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November 2007, Issue 45 |
BtoB E-mail Marketing
E-mail Deliverability Q&A
Part 3: Messaging and Mobile Devices
On August 14, 2007, Bulldog Solutions hosted An Expert Roundtable on E-mail Deliverability for Lead Generation. This hour-long panel featured Stephanie Miller, vice chair for member initiatives for the Email Experience Council and vice president of strategy for Return Path; Michelle Eichner, COO and vice president of client development for Pivotal Veracity; and Ryan L. Rutan, programmer analyst III for National Instruments.
Over the past several months the panelists answered several dozen questions not addressed during the live Webinar. Previous installments in this series covered questions related to regulation and blacklisting and e-mail metrics. This month: message development and considerations for mobile users.
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Message Development
Q: Are subject lines the detail that puts an e-mail in a client spam folder or would size play a bigger role?A: Stephanie Miller: Both contribute to the content score. Remember that clarity always trumps clever in subject lines, and avoid all caps and excessive punctuation. Shorter is better. For size, try to keep it below 50K, which should be easy if you link to images. Content is important, but it's only a small part (about 17%) of why e-mails get blocked. Your Sender Reputation is much more critical.
You must understand and address your Sender Reputation. First, know what it is. Second, identify the root causes of any failures. This is some combination of complaints, content, infrastructure, file hygiene and mailing consistency. Third, fix those root causes. You might need to clean the file, re-permission parts of the file that are non-responsive, ensure your bounce processing practices are solid, make your unsubscribe more prominent, offer choices for frequency, trim your template of gratuitous images and/or eliminate sources of data that drive a lot of complaints.
Q: What is the best day and time for sending out BtoB e-mail campaigns?
A: Stephanie Miller: This is easy to test for your file. We see some BtoB campaigns do best on Sunday nights, others on Tuesday mornings. One of our clients finds that lunch time is a great time for them.
Q: Do we know that e-mails with graphics get better response than text-based e-mails? Could it differ from industry to industry?"
A: Stephanie Miller: It does vary. In some industries like tech, text works better. This can be easily tested for your file. It's always a good practice to offer a choice of format (text, HTML or mobile).
Q: What are the most common causes of a low deliverability rate? (In other words, what causes an e-mail to be caught by a spam filter?)
A: Michelle Eichner: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a multitude of different variables to determine the disposition of e-mail. However, the more vital variables in rank order are 1) Spam Complaints 2) Poor Bounce Management and 3) Content and Design.
Q: Can you provide pointers on improving delivery of regular HTML/text e-mails?
A: Michelle Eichner: Our recommendation is to follow industry best practices and utilize all the tools at your disposal to conduct QA on your e-mails prior to a production launch. If you're not using an automated service such as Pivotal Veracity or Return Path's deliverability solutions, you should at least manually check your e-mails prior to sending them across the various e-mail clients and ISPs. The fundamentals are validating your links and images, identifying if your e-mails will be delivered and, if so, where, the inbox or spam folder? With some initial preparation, you can help improve the likelihood your e-mails are delivered.
Q: Does body content affect whether an e-mail will land in junk mail?
A: Michelle Eichner: Yes. Body content is absolutely a variable that may cause your e-mail to land in the spam/junk folder. In fact, some ISPs are more sensitive to content/design elements than others. Some of these include Hotmail and Gmail. We recommend performing a test with your e-mail prior to sending the live campaign to see if or which ISPs may deliver your e-mail into their spam folder. The pretesting will provide you with insight and afford you the opportunity to make changes before you send the e-mail to your customers/subscribers.
Q: Do images affect whether an e-mail will land in junk mail?
A: Michelle Eichner: There are many different variables that may cause spam folder disposition, and images are one of the many. However, images may or may not carry any more weight than other variables. For instance, if you're sending an e-mail that consists only of an image, then yes, it's more likely to be delivered to the spam folder. However, if you're using images throughout an e-mail, there's no telling if that one variable is causing more harm than good without testing.
Q: Is it true that keywords such as "Buy" and "Sale" could affect delivery?
A: Michelle Eichner: It is very possible on any given day words such as "Buy" and "Sale" could affect your e-mail deliverability. ISPs continually tweak their filters and it's impossible to know how each ISP tunes its filters and when. We recommend that you regularly test your e-mails to determine how the content may be driving the disposition of your e-mails.
Q: Does personalization (i.e., Hi, John Doe) increase unique click-throughs?
A: Stephanie Miller: This isn't an automatic "yes" or "no." When you have a relationship with the subscriber, a personalized salutation can boost response. But if you don't, it can actually lower response rates and increase complaints.
Mobile Device Users
Q: Would it work to have a link at the top of the promotional e-mail that says "Viewing this on a mobile device? Click here," which takes the user to a different version?A: Stephanie Miller: That can be a good practice. Something like, "On your PDA? Click here to view this as a Web page." Then the click will open the browser on the PDA. So be sure to format the page for viewing on the small screen. But be sure to track the link so you can track how many people are actually using it.
Q: Is the shift moving towards e-mail that is written for mobile devices, or mobile devices designed to handle standard e-mail?
A: Michelle Eichner: At this time, the percentage of consumers who access and read their e-mails on PDAs is still very small. Moreover, there is little standardization across the various handsets and providers. This makes it difficult to accommodate everyone. So it's in your best interest to know if your customers are using PDAs to receive and read your e-mails.
A few simple questions can help you determine the best strategy for your business. Ask your customers where they prefer to receive and read your e-mails. Consider asking what type of PDA they use. Having this information will help you determine if you need to alter the type of e-mail you should be sending.
Q: Will we see more e-mails being deleted and unread because of mobile phones?
A: Stephanie Miller: I think this is happening already. Many mobile users say that they delete newsletters and promotions automatically. They can't be bothered. About 35% say that they will save those types of mail to read when they get back to their PC. The proliferation of mobile devices raises the bar on relevancy and permission. Your e-mail must be welcome and engaging to break through.
Q: Besides making your e-mail communications simpler, what would you do to make it readable on a PDA? Aren't most e-mail marketing vendors basically at the same level technology-wise?
A: Michelle Eichner: Very few PDAs display HTML e-mail in the manner in which you designed them. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, there is no standardization across the various handsets and providers. Our recommendation is to find out which customers want their e-mails sent to their PDAs and then send them text messages. In time, PDAs will continue to improve; however, we have a long way to go before the masses can handle high-quality HTML e-mails.
Know colleagues who would be interested in this topic? Send them this newsletter, and if they subscribe, you'll be entered into a drawing to win an iPod nano.
Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.
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