Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing June 2006

Strategy
Delivery Is the Whole Journey
By Randall Litchfield

Every email marketer's dream is to speak directly to the primal urges that motivate customers, and score bull's-eyes with every communication. But industry statistics tell a different story. Open rates average only 30%, meaning that 70% never even see the message. Then there's click thru rates - 5% if you're doing well - and final conversion rates of well under 1%.

Fortunately, email is such a cost effective medium that marketers can achieve excellent ROI with these kinds of percentages, but what does it take to do better? The answer lies in understanding the odds against message delivery, and what we call the Perilous Path of Permission Email. There are at least 5 legs to the journey of an email message, each with its own set of obstacles:

First Leg - Email server - you create your message on your PC, load it into your commercial email system (resident or third party service) and fire it from the email server. At this point, your only obstacle is yourself. Did you test and QA the message to see if all the links work and the HTML renders equally across all popular email clients? It's your last chance.

Second Leg - Blacklisting server - after travelling the Internet your message reaches the recipient's email server (typically their ISP) which uses a third party blacklisting service. This means that, before the ISP admits your message they send the IP address used by your email server to the blacklisting server for look up. If it is listed, the journey ends here. Prevention is the best cure. If you conduct yourself as a responsible permission email marketer, you shouldn't end up on any black lists.

Third Leg - ISP spam filter - Now the message enters the ISP, but just because you're not blacklisted doesn't mean you're not spamming. It just means you haven't been caught. That's why most ISPs run all inbound messages through spam checking software. These are ingenious rules-based devices that assess many aspects of the message for spam attributes and apply a spam count. If the count exceeds a threshold, the ISP kicks your message into a spam folder where it will never see the light of day unless the recipient takes the trouble to look in it, which almost none do. (Would you open a folder labelled "Spam"?) The best counter measure is to run your message through spam checking software before you deploy and verify your own count - anything under 5 should be OK.

Fourth Leg - Recipient's Inbox (unopened) - Your message has entered the Inbox and now has that 3 in 10 chance of being opened - like making it to a company's reception area unannounced. The biggest determinant of open rates is the subject line. We recommend pretesting at least two to small subsets of your list prior to the main deployment and running with the winner.

Fifth Leg - Recipient's Inbox (opened and clicked) - Congratulations, journey's end is the mind of your reader. They at least read the message at this point, and clicked on something. Now it is all up to message resonance and relevance - just as in any form of marketing.