• Written by Michael Kelly, ClickMail Marketing

There are many moving parts to getting email right, and many pitfalls — but with some planning, most can be avoided. Across the spectrum of online marketers – b2b, b2c, non-profits, and all others, the top two challenges faced by B2B, B2C, are deliverability and relevance. At ClickMail Marketing, we believe that there are 6 areas or elements of email that can be optimized to achieve success.

Authentication

As of October 2004, there has been an initiative that the industry has adopted which provides for a means to determine if a message claiming to be from a particular organization was in fact sent from that organization. There is what’s known as an SPF record – sender policy framework. It is part of a DNS listing (domain name server) – the filed record that every website domain has published. If you are sending email, you should have an SPF record. It allows your organization to state what mailservers are authorized to send email on your behalf. It can ‘prove’ whether a message claiming to be from SF-MOMA is legitimately from SF-MOMA.

Find your dns record at http://www.dnsreport.com/, enter your domain (i.e. sfmoma.com) and let the results load. Scroll down the ‘mail’ section (but check MX too), and look for the SPF row. The ‘cheat sheet’ has online resources as to how to publish an SPF record.

Reputation

Once an online marketer can be authenticated, they can begin to develop a reputation (good or bad). Do you know YOUR sending reputation? Your group may have a good reputation, but the ESP you’ve selected may not, or the ESP may allow a mixed bag of senders to share a mailserver with you – putting your reputation at risk, and at the mercy of the sending practices of others. There are ways to protect/repair your sending reputation; a good idea is to procure and use a dedicated IP address. Clean your list(s) of addresses that bounce. Use DOI (double opt-in) for sign-ups. Publish your privacy policy and adhere to it. Never rent/sell/share your audience – ever. Repairing a reputation is complicated and costly.

Delivery Engine

An organization can send email a variety of ways, and in different combinations. Most organizations have internal mailservers, but the majority of these are not well-suited to a ‘broadcast’ environment (one to many). Either they do not provide the valuable metrics/analytics (opens, clicks, forwards, etc…), or they struggle when sending volumes of more than 3-5k at one time, or they cannot effectively process personalization, or automatically handle opt-outs, etc…

Many organizations choose to outsource the transmission of ‘broadcast’ email to an ESP/3rd party. How can you know which ESP is right for your needs? Only by testing (or taking the sales rep’s word for it – dangerous). The more systematic the testing is, the better insight is gained. Ideally, one would compare a ‘shortlist’ of up to 3 ESP’s against each other (and possibly including the internal mailserver as a 4th control) in sending identical content to a randomly segmented, equally divided live audience. Then one measures the opens/clicks/conversions from each ESP. In addition, it is advisable to include a seedlist from a 3rd party deliverability scoring platform (i.e. ReturnPath, Email Advisor, Pivotal Veracity, Habeas, etc…) that will not only show whether the email was delivered, but whether it made it to the inbox, or was routed to the junk or bulk or spam folder.

Content

The elements of email content (html and text) are broken into the categories of messaging, layout/design, and coding. Obviously, the messaging should be compelling and valuable – but to ensure deliverability, it should be scored for ‘spaminess’ (the likelihood of being filtered/blocked from delivery to the inbox) and optimized accordingly. This can be done via a number of ways – open source code from spam assassin is one way, many ESP’s provide rudimentary spam scoring from their interface, and there are some free and subscription-based services available online (Pivotal Veracity, ReturnPath, Habeas).

From a layout/design perspective, the Call To Action should be present in at least 3-5 places, with a prominent placement ‘above the fold’ (first screen view). Images are blocked by default in many email clients, so alt tags and text descriptions should be included in the design. The layout should also be optimized for viewing in the ‘preview pane’ (70% of Outlook users look at a message in the preview pane to determine if they are going to open it).

From a coding perspective, the html should be constructed such that it will display/render correctly across the spectrum of email clients (html often displays differently between Outlook and Gmail, and differently from LotusNotes to Hotmail). It is crucial to test what the end-user experience will be for your recipients – since you can have the right message, at the right time, to the right audience – but if it does not display correctly, it’s a lost opportunity. Never mind that a recipient may think they’re getting spammed/phished and report the transmission to spamcop or other abuse reporting network. You can test rendering by setting up a laboratory environment of various email clients, or use one of the above-mentioned 3rd party scoring platforms.

Attributes of a broadcast

This is an area that has a large number of ‘moving parts’ including the subject line, the from fields, the reply-to fields and there are a vast number of iterations possible. In general, one should do the following:

• Find a consistent ‘static’ From address to use, so that when a recipient adds your emails to their address book or safe sender list, you are assured of making it to the inbox. If you send from different addresses – you lose that opportunity. Use different ‘labels’ (i.e. SFMOMA eNews vs SFMOMA Events) as needed, but keep the address the same ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ).
• Provide a ‘view online’ link so that the message can be viewed via a browser, in case an email client mangles the images, or a text-only recipient may want to see the rich-media aspects of the communication.
• Always send 2 payloads (html and text – called MPA, multipart alternative). It reduces your spam score and ensures that your audience will get the optimal version for their particular email client.
• Provide a ‘preferences’ page whereby your audience can designate in what format they want to receive information from you, and choose what content they want to receive.
• Subject lines should be direct, and studies show that 7 words or less produce the highest open rates.
• Do not list the From address as “Joe Jones”, even if Joe is the director of membership. Since most recipients won’t know him by name, you should include his affiliation in the From field: “Joe Jones – SFMOMA”. Latest studies show that recipients determine what they are going to open more by who it’s from than what the subject line is.
• Also, very smart to include “Forward To a Friend” functionality – it grows your list at no cost!

Relevance

This is one of the very hardest things to achieve. The more you learn/know about your audience, the more meaningful your dialogue can be with them. If you batch/blast the same content to everyone on your list, you will slowly but surely start losing the battle with attrition, and that battle does not have be lost. There are a variety of ways to include personalization in your messaging. Not just addressing your audience by name, but making the content relevant based on what they signed up for, what interests they have expressed/demonstrated, and how they interact on your website.

Trigger-based messages allow for a specific email to be sent once a certain action is taken from within an email or on a website (i.e. on filling out a form, they get an email coupon for 2 entries for the price of one).

Drip-marketing allows for a new recipient to begin receiving the first of a series of messages (welcome letter day 1, benefits letter day 3, bring a friend letter day 14, etc…)

Dynamic content enables an online marketer to send one broadcast, but the content is specific to what you know about each recipient, and is created on-the-fly by attributes flagged in your list (so an SFMOMA patron gets a different version of the eNewsletter than a student member) – but all from one broadcast. Most top-tier ESP’s have this functionality built into their platforms. Some organizations can custom program them with their internal server, but it can quickly get expensive to build and maintain. Lastly, automating the flow of data from your CRM or in-house database to an ESP via an API is very effective.

Optimizing any of the above 6 areas will help your email marketing efforts but your best results will obviously happen when you’ve been able to focus on all of them.