Countless myths abound in the world of email deliverability. That’s why there’s no one better to clear up these common misconceptions than the leading experts in the world of email. For every issue, we’ll bring you a Q&A with leaders from inbox providers, spam trap networks, antispam systems, and more in our new Ask the Expert series blog.
In our eighth Ask the Expert series blog, we’re chatting with Alex Price. Alex is a Senior Deliverability Project Manager and has been with Twilio SendGrid for the past five years. He has been in the email space for roughly 13 years, primarily focusing on compliance and deliverability. Alex has worked with businesses both small and large–from mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 organizations–to help deepen their understanding of email and optimize their deliverability.
My role within the team is unique in that I have two distinct but complementary priorities. First, as a deliverability consultant, I work for my clients with the primary goal of helping them maximize their email performance.
Second, I review current SendGrid products and services (offered by our Professional Services team) to ensure that our customers have access to a wide variety of solutions offerings that can take their digital marketing program to the next level.
Most people dream of being a professional athlete or an astronaut as kids. Not me. From the beginning, I dreamed of authentication records, mail transfer agents, and email filtering algorithms.
In reality, I discovered email by chance. When I was fresh out of college, companies were remarkably liberal with the term “marketing coordinator” in job listings, so much so that when I came across an opportunity to work in email—and the job responsibilities actually related to email and not in the six degrees of separation sense—I jumped at the opportunity.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of building my email knowledge through various roles in support, compliance, fraud mitigation, and now deliverability.
It can be incredibly simple and yet incredibly complex at the same time. In that way, it’s a lot like a Rubik’s cube. There are so many different individual elements that make up email, and the manner in which those elements can interact with each other is vast. Yet with relatively few steps, anyone can achieve success, provided those steps are the right ones.
A fairly common misconception that marketers have is that inbox service providers (ISPs)/receivers have a responsibility to ensure a marketer’s mail gets delivered. They don’t. Their responsibilities extend only to the needs and wants of their customer base and go no further.
That’s not to say that marketers (or senders) can’t benefit from an ISP’s responsibility to their customers. But that benefit can only be achieved when delivering a marketer’s mail enriches the shared customer experience.
Pay attention to metrics like open rate—yes, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) open rates are still valuable in this sense, as dips can provide insight into potentially declining inbox placement rates—as well as delivery rate, block rate, and complaint rate, as these are all straightforward indicators of performance.
Other metrics, such as conversion rates, attributed revenue per campaign, and website/app traffic, can also identify potential issues with deliverability. While these fall outside of the aforementioned traditional delivery metrics, they are equally as valuable.
Implement a sunset policy: Even in the age of MPP, having a sunset policy that removes individuals who haven’t engaged (opened and/or clicked) in the past 12 months is still a great place to start. Not only will it reduce the risk of spam traps in your database, I see quite a few senders who have a significant portion of their database still registering no engagement.
Create triggered campaigns: Triggered campaigns are a great way to ensure content remains relevant and timely, especially in cases where a known and relatively recent customer activity (like abandoned cart, website search history, past purchase history, and app activity) triggers the campaign.
There are various methods to determine this, but as a starting point, message frequency should always directly mirror the level of engagement. That is to say that the most engaged subscribers should receive email more frequently, whereas the least engaged subscribers should be subject to a sunset policy or outright suppression.
However, it’s crucial to note that engagement levels don’t always follow a linear progression from engaged to unengaged. It’s common for certain subsets of your database to experience a period (or periods) of revival, during which they begin to engage with emails again after inactivity.
As such, it’s critical to understand how engagement might vary throughout your customer lifecycle and craft your targeting strategy accordingly.
Have you ever received an email and took a few minutes to go through the whole thread only to get to the end and wonder aloud, “Why was I sent this? ”
If you don’t tailor your email content to the preferences of the individual recipient, you risk creating this kind of experience for your customers over time. Not only will they begin to tune out your mail, but in the worst-case scenario, you might annoy them to the extent that it has broader implications for the business outside of email.
Providing personalized content is about more than providing information that people will find useful and interesting. On a deeper level, it’s about establishing trust with your customer base.
If I know or if I come to expect consistent value from your communications, not only will I be more likely to open future emails, but I’ll also be more likely to positively respond to your call to action (like purchasing a product, signing up for a loyalty program, or registering for an event) which is what you look for as a marketer/business.
It’s cliche, but quality over quantity, and that’s particularly true in email. While growing your list organically, implementing dual validation, and setting proper expectations (What are you going to send them? How often are you going to send to them?) at sign-up can be a slower process, those subscribers will prove to be far more valuable in the long run.
Setting proper expectations at sign-up yields a far greater return (more likely to open/click on your emails, purchase your products, and more) than those addresses collected via third-party acquisition or a vague, tenuously implied business relationship.
Most companies I work with marketing managers or specialists or email marketing managers or specialists, and their priorities tend to involve building the customer journey, content creation and strategy, or database growth.
Successfully accomplishing those tasks is a monumental achievement, and I’ve been very lucky to work with some of the best people in the business in that regard.
However, the requirements of running a successful email program often go beyond what’s typically expected from your traditional email/marketing position.
Here are some questions to consider:
Is your sending architecture set up correctly?
Are you familiar with the concept of email reputation?
Do you know how to resolve filtering issues?
What’s the difference between delivery and deliverability?
The list goes on. To have a successful email program, you have to know all, or at least most, of the answers to the previous questions, and if you don’t even know you’re supposed to ask those questions, it can be a difficult/frustrating experience.
Therein lies the value of a deliverability consultant. As subject matter experts in email and deliverability, we’re with you every step of the way to ensure you get the maximum return on your email investment.
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Thanks to Alex! Be sure to stay tuned for the next Ask the Expert, as we’ll chat with another expert in email marketing to provide you with further insight into the ins and outs of email deliverability.
