Posts Tagged ‘deliverability’

Email deliverability: global situation and tips for improvement

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Last week, Return Path, the world’s leading email reputation monitoring company, published Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report of the first half of 2011. The report shows that only four out of every five or 81% of permission-based email gets delivered to the inbox. Of the rest 19%, 7% of email lands in a spam or junk folder and 12% of email is blocked by ISP level filtering and simply goes missing.

Global situation

Return Path reviews data from 149 ISPs worldwide, and the research indicates deliverability rates vary by each region.

North America shows the highest inbox placement rate (IPR) with 86% of emails delivered exactly to recipients. Europe ranks second with 2% less than US and Canada (84%) but Asia and the Asia Pacific territories and Central and Latin America go under the global average, accordingly 78% and 62%.

Why so many emails do not reach the inbox?

Bounce rate myth

Marketers continue to spread a widely believed „lie” if email doesn’t bounce it reaches the inbox and hide a little known „secret” that it’s not exactly true. Even if email gets sent, for various reasons it can land to spam or junk folder. Recipients usually don’t read spam messages, so we can consider email actually is not delivered.

Deliverability failures

Even though deliverability problems cost a lot of money, marketers don’t pay enough attention to that. Focusing just on revenue comming from campaigns, marketers do not think how to increase email marketing ROI. However, ignoring deliverability failures is a real lost of money.

Impact of new inbox technologies

Return Path analyzed a panel of sample 30 000 Gmail mailboxes and indicated that 91% of emails arrived in the inbox, while 9% were missing – blocked before reaching the mailbox. Moreover, 81% of Gmail mailboxes had priority inbox enable, but only 17% of emails in the inbox were marked with priority.

Business inboxes are particularly difficult to reach because they are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. Only 80% of emails go through these filtering methods.

Missing email marketing best practices

A lot of marketers still don’t follow the best practices, for example, sending only permission-based emails, including unsubscribe link or cleaning old email lists. Return Path revealed that even top brands fail in implementing the best practices.

How to improve email delivery?

Monitor email delivery

  • follow spam complaints and unsubscribe rate that point to the bad quality of campaigns
  • ask for advice your e-mail marketing consultant to fix delivery problems

Clean your list

  • check spelling mistakes of bounce emails and correct them (.gmal, .ocm etc.)
  • delete hard bounce emails from your list (non-existing email addresses and blocked emails)
  • remove maintenance addresses (support, noreply, admin etc.)
  • if your list is more than 6 month old, make general data base cleaning to remove non-existing emails (Mailigen offers the service)

Ask for permission

  • when making a list, use double opt-in to be sure about existing email addresses and willingness to receive emails
  • if using email list for a long time, ask subscribers for permission confirmation
  • practice re-engangement campaigns to involve inactive contacts
  • always include unsubscribe link in emails

Send relevant information

  • send information that people have subscribed for to avoid spam complaints
  • segment subscribers in groups to send even more tergeted emails
  • avoid spammy subject lines and content

Use professional email service providers

Together with the best email marketing practices, your campaigns have more than good chances to reach the inbox.

Deliverability on Mailigen service

Email marketing service Mailigen is proud about its high deliverability rates. Taking into consideration the best technical practice, Mailigen shows its inbox placement rate of 86% that is similar to the global leader North America and higher than Europe average rate.

If you have any questions or want to increase your deliverability rate, please contact our consultants. We will be more than happy to help you.

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How Email Bounces can Affect Deliverability

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Email BouncesBounced emails are like all the supervillains in the world combined.

They reduce your income, make your email support provider bill bigger, and can even cause blacklisting of your entire list.

Fortunately, though, things are getting better in terms of delivery for the average sender: an Epsilon study suggests that about 4 per cent of email campaigns were bounced in the 3rd quarter of 2010 (mind that the email bounce rate relies heavily on the industry, though).

Why do emails bounce in the first place?

The most common reason for a bounce is a misspelled email address. Maybe the subscriber uses a local email provider, which doesn’t accept your email due to its size, or has a full inbox. A network failure can also make your email bounce in rare cases, or your sending address might have been blocked by the mail server. It’s also important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces.

Hard bounces are undelivered messages that are permanently kept from reaching the intended recipient. Examples include blocked email, and email sent to mistyped and no longer existing email addresses.

Soft Bounces are email bounces from emails that were sent to a existing address, but were sent back. This can happen due to a full inbox, your message being too large, or because of overwhelmed server capacity.

Bounces can affect your entire list. ISPs can blacklist you because spammers commonly employ a technique known as a “Direct Harvest Attack”, and the respective ISP can mistake you for a spammer if you send email to non-existent addresses, as is done during a “direct harvest attack”.

Needless to say, you shouldn’t send emails after hard bounces, you should delete them right away, and after three soft bounces sending an email becomes a long shot.

7 things you can do to decrease the bounce rate

1. Clean the list you own regularly.
This is a no-brainer. Remove bounced email addresses regularly, and re-engage the customers when doing it can yield returns. Besides, clean email lists give more accurate statistics, and will greatly lower your email bounce rate. For more information on list maintenance, check out our article on email list hygiene.

2. Skim read the bounced addresses.
Chances are that some addresses need correction if you don’t follow a double-opt in system. Even if you do, though, you might want to correct the emails that were mistyped (.ocm, htomail, etc) for the user to get the chance to confirm his or her subscription.

3. Use double opt-in.
Double opt-in confirms each address upon subscribing, reducing the possibility of mistyped addresses to practically zero. In theory, by doing this and you won’t have to do #2.

4. Try a win-back campaign.
Re-engaging inactive subscribers is an option you should consider if your open rates are falling low. A win-back campaign will trim your list greatly, but the result will be a cleaner list with more possibilities to deliver.

5. Send useful and relevant emails.
By doing so you will not only keep your reputation in check, but also potentially sell more, experience fewer complaints and have soaring email open rates. It is tempting to send short-term campaigns with no real value to the customer, because they can work well. But don’t. Just don’t.

6. Make sure your letters aren’t “spammy”.
A letter can be filtered by the webmail client (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo) or desktop email software (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), so insure that your email has no phrases like “Cialis, Viagra, sex tape”, and so on prior to sending it.

7. Remove spam traps and maintenance addresses.
Scan for addresses such as help@domain.com, admin@domain.com, etc. Addresses like antispam@stopspam.org are most likely added by people who don’t very much like you or think they are funny. Do your best to remove them.

We would like to hear how you are dealing with bounced emails. Which of the 7 tactics you use?

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A brief Introduction to Email Deliverability

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Email DeliverabilityEmail deliverability is a term that refers to everything connected to the ability of your emails to turn up at the recipients’ inbox.

Email deliverability directly influences the effectiveness and reach of your campaign: no one can view an undelivered email or click an unseen link. That’s why good email deliverability is vital to the success of your email marketing campaigns.

The main pitfalls in email deliverability

1.Bounced emails

Bounced emails can’t be avoided. Whether the address has been deleted, domain expired, or mistyped from the start, bounced emails will hinder your list development at all times. Correct them as you go, because ISPs will likely think that you are a spammer

2.Spam filters

Spam filters usually check for content quality, senders IP and reputation. So it’s important to keep your reputation in good condition. Even more importantly, always think about what you are writing in your message body. As there is more spam traveling around the world than actual marketing related emails, it is important you are aware of words not to use in emails not to be identified as spam. You can read more about avoiding spam filters and words not to use in this article.
Spam filters usually act in favor of the user, but can cause your email to land in the spam folder.

Note that most email service providers (ESPs) have built-in spam check options that offer you to check spam-rating of your emails before you send them.

3.Invalid HTML

Most emails sent today are not W3C compliant and invalid HTML emails are likely to be blocked, just because email spam senders sometimes use standard-ignorant HTML to their advantage. Use the W3C validator for keeping your emails standard compliant.

How to ensure deliverability (or at least better it)

1.Send targeted emails

Most of the errors in deliverability are caused by using low quality email lists, or not having email lists targeted enough. Blast an email to too broad of an audience and you will get unhappy readers because of wrong interests.

Targeted emails aren’t simply ones with the recipient’s name in the email.
The content of relevant emails is relevant to the user’s interests, isn’t overly sales-oriented, and doesn’t contain misleading information, links, etc.

2.Use ESPs for sending email.

Although you are the one who’s responsible for proper delivery, ESPs can help you deliver more emails than by going solo.

First of all, ESPs act on the basis of permission email marketing, which is actually the only legal way of sending commercial email in the U.S. and most countries around the world.
ESPs also have ongoing relations with internet service providers, and employ a significant amount of tools (bounced email removal and logging) for making your life easier.

3.Be honest to your subscribers

This one usually goes without saying, but telling half-truths is lying — at least in email marketing, anyway. Tell your users about when, how often, and about what you’ll be sending emails. You can’t exploit the email because somebody signed up for your company newsletter a while ago.

In a nutshell

Send targeted emails, probably with the help of ESPs.

Personalize emails for better delivery results, and practice honesty to your subscribers.

There is no ‘magic pill’ for bettering email deliverability, but honest, transparent campaigns will be delivered to more recipients than the ones that reek of email spam.

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Top 10 email marketing mistakes

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Email Marketing MistakesThere are many common email marketing mistakes that marketers make, and not because they don’t know what they’re doing. Email marketing mistakes are made simply because there are many things you need to check over and over again, because some mistakes are deadly for success.

We’ve arranged some things that you should double — if not triple or quadruple — check before you send out your campaign.

1. No permission for sending e-mails

Yeah, some people still don’t get it.
E-mail marketing isn’t regular marketing. You can’t expect to sell a product by annoying people, nor by sending spam (which is illegal, by the way). If you don’t have explicit permission to mail to the people on the list then don’t e-mail them. You shouldn’t buy or rent an e-mail lists either.

2. Sending out rushed campaigns

Most marketers know how to write attractive content, but time is a beast, and it can mess up even the most intelligent campaign. You cannot allow to send content before it’s ready for the client, and you absolutely need to write decent “Subject” lines, which brings us to the next common mistake.

3. Botched “From” and “Subject” fields

These two fields are easily the most important variable that influences the open rate. Poorly chosen email “From” and “Subject” lines are the only few things which bring measurable results… you know how to make these fields work, don’t you? Just be carefull not to send from “no-reply@” emails etc., people like persolaization.

4. Non-targeted or irrelevant content

The word “targeted” sounds a bit complicated. But basically what sending targeted content means in e-mail marketing is, well, sending content you said you’d send. You should also use all the tools at your disposal: don’t be afraid to experiment a little and segment the users.

5. Sending bad content at a bad time

This mistake is as common as it is relative. Bad content means that users will most likely unsubscribe if they utterly dislike your content. Grammar errors and missing links will make you look unprofessional. A bad sending time will make the users skip the e-mail altogether. A good time to send e-mails is, as a rule, between Monday to Thursday. Always be weary about how often you send the e-mails, too.

6. Too many graphics

Yes, graphics are what attract attention in e-mails, but keep in mind that they are disabled altogether for Gmail, and do not show up in a number of e-mail clients automatically, if you are not a trusted sender. Furthermore, too many graphics increase the loading time — that, in turn, means that many readers will not read it thoroughly.

7. No call to action

Believe it or not, people often are so hyped up about their campaign that they forget to do their best to increase conversions. No email call to action means little, if any conversions. Make your wants clear and simple to the readers.

8. No unsubscribe link

Like #1, this relates to the CAN-SPAM act and appeals to humanity of marketing. Not only dismissing the unsubscribe link is illegal. It’s very bad for your brand, and such a practice can get you blacklisted (unable to send e-mails at all) in a breeze.

9. Not doing anything with the list

Well, “not doing anything” is not a mistake, as nothing is done. However, not doing anything leads to an awful lot of bad things–users will simply forget you if you’re inactive. To recover an old list, you have to remind the users about your existence with a “reminder e-mail”. In most cases you’ll have to lose at least 30% of your subscribers.

10. Using e-mail marketing only for e-mail marketing

Encourage the users to provide feedback; encourage the users to contact you directly. Why not include links to your company’s profiles in social media sites? This isn’t what every contemporary business does. It’s what the every contemporary client expects.

The consequences to making mistakes in email marketing are much worse than with other types of marketing.

A bad “Subject” field can botch the entire campaign; too frequent e-mails and irrelevant content can give ground to spam complaints (utterly bad); and sending e-mail to strangers is all but a business suicide.

E-mail marketing is a fragile tool, which can yield great returns, but breaks easily. Don’t be scared to try and use it to the fullest potential–whilst still remembering that there are boundaries that needn’t to be crossed.

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Analyzing email marketing campaign results

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Email Campaign Tracking & reportIf you’ve already sent an email marketing campaign, chances are that you are at least familiar with the process of email campaign tracking, and have analyzed the statistics you got from your campaign.

However, the analysis of acquired data doesn’t stop with open rates or the average clickthrough rate (CTR).

Overall analysis

When a campaign has concluded, take a look at the obvious data: the open rates and the CTR. The open rate can be somewhere from 20 to 40 percent, but we can’t give an exact number for the CTR, hence the CTR relies heavily on the composition of your content, how well you write, etc; as a rule of thumb, CTR is best measured relatively to other campaigns.

If the open rate is well below 20 percent, the campaign has failed, and you should review the fundamentals: are the “Subject” and “From” fields in order? Is your audience targeted enough? Is every single e-mail delivered or are there broken e-mail addresses?

Then have a look at the unsubscribe amount; if the number has soared without no apparent reason, you might be sending e-mails too often, or need to re-think the branding of your e-mail campaign.

The CTR is a bit controversial: if it’s high, it’s good, right?

Ultimately, you want to pay attention only to the clicks that go to a landing page. A big clickthrough rate is good, because it shows that your readers pay attention to what you have to say, though you might want to adjust the layout or the content of your e-mails if people don’t click what you want them to click.

The sending time is also crucial: are your subscribers located in a single time zone? Are they spread out? What sending time generates the most opens?

As a rule, you shouldn’t send e-mail on Monday mornings and from Friday to Sunday; around those times e-mails are more likely to drown in the already full inbox. As for the “ideal” sending time, determining it is entirely deductive–just follow what works for you and experiment a bit.

In-depth analysis

Analyzing campaigns doesn’t stop at the obvious.

Good analytics software will let you know other important factors. For example, the average time spent on the site (or not spent), is a good indicator of how well your landing page integrates with your email campaign.

If the time spent on your site is too small (or many users bounce), you might want to adjust the design and content of your landing page to look more like your e-mails do.

If the time spent on your landing page is large, but there are still few conversions, you might want to add clearer calls to action. The email call to action should create a sense of urgency within the reader; long time spent on the site indicates interest, but also shows that the readers can’t make up their minds (hint: it’s you who has to make up their minds).

What to do with your data

An email campaign report is merely a guide, from which you have to extract useful information.

You should divide your users into segments according to the data you analyzed. You could, for example, create a separate email marketing landing page for users who spend a lot of time on the landing page, and include urgent calls to action in the page.

Here you decide what you need to correct, and why. Be careful, though, and pay attention only to the “big picture”, as individual statistics are what they are: mere numbers.

Conclusion

When all is said and done, you’re finally ready to send out your new campaign. Go ahead, send it. Then learn from the results once again. E-mail marketing is a long-term process; it involves long-term thinking and focuses on long term results.

By continuously improving your campaign, you’ll be able to achieve the long-term results everyone is longing for. Each time when you analyze email campaign, you’ll become better at recognizing all the subtle things that make an e-mail marketing campaign successful.

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Increase Email Deliverability

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

You’d be amazed if you saw the spam numbers of today. About 70 per cent of all e-mail sent is spam; furthermore, there are more than 14 billion unwanted email letters sent each day and spam generates annual losses of about $20b. These numbers are the reason behind the drastic spam filtering of today, and numerous businesses have become weary about the delivery of their newsletters.

Few Tips to Increase Email Deliverability

email deliverabilityThe most secure way of reassuring email delivery is to have clients manually add you to their address book. However, it seldom happens with regular customers. It is, however, important that you mention that they should add you to your address book for the simple reason that it can save emails. Mention something among lines like ‘Add us (company@email.com) to your address book in order to ensure delivery. Thank you!’ in your subscription form.

E-mail providers know about mailing lists and will allow your emails to go through unharmed if it appears that the subscriber has manually subscribed to the list.

  • Mentioning the subscriber’s name in the subject line is crucial, as personalized emails are rarely thought to be spam.
  • Among other possible things to ask, be sure to ask for the recipient’s name when he signs up.

Owners of more sizable lists have to be cautious; if numerous recipients of your emails mark your email as spam, you can start losing customer trust-and your email address can become blacklisted. Blacklisted email addresses can be automatically marked as spam by email providers and ISPs.

To avoid blacklisting…

  • be sure to provide an opt-out link;
  • send only relevant content;
  • don’t send it to people who haven’t subscribed to your list; et cetera.

However, blacklisting for newsletters is very rare and you can get your sender’s IP removed from the blacklist if you provide evidence that you only send email to your subscribers.

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