With the DMA's lucrative projected ROI on email marketing for 2007, marketers are expected to increasingly rely on email for critical sales promotions to attract the growing number of online shoppers, particularly for the upcoming holiday season. A sharp increase in outbound messages over normal activity can put a strain on a marketer's email system, resulting in slower delivery. Further, a marketer's inability to comply with ISP deliverability requirements can result in undelivered messages and strained relationships.
With holiday marketing activities beginning as early as October, email solution provider Message Systems' vice president of field operations, Barry Abel, advises that now is the time for email marketers to take a hard look at the effectiveness of their email delivery system and their relationship with ISPs.
"Deliverability is vital to the overall success of an email campaign and the bottom line is bounced messages equate to lost revenue," said Abel. "Consider, for example, a company that sends 500,000 emails as part of a targeted marketing campaign. Past campaign performance indicates that 100 of every 1,000 mail messages delivered to customer inboxes are opened and that of these, three people purchase products at an average transaction value of $25. Using these statistics, the retailer can expect the campaign to generate $375,000 in revenue if all 500,000 messages are received. However, if the deliverability rate slips to 80%, 100,000 messages are undelivered, costing the retailer $75,000 in lost revenue. Repeat this process on a wider scale over a year and the revenue loss is staggering. In this case, every one percent of increased deliverability produces $3,750 in additional revenue. That's why having an email delivery system that consistently achieves high deliverability rates is so important to the bottom line."
There are several things retailers can do to prepare their email delivery system for the holiday season. Whether email campaigns are handled in-house or outsourced to an email service provider (ESP), a high-performance email solution with virtual IP capability, bounce automation, real-time reporting, and tools to match ISP sending requirements are key considerations for achieving high email delivery rates and maintaining a good reputation with ISPs.
An email solution that allows each server to send millions of messages per hour with ability to maintain 100k concurrent connections will scale to send multiple campaigns simultaneously and provide the bandwidth to prevent delays. Choosing an email infrastructure that allows marketers to segment traffic by using unlimited IP addresses on a server provides fine-grain control over outbound mail processing and contributes substantially to improving deliverability.
Few marketers have email systems that monitor email delivery and process bounced messages. Knowing if a message lands in an inbox, a junk folder or was blocked by a spam catcher, provides the information a marketer needs to make adjustments so more mail is delivered to the inboxes. Further, if bad addresses are continuously used, this is an indication to ISPs that the sender may be a spammer, which can result in blacklisting. Email solutions that monitor and report on email deliverability and automatically eliminate bad addresses improve overall deliverability and help preserve the company's reputation with ISPs.
Some email systems also provide real-time analytics that also provide immediate insights into the deliverability of each mailing. On-demand reporting allows email marketers to make adjustments to improve deliverability before subsequent campaigns are sent. Similarly, an email solution that has workflow and policy management capability will alert administrators of mail processing problems when they happen, so that corrections can be made immediately.
Finally, maintaining a good reputation is critical to timely email deliverability. ISPs are fighting spam, phishing attacks and viruses daily. To prevent illegitimate mail from reaching their customers, they are tightening the requirements for senders. There a number of things legitimate marketers can do to establish and maintain a good reputation with ISPs. These include adopting authentication technology such as DKIM or Sender ID, sending to clean mailing lists and using an email delivery system that can vary the speed of message delivery to avoid overburdening ISPs that have implemented throttling. It is important to either establish an in-house ISP relations team or to contract with a third-party reputation service to keep up with changing ISP requirements.
"With the holiday season fast approaching, any retailer who wants to drive sales through email would be wise to evaluate their email delivery system now and make the necessary adjustments to handle the projected volumes generated by 4Q campaigns," said Abel.
