Do Not Unsubscribe: Controlling Your Email Reputation
Email marketing provides many opportunities for engagement once you reach your prospects and customers. But ensuring your communications actually see the light of day requires a close examination of your email reputation.
Senders with a poor reputation will find a portion of their emails NOT reaching the inbox of their recipients, and that portion will then continue to grow over time. In this blog we’ll review the importance of monitoring spam issues to stay in good standing with ISPs (Internet Service Provider, such as Gmail) and their ever-changing algorithms and filters.
But My Emails Aren’t Junk NOR Spam!
Gasp, they don’t like me? It seems obvious but if your email content is useful and valued by your prospects and clients, then your emails will continue to be well received. But what if your message didn’t resonate with the reader? Email recipients can choose not to open the email—or—open it and manually send it to a spam folder, which will be flagged by the ISP and, as a result, all future emails from that sender for this recipient will be put into spam. Enough volume of these types of negative engagements, and ISPs will begin to direct your email sends to junk or spam. And once that starts, it’s typically a downward spiral for your deliverability success. Subscriber engagement is what drives these rates and can be a bit tricky as each email provider handles this component differently. It used to be Google required senders to avoid spammy subject lines, but those days are past and now Gmail’s process for determining deliverability is most heavily influenced by algorithms measuring email recipient’s engagement levels.
In addition to user-generated issues due to low engagement, you must also navigate spam traps—email addresses that don’t belong to active users and serve to identify spammers or senders with poor data hygiene practices. You can manage this component too, by regularly reviewing your email results and scrubbing your lists for bad and inactive contacts.
High Spam Rates (Low IPR) = Magnified Lost Revenue
Before you look at how many emails were opened and read, back up the stream one step and look at your spam rate to determine how many emails actually made it into the inbox of your customer or prospect. It’s important to understand that your spam rate directly affects your open rate. Your open rates are more likely to decrease as your spam rate increases.
If you can manage your spam rate downward, your open rates will move upward, and naturally your revenue from your email offers and promotions will increase as well.
In this example, the AOV is $25, and conversion from opened emails is 25%, in both scenarios. The only difference is the 14% spam rate and associated open rate of 17%. From a mere 14% spam rate with the associated 17% open rate, there is lost revenue of $8,750 from one email delivered to 50,000.
ADM has fine-tuned email data management to help clients achieve their highest deliverability, open, IPR and engagement rates, which ensures the optimum ROI. Our management services include consumer data analysis to segment consumers with relevant content along their customer journey, engagement testing, email addresses validation using a proprietary tool, and, of course, providing the standard ongoing monitoring of all KPIs. If you don’t have the tools, time or expertise to optimize the ROI from your email database, we can provide complete management or ad hoc analysis and recommendations for improvement. We are offering a free Inbox Placement Analysis to qualified companies. Contact us to get your free IPA. To learn more, check out some of our work.
