Managing Email Marketing: It's All About Deliverabililty

I have learned a lot recently about managing the sending of emails -- from your website or customer portal/community, or from your marketing DB.  There are a bunch of issues for effectively managing the use of Email technology and ESP's (Email Service Providers) that are great to know about, and to think through.  This post sorts them out so your common sense can go to work -- it's possible to set yourselves and your organization up to win and to improve your effectiveness at email communications.

Before you read further, it might be valuable to check out this article from Direct Magazine, entitled "Five Questions to Ask E-Mail Service Providers".  The article offers five steps to making sure your ESP can help you get your e-mail message safely past the filters -- so you can understand and measure whether your messages are getting delivered, or ending up in your recipient's spam or junk mail folder.  Here's a quick rundown:

1. Insist on independent inbox and spam folder tracking -- where there are a number of email boxes at all of your key ISP's in your mailling list, so you can get some real data about the actual delivery of emails to their destinations.
2. Check to see what other mailers the ESP you’re considering services, and think about spending more for a dedicated IP address for your mail.  If you share an IP -- who knows what's being sent, and that IP may end up on a blacklist, and not by your doing -- but you will suffer lost opportunity from mail that doesn't get delivered.
3. Check into an ESP’s bounce management policies and capabilities.  Get familiar with "hard" vs "soft" bounces and what they can mean -- how does your ESP interpret this information?
4.    Find out what spam filters the ESP uses for checking deliverability and how they check your HTML code for correctness.  You've got to check with things other than shareware like Spam Assassin.
5. Look for an ESP with a full set of delivery features -- like blacklist monitoring, whitelisting, abuse board monitoring, etc.

If your head isn't swimming already -- then consider all of your emails being sent -- are different departments using different ESP's?  Are they integrated with your marketing DB, lead DB, customer DB, or customer/community portal DB?

Here's why that's important:  CAN SPAM Act.  It says a few things that you may want to monitor to keep your company out of hot water...

• Beyond including a postal address and an unsubscribe link that works, you must also pay attention to ...
• How you provide "opt-out" options.  If you do not provide specific opt-out options for every department or function that is sending emails, then when a user opts out, you must opt them out of EVERYTHING.  Currently you have 10 days to do that -- and that is being reduced to 7 very shortly (and we can guess that timeframe wiill continue to shorten).  So if you've got different departments using different ESP's, then you are advised to ensure that they can communicate that Do Not Email list and make sure they also get them updated accurately.

And if that's not enough, then take into account laws put in place in both Michigan and Utah, that say if you are sending emails for things like guns or weapons, adult content, etc., that you MUST check your email list against their supression file (a do-not-email list that parents can put their children's email addresses on), so that none of the "wrong" sort of emails get delivered to minors.  Here's the kicker -- those DB's are fee-based, soemthing like 7 cents per recipient in your email list.  Ouch!  If you're a B-to-C business that sends out any subject matter that they've outlined in their law, and have a list of 10,000 emails, that's an additional cost of $700 for sending to that list.

Check out an article about the laws imposed by Michigan and Utah, entitled "Michigan, Utah Impose Dreaded E-Mail Tax" posted at the Datamation website in July.

Now, as though that would be enough -- but there's this thorny issue about what are the "statistics" that are most useful when managing your email deliverability.  I spoke with Pivotal Veracity, which offers and partners with many ESP's, providing their deliverability statistics.  Here's what they said:

• As a base level, you want things like Number Emails Sent, Number that bounced, Number of emails opened, number of emails where a link was clicked.
• Added bonus is to do domain-level statistics -- so the same as above, but on a per-domain basis for each campaign sent.
• The BEST is to add the Placement data -- that is, where does your email get delivered at the major ISP's -- to the inbox, or to a junk mail folder?  This is what you can use that will help you determine things like where you could improve your email messages to get better results, and look at various opportunity costs that will assist you to improve your email communications.

So, it's a big world -- and it adds to your integration scenario, and introduces additional "systems" that need to be integrated to your marketing/customer/portal databases.  Knowing about all of this allows you to create workable solutions that are manageable in the total marketing systems mix.

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