TIP SHEET
DO NOT SELECT AN EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER UNTIL YOU READ THIS!
Think Email Marketing Is About Blasting? Think Again!
Spam filters, phishing detectors and the sheer email volume flooding inboxes has critically devalued
email as a marketing medium. Marketers who fail to follow best practices are wasting 30% of their email marketing budget and time before they even hit the send button. If your email service provider does not offer the following features you are not following best practices and you will eventually experience decreased deliverability, list attrition, and sub-par results. Feature Unique IP Address Why You Need It An IP address physically identifies a computer or server on the Internet. It is similar to a social security number in that no two IP addresses are the same and each IP address carries a reputation. Black lists, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate network administrators routinely fight spam or unwanted mail by blocking IP addresses. Email Service Providers (ESPs) that group multiple clients per IP address are cheating them out of building a good reputation. Just as you would never blindly share your social security number, there is no reason why you would want to share your IP address with other marketers who are less scrupulous than you. Based on independent study by Jupiter Research, Marketing Sherpa and Return Path, almost 30% of all bulk email gets blocked. It is fact that marketers who send email using a shared IP address experience lower deliverability rates than marketers who send using a unique IP address. DNS Configuration as it relates to email marketing allows you to send email from your domain name instead of your ESP’s domain. This is important for both branding and credibility. In addition, many anti-phishing filters will block your email or warn email recipients not to click on a link if a link in your email does not match the domain from where the email is sent. A credible email service provider will help you with the DNS setup process so you can send email from yourdomain. com instead of youremailserviceprovider.com.
DNS Configuration
Tip Sheet Continued...
Feature Database Segmentation Why You Need It Upon successfully sending a campaign that reaches your recipients’ inbox instead of their spam folder you will be inundated with open and click statistics. A good ESP will have reports that show which recipients clicked on which links. A great ESP will not only give you a report, but the ability to automatically send follow up email to recipients who clicked on a specific link so timely opportunities are not missed. Automated database segmentation based on recipient behavior is the key to understanding how to generate additional interest using email. Henry Ford, referring to the Model-T, the first mass produced car, once said that customers can have any color [car] they want as long as it’s black. Take this attitude with your email recipients and quickly watch your opt-out rate increase. Instead of mass produced email, a quality ESP will give you the ability to create mass personalized email. This ability goes beyond basic merge fields to create mass personalized automatically tailored based on interests and recipient behavior. Email marketing is not a one way street. Your recipients want to respond to your email and without providing them a systematic way of doing so, you lose the ability to capture valuable data. From surveys to landing pages, an ESP should have integrated forms to help you maximize your feedback collection. The information you collect should serve as a guide not only for future email campaigns but other marketing efforts as well.
Sophisticated Personalization
Data Collection
What Kind of Deliverability Should You Expect Once You Start Using Your New IP Adddress
Opening an account with a new email service provider (ESP) that assigns you a unique IP address is just like trying to establish credit without any credit history. A new IP address is not a “shoe-in” for ensured deliverability. When establishing credit, you need to confirm your identity, the same goes for your new IP address. This is done by configuring reverse DNS with your new IP address and implementing a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) (http://www.openspf.org). Once your identity is established, it takes time for other mail servers to recognize your IP address as a valid source of email. This is done in a number of ways; 1) Your recipients place your domain and/or your IP address on their “safe sender” list or email address book; 2) Corporate Network Admins and ISP’s place your domain and/or IP address on their white lists. The latter is often done automatically by checking your reverse DNS and SPF. This can sometimes take a while – all a process of building a reputation. Once your IP and domain are recognized as legitimate email senders, you will notice an increase in your deliverability rates. However, the process does not stop here. You will need to maintain your reputation by keeping your spam complaints low and email volume to a tolerable level. Below is a list of the major ESPs and how they determine deliverability of bulk email. As you can see, reputation is the most important.
Gold Lasso, LLC 312 Main Street, Suite 200 Gaithersburg, Maryland 20878 Phone (301) 990-9857 Fax (301) 990-9856 http://www.GoldLasso.com