TOP TIPS
Deliverability
How do you eat an elephant - one bite at a time!
Grow Your Vision and do it before lunch
Is email marketing still worth the effort? Absolutely, but the demands are greater than ever to deliver it successfully.
We’re all on a bit of a marketing journey and management of your contacts is key, and here's why…….
Let’s start with the seeds, nets and spears analogy:
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Scatter seeds, or the shotgun approach to marketing communication, and some will grow and others simply won't.
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Cast a net, is a bit more of a honed, or segmented approach to marketing and means identifying groups and go after them with more specific and relevant messages.
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And then we have spears, or targeted individuals. The key here is that we want their trust, but how?? Simply repetition builds familiarity, familiarity builds trust and trust converts to sales
Data is so often the elephant in the room
Is email marketing relevant to this journey? I’d say so, and we’re here to help you. In an ideal world we’d like to become your obvious choice, and this is where we’re all in it together - if we become your trusted partner, then you’ll budget for us next year and we’ll all be able to drive more added value with you.
Let’s put it under the heading - Deliverability
Too often it’s rubbish in, rubbish out and without wishing to be too graphic as your email sender, your rubbish suddenly becomes our rubbish so we have a vested interest in helping you to eat the elephant - a bit at a time!
Dull, dull, dull, but absolutely essential….
Deliverability is the measure of an email's ability to successfully reach a recipient’s primary inbox, rather than being blocked or filtered into the spam folder.
This is fundamentally built on technical compliance and data quality.
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Protect your reputation
We always offer the ability to have a second domain to send marketing emails from. This allows you to hive it off from your corporate one, and protect it from the vagaries of sending emails for marketing purposes and it allows us to ensure that you’ve got all the correct DNS records (MX, SPF, DMARC and DKIM) set up against the domain.
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Monitor Spam Rates
We monitor your spam rates, aiming to keep them below 0.1%; rates reaching 0.3% or higher can severely impact inbox delivery.
If your attracting high spam rates your sending to dubious email addresses, so lets take out the freebie emails, the ones related to an irrelevant job e.g. accounts@.
Let’s take out the ones that never open, aka the unresponsive contacts and let’s verify the ones left using a 3rd party tool like emailable.com so we can take out all the Graham@ no longer works here emails.
If you're struggling with the above then drop Support an email - we'll help for a small fee :-)
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Sneaky IP addresses
We regularly scan for IP addresses that are spam bots, so your campaign stats are now looking something like and the elephant is looking a touch dishevelled.
You’re getting more emails to land but not a great response rate
A response rate being the measure of how successfully recipients engage with your messages after they land in their inbox. But WHY!??
Would it be because you’re trying to sell hardhats to dentists?
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Sementation and Profiling
And now we’ve landed in the wonderful world of segmentation and profiling.
Start with a spreadsheet list of Contacts, add a couple of columns:
Column 1 is Company size - above or below 10 or 20 employees - simply column with a yes, no or blank
Column 2 is Industry - based on easily identifiable characteristics of the target companies. White collar, blue collar, industrial, education - whatever works for you.
So now you’re profiling in order to segment into smaller groups -fabulous
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First names, job roles
You can go further with SIC codes and credit agencies, but you’ve probably got to lunchtime, and you’ve already made a significant start - well done you and you’re team.
The Marketing Portal can group contacts together by Tagging them to run alongside mailing lists. We can look at content to encourage interaction, including quick little surveys that don’t induce anxiety or a form of friction when they see 35 intimidating questions.
Personalisation is always a hoot, but just do the above and we’ve taken significant steps and the world will thank you for being nicer and more trustworthy.