In a post this morning, Dan Deneweth from Responsys says he’s received confirmation from Yahoo that they have increased the value of engagement metrics when making delivery decisions. The really great thing, for the ISPs, about engagement metrics is that they directly measure how much a particular email is wanted by recipients. There’s no guessing about it, it measures how engaged the...
In the email delivery space there are a lot of numbers we talk about including bounce rates, complaint rates, acceptance rates and inbox delivery rates. These are all good numbers to tell us about a particular campaign or mailing list. Usually these metrics all track together. Low bounce rates and low complaint rates correlate with high delivery rates and high inbox placement. But sometimes the...
ThinkGeek have a bit of a challenging audience to connect with. Many of their customers are, well, geeks. And many geeks have a reputation for being suspicious of marketing. I’d even go so far as to say that ThinkGeek has a bigger marketing challenge than other popular retailers. One of the challenges all marketers face, though, is getting people to actually open and read an email carefully...
From Tim Roe at eConsultancy.com: Is engagement email marketing finally here?
Tim lays out a number of factors for why engagement is important in email marketing and how to use engagement to improve ROI.
Ken has an article today about how Pro Flowers managed to get their mail out of the bulk folder at Gmail by asking their recipients for help. This year, ProFlowers apparently took into account Gmail’s use of sender reputation and user engagement in its spam filtering rules by using subject lines, such as: “Gmail Customer Notice: Open if you missed yesterday’s special discount!” and “Help Teach...
Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools. Is their increased vigilance pissing you off? If so, your anger is misplaced. They are reacting quite sensibly to market conditions...
I’ve been thinking lately that sometimes that what works for marketing doesn’t always work for delivery. For instance in many areas of marketing repetition is key. Repeat a slogan and forge an association between the slogan and the product in the mind of the consumer. More repetition is better. Marketers can even go so far as using the same ad to drive consumer action. Television...
I use a pretty standard mail filtering setup – a fairly vanilla SpamAssassin setup on the front end, combined with naive bayesian content filters in my mail client. So I don’t reject any mail, it just ends up in one of my inboxes or a junk folder. And I have a mix of normal consumer mail – facebook, twitter, lots of commercial newsletters, mail from friends and colleagues and...
Mail delivered to the bulk folder is likely to continue landing in the bulk folder without intervention. Sometimes a sender can talk to the ISP involved and get mail moved back to the inbox. Sometimes a sender can make hygiene changes and get mail moved back to the inbox. The most effective way to get mail delivered to the inbox, however, is for recipients to go into the bulk folder and mark the...
Yesterday I wrote about how important recipients are to achieving good delivery. The short version of yesterday’s post is that delivery is all about engagement, and how the ISPs were really focusing on engagement and proving custom user experiences. This is great, for the user. Take the common example where a commercial list has some highly engaged recipients and a bunch of recipients that...
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