) a cleaner, clearer, smaller, safer, more relevant inbox. That's what those customers want.
So the ISPs are inevitably incorporating customer wants into their definition of reputation: a reputable sender is one who sends email that recipients want and value.
The clearest example of this connection between ISP and recipient reputation is clicks on the "report spam" button.
Your reputation with these recipients plays a powerful role in determining the number of spam reports you get. The greater the proportion of recipients who report your emails as spam, the worse your sender reputation with ISPs.
But it's not just about spam reports.
If ISPs are using their customers as a guide to what counts as reputable email, then what about all the other criteria that define a valued email?
A few weeks ago I speculated that the big webmail services would likely incorporate other subscriber-email interactions into their assessment of your reputation. If recipients don't interact with your email, then your sender reputation and deliverability would suffer.
Just last week, deliverability consultant Laura Atkins cited evidence that AOL are doing exactly that:
"No longer is reputation all about complaints, it is about sending engaging and relevant email. The ISPs are now measuring engagement. They are measuring relevancy. They are measuring better than many senders are."
AOL itself owns up to, for example, taking "not spam" reports into account when assessing your reputation. In other words, do people look for your email in the junk folder and mark it as "not spam?"
So the new email marketer looks to improve deliverability by focusing on the red area in our Venn diagram above: where the two reputations meet.
The new email marketer tackles their reputation with ISPs directly, by keeping lists clean of dead addresses etc. And indirectly by improving their reputation with recipients.
The new email marketer builds a solid reputation and relationship with recipients by doing all the things we've covered in this series.
These recipients engage with the emails. The ISPs take note. And your sender reputation - and delivery rates - rise accordingly.
It matters now more than ever before.
Analysts warn (again) that people are getting too much marketing email.
The holiday season is on us. And people turn to email marketing as a cheaper way to market in a time of declining budgets and a down economy. The inbox flood is likely to get worse, not better.
Email users and their address providers will not reward those who add to that flood with "me too" messages.
They will reward those that value their reputations, by providing value to their recipients.
As Benjamin Franklin also said:
"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
Part 18 coming soon...
Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, sender reputation
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | October 27, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter
Permalink | October 27, 2008 | 0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter
0 Comments:
Comments closed during migration to a new blog platform in early May
