More on Relevancy

Al Iverson comments on information from Craig Spiezel at the Exacttarget customer conference this week. Craig confirms that MSN/Hotmail is also looking at user engagement, opens and moving mail out of the spam folder as part of their delivery metrics.

Ultimately, engagement is the key to mitigating delivery issues when sending to Hotmail.

  • Stop mailing to subscribers that never open or click on your email messages.
  • Don’t reactivate old, bounced addresses just to see if they’ll go through…today. (A few might, but most won’t, and Hotmail will notice.)
  • Stay true to permission. Don’t buy lists, stick to clear opt-in (not opt-out). Don’t bury the “we’ll send you email” notice in a privacy policy or legal notice.

I expect that more ISPs than AOL and MSN/Hotmail are looking at recipient engagement or are investigating how to measure it and incorporate it into their delivery decision process. It does reinforce my earlier blog post about relevancy and how important it is for delivery.
Hat tip: Mark

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Visiting customers through email

A few months ago I was working on a deliverability problem with a new client. They are a social networking site heavily branded with black background and pink text. One of the questions they asked me during the course of troubleshooting their delivery problems was if sending pink and black branded emails to match their site branding would decrease their deliverability.
That was actually a more interesting question than many I have received and led to the following analogy. A website is your showroom on the web. It is the equivalent of a brick and mortar store where people visit you and come to see what you have to offer for sale. Heavily branding the store is the right thing to do.
An email, be it marketing, transactional or relationship, is the equivalent of sending a traveling salesperson to someone’s house. That sales person is entering the customer’s space. In this case overly branding your presence in the customer’s space which can annoy or completely turn off your customers.
Branding emails to customers is a good thing; it builds brand recognition and customer relationships. Just remember, though, that you’re entering the customer’s space. Be respectful of that space.
As an aside, I did actually ask AOL about the color of email would decrease delivery. The nice folks over there did reply “AOL SAYS NO PINK!” But I’m fairly sure they weren’t serious.

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Permission, Part 1

Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.

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Relevance: don't underestimate it, measure it.

Ken Magill has an article today about a new service from e-Dialog called the Relevancy Trajectory. This product

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