Reputation is all
Email marketing remains an incredibly
important component of the overall
marketing mix. Indeed, when email
marketing can deliver an ROI of
4,300%, according to the Direct
Marketing Association, ever more
organisations of every size recognise
the importance of effective email
marketing campaigns.
Not all, however, understand the
changing email marketing landscape.
Email marketing is no longer about
blanket emails to 100s of 1,000s of
unknown recipients in the hope of
achieving 0.1% click-through. Today, email
marketing is about building relationships
with existing, known prospects and
customers – individuals who have actively
provided contact details in return for
valuable offers or content.
With marketing focusing more
resources on fewer individuals, it is
critical to ensure that emails actually
arrive in recipients’ inboxes. Yet this is
becoming increasingly challenging given
internet service providers’ fast evolving
attitudes to spam and the creation of the
Sender Reputation.
Reputation Risk
The Sender Reputation score, which
ranges from 0 to 100, is based on bounce
rate, the number of people that flag
the email as spam and the number that
unsubscribe. If a company sends out a
badly considered email campaign that
results in just a handful of people flagging
the email as spam, the ISP will not only
block the rest of that email campaign but
also slash the Sender Reputation score.
The model is simple: with a good
Sender Reputation your emails will be
safely delivered to each recipient’s in-box.
With a bad reputation all subsequent
batch email activity will be affected,
resulting in not only marketing messages
being blocked, but potentially an entire
Every internet service provider (ISP) now attributes a Sender Reputation
value to any organisation that generates high volumes of email. The risk for
businesses with low scores is that all their email will automatically be seen
as spam, arriving, at best, in the recipient’s spam folder and, at worst, being
discarded. A poor Sender Reputation, warns John Paterson, Chief Executive
of Really Simple Systems, doesn’t just have an impact on brand perception;
it can also result in non-delivery of all batch emails, including invoices,
remittance advice and support updates.
invoice mail-out, which could have a
business-critical impact on cash flow.
Real Time Performance
With ISPs tracking recipient behaviour in
real time, a Sender Reputation score can
plummet in less than an hour if an email
campaign is poorly received. So how
can an organisation avoid a bad Sender
Reputation?
The first step has to be to know and
monitor performance continually and
in real-time; without understanding the
Sender Reputation value, it is impossible
to understand just how well your email
marketing campaign is being received.
It is also worth testing email content
on a small subset of the customer base
before embarking upon the full mail
out, especially for any new content or
company direction.
Actively manage each mail out and be
prepared to pull a campaign immediately
at any sign of a drop in Sender
Reputation to avoid wider business
impact – then work slowly and steadily
with carefully managed activity to rebuild
that value over the following few weeks.
Tailored and Targeted
It also important to improve radically
the way email marketing campaigns
are considered and managed.With the
emphasis now on building relationships
with known individuals, it is simply
unacceptable to send unsolicited emails –
to those on a purchased list, for example.
This activity is a fast track to spam
notifications and ‘unsubscribes’ and a
very low Sender Reputation.
In contrast, high click-through levels
indicate that recipients are interested in
the email content, which will boost the
Sender Reputation score. It is therefore
important to tailor both the content and
frequency of any email marketing activity
in line with your current relationship with
Marketing
the recipient.
An individual who has, for example,
provided an email address in order to
download a white paper from a web site
may be happy to receive a monthly email
with content related to that paper, but
may unsubscribe if deluged with daily or
even weekly emails.
In contrast, someone who has
downloaded a white paper and watched
a video is clearly more engaged with
the company and more open to perhaps
weekly email messages. Understanding
the relationship and responding
accordingly is now critical and demands
a far more sophisticated approach to
marketing messaging.
Conclusion
Email marketing has become increasingly
important over the past few years
but the introduction of the Sender
Reputation is changing the game – and
not just for marketers.
Organisations cannot simply
create a new email message and hit
send – the risks are now too high. The
content and frequency of emails have
to be predicated on the interest in the
company already demonstrated by
each recipient; the campaign must be
proactively monitored; and organisations
must set a clear minimum Sender
Reputation value that cannot be passed
to avoid any impact on other, business-
critical email activity.
Marketing has become increasingly
core to business development, yet how
many organisations can afford to let
marketing play fast and loose not only
with their corporate reputation but
also with essential business processes,
such as invoicing? Proactively managing
the Sender Reputation has become
a fundamental aspect of any email
marketing activity.
magazine
01732 759725
31
Email
marketing is
about building
relationships
with existing,
known
prospects and
customers
