If you aren’t reaching people in ways that are meaningful to their needs or mission, your e-mail marketing efforts need a tune-up.
Relevancy is the goal. But it’s also your biggest challenge. Relevancy requires you to segment your campaigns so that you are delivering absolutely targeted content. Learning to track this activity with greater accuracy is where success lies.
Some ways to insure relevancy are obvious... personalize your message as much as possible, offer recommendations based on past transactions, and test frequently.
Relevancy is significant because:
Don’t dismiss the impact of undelivered e-mail. Marketing Sherpa [1] says that 20% of all e-mail routinely goes undelivered. Other drags on relevancy and deliverability are inactive subscribers and destinations other than IP addresses. Since ISPs don’t tell you what happened to your e-mail, you have to do the homework yourself.
Here are some tactics you can apply to your efforts at increasing relevancy:
• Determine your inbox placement rate not just your deliverability rate. An e-mail delivered to a Junk e-mail box is lost.
• Monitor your reputation. Stay on top of complaints, comments, and unsubscribe rates.
• Get a seed list monitoring tool. Find out why ISPs are blocking your e-mail.
• Remove dead addresses.
• Win back your inactives with a price incentive or limited-time offer.
• Remove your hardcore inactives.
• Manage frequency. Figure out what works best.
• If some of your campaigns are getting complaints, analyze your creative. Maybe you need to revise your strategy.
• Maintain a permanent IP address. ISPs identify you by historical data.
• Keep all your records up to date with a solid infrastructure that can readily authenticate data.
Finally, more ISPs are showing trust seals as another form of authentication. If an e-mail is not authenticated, a subscriber may delete it. The better your campaign management software, the higher the deliverability. To see how you score, try this free service from ReturnPath at www.senderscore.org [2].