If you want to improve email deliverability it's important not to neglect how your email looks, including the formatting! We've talked more than once here about how not just your content, but even the formatting of your content, can make a big difference to your email deliverability. It can either improve email deliverability, or it can hinder it. It's something on which we cannot put too fine a point, as some people just don't get it, others don't believe it, and still others feel that it shouldn't matter, gosh darnnit, especially if their list building practices are kosher and their users really want their email.
Email personalization (i.e. personalizing email subjects and greetings) has become a widely used practice in email marketing. So it always surprises people to hear that personalizing email can actually hurt your email deliverability if not done well and carefully. Most mailing software these days will allow you to personalize email by putting someone's name in the subject line and salutation, and, not surprisingly, most commercial emailers take advantage of this. After all, using the recipient's name when addressing them seems like it should be a really good idea.
We're always thinking about ways that we can boost our customers' deliverability and email reptutation to previously unheard of heights. And, as we've mentioned before, open rates are becoming increasingly important. That is because ISPs look at your open rates to see if people are really interested in receiving and reading your email. So I got to thinking about things that can artificially suppress your open rates.
Having a good email reputation is actually much more important than being on a whitelist. But lots of people still talk about trying to get whitelisted, and they are looking for information about how to get on an email whitelist. And indeed, getting whitelisted used to be the holy grail of email deliverability. Did you catch that? Used to be.
Some of you know that we have been quietly working on our Feed back Loop Reports service for a while now. Today, we are making it public! And not only that, but for a limited time, you can get our Feed back Loop Reports at a special price!
You may not have heard of drip email marketing, or email drip marketing, but I can assure you that you know what it is. You have either sent it, or received it, or in some other way come into contact with it. Wikipedia - not always the most reliable source, but in this case accurate - describes drip email this way: "Email drip marketing is a form of e-mail marketing where a company sends ("drips") email messages to subscribers on a scheduled basis established using e-mail marketing software."
Last week we talked about how if your email is not "mobile friendly", that is, if it doesn't render well on mobile devices, your email will not bring you the results for which you are hoping. And because once someone reads your email on their mobile device, they aren't as likely to read it on their computer, this is very important. Remember that open and click-through rates can directly affect your deliverability.
I'm sure that you know that more and more people are reading email on the go (I, for example, read a large percentage of my email on my Sidekick, many others read email on their Blackberrys). In fact last year Marketing Sherpa determined that 64% of key decision makers are reading email on their mobile devices. Reading your email on their mobile devices. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means in terms of your email deliverability?
The results of two studies which looked at whether people are less inclined to be honest in email are out, and the answer is a big "yes". Based on these studies, at least, people tend to lie a lot in email. In fact, the two studies, published jointly as a paper entitled "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining", found that in their tests, subjects were likely to lie as much as 92% of the time!
