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May 2011, Issue 87 |
What You Can Do Today to Improve Email Deliverability Before Your Next Send Bulldog Solutions VP of Marketing Amy Bills interviews Dennis Dayman, Chief Deliverability and Privacy Officer, Eloqua 
The Email Experience Council's List Growth and Engagement Roundtable has launched a new podcast with in-the-trenches interviews with some of the thought leaders in the space. Insight into growth strategies, deliverability and list hygiene from the field’s recognized experts is broken down into short interviews. The following is an excerpted transcription of an interview with Dennis Dayman, chief deliverability and privacy officer for revenue performance management leader Eloqua.
Dennis Dayman, Chief Deliverability and Privacy Officer, Eloqua: Your sender score is a new way to determine which emails are bad and which are good. It's very similar to how the financial industry in the United States rates a person's ability to pay their bills on time or understand how many assets they have. For example, if you go to the bank to get a loan for a car, the bank wants to make sure you can pay it off and not default on it. So typically, over time, as you gain more assets and pay your bills on time, all that information is reported to the credit bureau, which uses that information to give you a score. The higher the score, the more financially stable you are. So the same model applies to your sender score. If you as a sender do everything right, if you keep your bad email accounts or "user unknowns" low, if you have low complaint ratios, then your sender score will be much higher. As the ISPs out there receive your email, they'll look at the source, they'll look at the IP address, and ask, "What is the sender score of this sender?" If it's good, then your email will go through or bypass some filters. Amy Bills: What are some of the things I can do right now to improve my deliverability before my next send? Dennis Dayman: One of the things I find that's missing from most processes is really breaking down what your campaigns look like. Many marketers send a campaign out, and then four or five days later, look at the metrics and discover that only 1% went to bad email addresses. And they might see that their complaint ratio was low. But they don't ever look at it again. What I think is missing, what a lot of marketers could begin today, is to start trending over time—not just looking at the campaign after the fact, but to look at it the day after, then five days after, then seven days after, etc. So what you can do is go back and look at the last five campaigns and see the metrics over time. For example, in the third campaign, it looks like our complaints increased. What was different about that third campaign that could have affected our reputation today and could potentially affect our reputation and deliverability of the message that I'm going to send out in the next couple days? So I would recommend simply taking some extra time to look at your past campaigns. There's always room for improvement. The second thing would be to make sure you're not sending the same kind of content every single time. I still see the "batch and blast" model all the time: the same message being sent to the same list. Instead, when you send a campaign, you should be able to look at metrics—not just opens and clickthroughs—but what each person looked at within the email, and more importantly, if they went to your website after reading your email. And if they did, what were they looking at on your website? So instead of sending your next campaign as a typical "batch and blast," you can now segment that message. Because you know that in your last campaign, this subset of customers looked at this, and this subset of customers looked at this. We're talking about giving prospects what they really want based on their clickthrough behaviors. And if they are getting what they want, they are less likely to hit the spam button and your reputation will increase as a result. Amy Bills: Can you direct our listeners to any resources for the deliverability issues you talked about today? Dennis Dayman: I contribute to a blog with several other industry mentors about deliverability issues at blog.deliverability.com. We try to publish regular articles about deliverability issues coming around. There's also an FAQ place on the blog, which answers questions such as "What the minimal number of hard-bounces that I can have in a campaign?" Or you can ask your own questions and all the experts will weigh in. Return to MWJ Home Original Q&A has been edited for clarity and consolidation. Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, an online marketing agency that changes the way BtoB companies define demand-generation strategy, engage prospects and convert leads to customers. 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, VP of Marketing. |
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