No half-hearted attempt ever truly succeeds. Email marketing is no exception. Sometimes the path to progress requires facing up to some hard truths and challenging the status quo.
Year over year, from one marketing manager to another, possibly spanning one or more service providers or agencies, your email lists may have seen better days. Where does the provenance of your email audience fall on a scale of nefarious to pristine?
Depending on how your organization has historically approached digital marketing, you may need to face the daunting process of reworking digital marketing infrastructure. Including the potentially painful process of evaluating, cleansing, or regrettably abandoning current contacts for a leaner, actively engaged audience augmented only with qualified contacts.
Email deliverability tip: Purge inactive customers. Most people merely delete an email, few are motivated to unsubscribe. Remove email addresses that have been inactive for six months. (Or less depending on your level of activity.) Purging inactive customers will ensure your target audience is willing and engaged, and will only increase your deliverability reputation.
Authentic email acquisition is integral to any digital marketing effort, and is perhaps even more important than the messaging itself. A solid, well-planned infrastructure for building your marketing lists is the best argument against uninformed crimes of ignorance against the inbox.
Never rent or purchase email lists, scrape emails of unsuspecting customers, or co-register email without your customer's consent or knowledge. These tactics just don't work. Your digital audience must be a unique representation of your marketing efforts and strategy. Organically growing this list is the best way to keep you out of the spam folder.
Email deliverability tip: Validate, normalize and organize customer data during the sign-up process. In this case an ounce of prevention will be worth a pound of cure in the long run. The double opt-in is the most selective method for list building because it requires action on behalf of the recipient (typically a click to confirm as a call to action). Email addresses collected this way are also extremely useful to the sender because the recipient has demonstrated genuine desire to receive their content.
Just untrue! Yes, I can open Outlook and fire off a personal email with no thought and for no cost. However, is that the yardstick to measure how we approach our digital marketing campaigns? Like most things, you get out of email marketing exactly what you put into it.
If you want to win the inbox, devote the time, planning and expertise necessary to construct a well-oiled communication strategy by focusing on:
Email deliverability tip: Closely monitor your sender reputation. An excellent reputation rating is essential to mastering the inbox. Staying out of the spam folder isn't as simple as avoiding a few red flag words in your subject line. Modern ISPs actively monitor sender reputation and other factors when classifying messages. Mail servers need to be "warmed up," while spam complaints, undeliverables, and other metrics denoting questionable behavior need to be minimized to ensure deliverability.
Need help evaluating your current digital marketing efforts? Novocent can help. We are a tech savvy agency with a focus on service-centric marketing.
Novocent helps you connect with customers by creating the building blocks of communication. We work to articulate the intangibles that differentiate your organization and can transform that messaging into actionable projects like:
Are we a ‘good fit’ for your team? Toss us a small project and let’s find out.
