Email Marketing Delivery Counts


	Email Marketing News		Email Marketing Research		Email Marketing Best Practices		Email Marketing Glossary & Terms

Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Marketing Delivery Counts

If you use email to communicate with and market to your customers, deliverability is increasingly important to your success. The most legitimate, honest, and forthright marketer in the world can do everything right, but if 20% of the mail is not reaching its intended target, there is a tremendous amount of missed opportunity.

In any volume email communications, a certain percentage of the recipients are likely to view you as an accidental spammer, despite your best efforts to stay on the permission side of email marketing. This is because people sometimes forget that they signed up for your material, or they're afraid to unsubscribe, or they're just plain tired of your email marketing messages.

Stay Focused
By staying focused on deliverability, you will quickly see when blockages occur that slow down or even stop your email. It is important to realize that when this happens, it is not the end of the world; it happens to just about every marketer.

However, it is critical that someone take rapid action to find out why the slowdown or stoppage happened and how to correct the problem.

Ask
If you are working with an email service provider, the best way to determine your deliverability rate is to ask them how they ensure email deliverability. The provider should be able to give you complete email delivery statistics. They should also have a well-defined process that ensures that your email is delivered. This process should include proactive steps such as participating in the Bonded Sender program, monitoring the delivery of seed names across the major ISPs, an analysis process that eliminates potential spammers from using the provider's systems, and an ISP relations person with strong contacts at the major ISPs, someone who can contact the ISPs quickly if a blockage does occur.

Another important feature for larger-volume mailers is to insist that mail be sent on a dedicated IP. If you are on a shared IP and other mailers on the same IP do something that causes blockage, your messages will be adversely impacted.

A commercial mailer should expect delivery rates somewhere in excess of 95% across all their campaigns (SubscriberMail , for example, has a delivery rate of 97.6%).

Monitor
If you are sending your mail using your own servers, you should sign up with a monitoring service such as Return Path's Assurance Systems. This tool monitors delivery across most of the major ISPs, and tells you when mail was received, whether it ended up in the customer's in-boxes or bulk mail, and whether it was delivered at all.

As more and more email services provide bulk mail folders, knowing what percent of your email marketing ends up in bulk folders rather than regular folders can also tell you something about how well your email is being delivered.

Email deliverability, if properly watched and managed, can yield huge dividends. Recent Return Path statistics show that 19% of the email being sent is not being delivered. This means the lost opportunity for just about any offer or customer communications is huge.

Being proactive, knowing what deliverability is all about, and taking appropriate steps to correct delivery issues are your insurance policies for successful campaigns in the future.

SubscriberMail's email marketing software and services | Site Map | Contact Us