Reputation perception management and efforts for the inbox

Do you know your email marketing Sender Score? Are you using DKIM for domain authentication?  Is there a measurable difference trending in your email marketing deliverability rate, right now? No? It doesn’t matter, that’s not my expertise anyhow. I was just checking to see if you believed I was smart. (Hint: I am not. These guys are: Mark Brownlow , John Caldwell,  Luke Glasner,  Chad White, Jeffrey Rohrs,  Al Iverson,  Matthew Vernhout, Jordie van Rijn just to name a few.)

Reputation perception management is more than a technical issue that gets tackled by Email Geeks and Email Snobs alike; it’s a marketing issue as well. Yeah, I know, we’ve all heard of PR and reputation perception management isn’t new in the corporate world. So, what’s ol’ Carlyle rambling about this time? Good question. Because I’m not smart like the email marketing people named above, I have to be something else without being dumb … so for now I’m “creative”.

My creativity brought me here: “Who cares how many emails are being delivered if the entity sending the emails is perceived negatively or irrelevant?” On a recent eMail Radio show Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx brought up some interesting points to think about. I suggest you listen to the show no matter how much you disagree, it’s thought provoking.  It brought me to my “Who cares” moment.

A perception list to think about:

1. Are you driving segmentation efforts for nothing? – Dela brought up a point in the show that Papa John’s Pizza discarded advanced segmentation for a “Coupon a week” to the entire email list. Not only was it cheaper to manage; it provided more value to the consumer, increased relevance and was perceived as “better” for business and consumer.

2. Are you measuring perception with the right metrics? – Current clients are great for information around retention efforts, but don’t base your findings on people that already like you. Be open and real about outside perception.  Perhaps the reason there are a large portion of inactive recipients on the email file is because they liked the company at conception and are disappointed with what came after.  For my Twitter people – OH: “Maybe your game isn’t as polished as your outfit. I like to look at you … but not talk.”

3. Do you know what your customers want or are you stuck in ‘best-practices’? – Just because ESP’s tout their features and acquire new social and sharing capabilities doesn’t mean it applies to you, capiche? Dynamic content, segmentation, time-based sends, trigger-based sends, workflows, granular and aggregate data analysis, social sharing, HTML vs. Text, Pre-header testing, etc – all don’t mean squat. If you’re misinformed on the perception and expectations of your recipients, all efforts are uphill battles.

I’d love to add more to this list, but I’d like to spur conversation around this as I feel it’s important.  Maybe the next three will be my next post.  I encourage talk around this issue, I feel like we as email marketers go to the extreme to keep up with trends and new tactics without really understanding our personal responsibility to the people on our lists. Remember: batch-n-blast used to work, still does … it’s all in the application of the tools and the perception of the recipients. It’s our job to align those efforts and thoughts and drive success for both parties.

Drop a comment and let me know what you think!

Takeaway: How you are perceived by your clients is every bit as important as your sender reputation. Do you know how your clients really perceive you?

Viva la Email.

Source: Conversion Marketing Forum

By Sherry Chiger

Internet service providers are changing the criteria by which they identify legitimate inbound email vs. spam: That much is clear. What’s less clear is how the individual ISPs are modifying their reputation scoring. At the Epsilon Email Institute’s recent Leadership Forum in New York, Quinn Jalli, vice president of deliverability and ISP relations for Epsilon, homed in on some specifics among the various ISPs:

·      AOL began using customer engagement, in the form of the last time a consumer opened his inbox, as a determinant of spam back in 2007. Even today, Jalli said, “if you’re having problems with deliverability into AOL, it’s probably because you have a very inactive file among AOL users.”

·      “If you’re in the junk mail folder in Yahoo!,” Jalli said, “you’re probably also in the junk folder of Hotmail and Gmail.” While Yahoo! continues to take complaint and bounce rates into account when scoring, it’s now using open and clickthrough rates—in other words, engagement metrics—as the primary criteria.

Originally posted at the Email Experience Blog (EEC) here and at the Bronto blog here.

The internet was designed to be a free exchange of information wherein anyone, upon a loose framework mainly having to do with networking and rendering capabilities, could join, share and digest what they wanted. Email was developed as a predecessor to the internet.  Again, one in which, as long as you had the most basic SMTP compliancy between networks, messages would be handed off between point A to B.

Today, email has turned into a monumentally powerful marketing tool and communication channel that still rivals the internet and other upcoming social networks, regardless of which side of the “email is dying” debate you fall under. With email marketing, forward to a friend, sharing links, email filters and forwarders, along with major ISPs providing outsourcing solutions (like Google Apps), the audit trail of an email is sometimes all but impossible to decipher without CSI level forensic header analysis.

But, you don’t care about all this.

What should you care about?

When you place an order to have something delivered with the USPS, UPS or FedEx, that item almost never leaves that company’s chain of custody.  Meaning, if you dropped it off with FedEx, the recipient will most likely receive it with FedEx.  Again, there are exceptions, but the vast majority of the time this is the rule.  When you send an email out, though, it may be going to a Yahoo! domain address, then forwarded on to a Gmail domain address and finally rendered in Outlook 2007.  What can you do to ensure that your mail has the highest rate of making it to its final destination regardless of the cyber hops in the middle?

1. Ask your recipient up front if their email address is still, indeed, the right one to be using. I check over 8 different email accounts on a normal day, and with inbox email aggregators with dynamic collection addresses (such as OtherInbox), I probably have several hundred email addresses (with OtherInBox I can use disposable email addresses) that will get to me somehow.  However, the email address to sign up with your service when I was a fresh college grad and using my Alumni account may no longer be at the top of my list.  So, I appreciate it when companies I do business with ask me if that’s still the one I should have on my account.  If it is, I click through on a prompt when I login.  If not, it takes 2 seconds to change.  I don’t get asked this every time I login, but perhaps, every 6 months or so to ensure the email address is fresh.  Guess what?  My Alumni account is forwarded to my Yahoo! account.  So, I changed it to have my Yahoo! account receive the email directly (and thus avoid any errant filtering on the part of my school).

2. Authenticate outbound email. Period. DKIM was designed not to break when making multiple hops in an email’s path to the final destination.  Unfortunately SPF will because of the technical nature of email headers, but with DKIM enabled mail, if it comes through at Gmail verified and then is forwarded on to AOL, the DKIM signature stays intact and the message has a higher likelihood of being delivered.

3. Here’s the bad part.  Just like you as a sender pushing mail out to a recipient, when email is forwarded to another domain by the recipient domain, the reputation and deliverability of that mail falls back on the ISP doing the forwarding.  For instance, I run my own domain hosted through Gmail.  When you send an email there, it gets forwarded to Yahoo! which is what I consider my central email nervous system.  But, sometimes, email from Gmail gets bulked at Yahoo! because of Gmail’s reputation.  This means I don’t get my mail.  What can you do about it?  Gently remind your subscribers to check their spam folders for mail that may have accidentally fallen prey to a filter somewhere.  In my case, I’ll get email that randomly gets bulked (as opposed to breaking any obvious best sending practices) and have made it a habit to check my spam folder often.

4. Check your content in multiple web clients. Oftentimes, an email sent to a Comcast domain looks fantastic, but when forwarded to an AOL accounts, looks horrible.  Now, like in #3, a lot of this is out of your control if the actual content is changed en route by the ISP.  But, if you ensure that your content looks good in the different clients, you increase your chances that when an ISP doesn’t reach in and play with the HTML when it’s being forwarded along, it will look fine in the end email inbox.

5. Have unique identifiers or parameters in your unsubscribe links tying an email address back to a particular sender. This way, your email software will understand the “fingerprint” in the unsubscribe link and know for which address an unsubscribe was logged, regardless of which email account the unsubscribe click actually comes from.  For instance, if I unsubscribe from my Yahoo! address on an email that was sent to me originally at a Gmail account but was forwarded on, you could end up shooting yourself in the proverbial foot.  I could have any wanted email to my Yahoo! account stop but the Gmail email continue.  Recipients will oftentimes setup multiple email addresses for one account (such as Amazon.com allowing you to have different customer accounts based on the unique email address and password combination – your significant and you could both use thesmiths@smiths.com but have different passwords to your own accounts), or across multiple accounts you as an ESP or single sender support (wherein I may shop at 3 different stores your ESP hosts email for), so directly tying that recipient’s unsubscribed email address to their preferences (and not the one that happened to actually do the unsubscribing) is key.

This is pretty technical stuff, folks.  But, in order to stay on top of the original intent of email being free flowing and having as few barriers as possible, you must be cognizant of the challenges in your path.  Reach out to your technical team to ensure you’ve got these points covered.  And remember, an email address is easily disposable.  We, as marketers, tend to see them as having high stickiness.  But, recipients can come and go with fluidity and tracking them along the way with their permission (ultimately their keeping you informed of their moves) keeps you in touch with your customers.

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability
Bronto Software
@ChrisAWheeler

Takeaway: Sending an eMail is like dressing your child up to go out on a cold winter day. Make sure you’ve buttoned it up right so that it arrives in much the same condition it went out as.

There is a lot that can go wrong in email marketing after you hit “send.” In fact, about 20% of most email marketing never reaches the inbox – it goes to junk or missing altogether. We never see a bounce error message for those messages. They are just lost in the ether. And if the message is not in the inbox, it cannot earn a response. Imagine the revenue lift you would enjoy if all your metrics (opens, clicks, page views, conversions) rose by 10% or 20% – just by getting more of your messages in the inbox.

Many marketers are confounded at this. Why would the ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail, along with thousands of B2B corporate system administrators, block our messages, especially if we have permission from subscribers?

The ISPs do it because it’s best for their customer – the subscriber. Subscriber complaints, measured with every click on that Report Spam button, serve as a proxy for subscriber satisfaction. Complaints are the largest element in sender reputation – the data that ISPs use to block or let messages reach the inbox. Subscribers complain (click the Report Spam) button when they are not happy with messages or if they arrive too frequently. They complain even if they gave you permission, are customers of your company, or even when they claim to love your brand. What they want is email that is helpful to them – helps them be smarter, do their jobs better, be more productive, beautiful or wealthier.

Help your subscribers, and they will engage with your marketing messages. Bore or annoy them, and they will complain.

Your practices and the number of complaints your program earns make up your sender reputation. You need to know your sender reputation in order to manage it. Check it free at sites like www.senderscore.org and www.dnsstuff.com. Sender reputation is one of the few “leading” indicators we have as email marketers. It tells us the likelihood of our messages reaching the inbox in the next 30 days. (The score is from 1-100. The lower the score, the less likely your messages are to reach the inbox.)

It also tells you the likely causes of a poor sender reputation. This might include complaints (subscribers clicking on the Report Spam button), unknown users (a high number of hard bounces that are not removed from the file prior to the next mailing), volume (either very high, very low or inconsistent sending can cause problems) and if you are listed on any major blacklists (external reputation).

Every email marketer has a Sender Score, which is a reflection of your sender reputation. It’s there whether you know it or not, or if you manage it or not. The major ISPs in North America and Europe (Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, Orange, T-Online, etc), use this data in varying fashion to determine if your messages will reach the inbox. Content does matter, but we find that reputation is the real reason beyond the vast majority of inbox delivery or failure.

The good news is that keeping your Sender Score and your inbox delivery high is as easy as being a good marketer. Care about your subscribers and send them messages that they want to receive. Complaints will be low and your Sender Score will improve.

Smart marketers know that the key to maintaining revenue is to customize email messages in order to earn more purchases and transactions from an existing base of customers. More frequency (sending more promotional messages to these buyers) is not the answer. That is boring for the subscriber and not helpful. It doesn’t work in any channel – catalog, direct mail, store display, search or email.

There may be some in your organization who feel that sending more promotional email is too cheap to pass up. Certainly every time we send out an email broadcast, we earn revenue. However, just increasing frequency without increasing relevancy is short term thinking and could be disastrous for your list quality and inbox delivery. You may find that your unsubscribe requests, complaints and fatigue (subscribers completely ignoring your messages) all rise when frequency rises. Instead, take an active interest in helping your subscribers, and make sure your content and contact strategies are aligned with what the subscriber needs, not what you have to sell. Speak to their specific interests – what they like to buy, who they like to buy for, and how to get the most out of what they just bought.

A great way to develop a subscriber-focused content strategy is to understand the buying cycles and life stages of your subscribers. New subscribers may welcome more email than long time subscribers – or the opposite may be true! Subscribers up for product or service renewal, who recently purchased, who visited a particular section of your website, who abandoned their shopping cart, who clicked but didn’t convert, who downloaded a whitepaper, who haven’t opened or clicked in the last quarter — all those life stage points are great opportunities for tailored email messages. Even if the number of subscribers in each category is small compared to your total file size, the response rates on these types of high relevancy offers will blow away your normal rates

It’s worth actively managing your inbox deliverability. If 10%, 30% or (gasp!) 100% of your messages to Yahoo! or another ISP don’t arrive in the inbox for a 30 day period (the length of time many deliverability failures take to correct), what does that do to your revenue? Best to keep your sender reputation high now, before you find out how that lost revenue goes over in the executive suite!

Stephanie Miller @ www.returnpath.net Twitter @stephanieSAM