E-mail Sender Reputation Key to Reaching Inboxes

Reputation matters in marketing, and e-mail marketers especially need a sterling sender reputation to ensure messages reach target inboxes. Mailbox providers use algorithms to filter and remove "spam," and marketing e-mails can be swept out of inboxes based on their sender reputation metrics, explained a recent Inc. magazine article by Peter Roesler, president of Web Marketing Pros. To show how important sender reputation is to inbox placement, Roesler cited recent Return Path research. The Return Path study measured e-mail marketer reputation with a Sender Score--a number between 0 and 100 (best)--to show how mailbox providers view a marketer's IP address. Return Path found one quarter of e-mail marketers with Sender Scores between 71 and 80 had their messages land in junk/spam folders, for example. Even marketers with scores between 81 and 90 had 10% of their messages diverted to junk/spam folders. Marketers want to be in the 99-100 score range, where only 2% of messages went into junk folders. Unfortunately, most e-mail marketers fall far short in terms of sender reputation; Return Path found 52% of e-mails were sent by marketers with scores below 71. One way to end up with a poor score, Roesler warns, is trying to jump-start e-mail marketing by purchase of an e-mail list with addresses that have not been properly obtained. Many of these e-mail recipients will mark unsolicited content as spam, spoiling reputation so legitimate e-mails get dumped in spam limbo. E-mail marketers need to know how they are viewed by mailbox providers if they want to improve reputation and keep it polished. Since scoring criteria vary by provider--based on combinations of open rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, etc.--it's best to go to an outside source to check reputation metrics, advises Roesler. He suggests resources such as SenderBase.org, ReputationAuthority and TrustedSource. See http://www.inc.com/peter-roesler/why-reputation-matters-for-email-marketing.html

U.S. E-mail Deliverablity Rates Drop in 2015

About one in four e-mails sent in the U.S. do not reach intended recipients, reflecting a sharp decline in U.S. e-mail deliverability rates for 2015. The overall U.S. e-mail deliverability rate is just 76% for 2015, down from 87% in 2014, according to the latest global research by Return Path. Return Path's "2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report," which analyzed inbox placement statistics by country, industry and e-mail provider, did have some good news for consumer-facing industries; retail, health and beauty, food and beverage, automotive and apparel industries all showed e-mail deliverability rates of 90% or above globally. In reporting the study, MediaPosts's Email Marketing Daily noted that e-mail provider policies and new spam filtering systems could be one factor impeding e-mail marketers' deliverability ratings. For example, Yahoo! Mail inbox placement rates dropped 13%, although Outlook improved by 3% and Gmail stayed consistent (Gmail's new block button has sparked concerns for 2016 deliverability, however). Another factor could be the overwhelming volume of e-mails, according to the Return Path report, noting that e-mail traffic has grown by 16% since 2013. For more on deliverability by country and industry, read http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/260317/email-deliverability-rates-drop-in-2015.html

Are Inbox Placement Fails Sapping Your E-mail?

It's an old saying in business that you can only manage what you measure. A recent Target Marketing magazine article by Tom Sather, Return Path's senior director of e-mail research, makes the important point that many marketers are not measuring, and thus not managing, e-mail inbox placement rates. In evaluating e-mail campaign performance, they may focus on improving subject lines, list targeting or brand engagement without realizing that a key part of the target audience never saw the message. They may be comforted by a good deliverability rate, but that rate only measures the percent of e-mail that did not bounce. Inbox placement rates, on the other hand, measure the number of messages actually arriving in subscribers' inboxes, taking into account those undelivered plus those shunted into spam folders. E-mail inbox placement will be affected by bad addresses and ISP filtering for poor reputation, content and engagement. Inbox placement will in turn fundamentally affect the validity of benchmarks and testing results as well as e-mail ROI, Sather points out. To put his remarks in perspective, note 17% of permission-based e-mails fail to reach inboxes globally--6% going to spam folders and 11% blocked--according to Return Path's most recent "Inbox Placement 2014" benchmark report. U.S. marketers did only a little better, with 13% of e-mails failing to reach inboxes on average. But on an industry basis, inbox placement rates have a wide range, with the best inbox placement rate attributed to health and beauty pitches (96%) and software and Internet e-mails at the bottom (43%). For Sather's comments on why inbox placement matters, read http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/inbox-placement-rates-cant-measure-cant-see/

How 'Little Data' Basics Yield Big E-mail Results

E-mail marketers can get lost in "big data" analytics and lose sight of the "little data" basics of e-mail delivery that reveal faster response improvements, advises Scott Roth of consumer intelligence company Return Path in a recent ClickZ post. Roth's "little data" fundamentals go beyond engagement rates to inbox placement rates, authentication policies and domain security, and Roth provides a number of real-life examples of how analyzing these basics improved e-mail results. For example, large U.S. retailer Dillard reversed a trend of declining open and click-through rates by checking inbox placement rates across all major mailbox providers. Dillard found that 20% of promotional e-mails failed to reach subscribers, with many e-mail addresses no longer existent. Plus, subscribers who did get e-mail marked it as junk at an above-average rate. The retailer focused corrective actions to pump engagement rates 100% and push open rates above pre-decline levels. Similarly, when another brand saw inbox placement rates drop 50%, they checked their sending basics and discovered that an improperly configured authentication policy for their sending domain had caused most mailbox providers to treat e-mails as spam. With corrective action, the brand saw inbox placement rise 46% to 92%. Financial firms especially need to track basic data for signs of security problems, as Roth points out. For example, he notes how a financial services firm tracking a rise in suspicious domains and call center traffic was able to correlate its e-mail data with phishing outbreaks and then implemented e-mail security protocols. For the whole article, read http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2410356/sweat-the-small-stuff-big-results-through-email-marketing-fundamentals