Email Marketing, as with any technology based industry, is constantly evolving.  Recently though, through major software releases and changes to protocols from ISP’s, it has become a bit clearer what the future has in store for the email marketer.

This series of short posts will start to skim the surface of where the industry is leading…

Segmentation and Relevancy

Okay this advice isn’t anything new to people who regularly read this blog or other email marketing articles, but it is getting more relevant as we progress through email marketing.

Make your emails relevant to each of your customers and don’t just create a single universal view of your whole list.  According to this report by Forrester Research,  companies that highly segmented their lists, saw results outperform that of non segmented lists by up to 5 times.

It doesn’t take someone with a Masters in marketing to see that although everyone on your list is interested in your products, it may only be certain aspects they’re interested in.  If you continually miss out their interests in your mass mail to your whole list, then they will switch off from your communications.

A great example of this is a previous post I wrote which also advises using passive segmentation to help start your list splitting.

Email Interaction

The noreply@ or other such addresses that discourage responses to your emails is coming to an end now. The majority of subscribers are on social media sites and to them, companies are no longer faceless brands.

Many companies are now contactable and post out information and try to interact with their customers throughout the day – not just posting sales promotions but asking questions and encouraging responses as well.  The ASOS Twitter account is a good example of this that springs to mind.

With email reputation monitors not just judging your emails inbox placement on complaint rates alone, but also the engagement of the list that you’re sending to (Opens, Clicks etc), it would seem that Interaction is the logical progression.

Couple this with recent technologies such as Outlook’s Social Connector and you can start to see how the future is shaping up for not just email marketing, but online marketing as a whole; the rise of the “Pull Customer”……

One of the main drawbacks that I can see with the rising popularity of smart phones is the knock on effect it will be having on conversion rates for email marketing.

I personally know that I receive a lot of marketing emails and do read a good majority of them on my mobile.  I will see products that I like and am interested in knowing more about, but I’m not about to go through the hassle of searching for a product online with my mobile – I normally just say that I’ll look at it later on and then forget about it.

I’m pretty sure I can say with confidence that I’m not the only one who does this and it must be having a detrimental effect on a good proportion of businesses email campaigns.

Using triggered emails though may very well help to combat this problem by allowing the user to ask for more information on a certain item or just the whole newsletter at a different time.

Simple links like “send me more about this later” could be placed underneath each product and then you specify a time delay that will hopefully catch them at a more receptive time.

Alternatively, having a link up at the top of the email asking for a reminder later on or actually giving options on when they want to receive the email again may also help you from losing your recipients to being put off from purchasing on a mobile.

There is of course a challenge to this.  We as email marketers are suddenly faced with inserting a myriad of links to cater for all our recipients situations.  Would it be too much? Thoughtful designing would have to come into play to make sure that the look of your email isn’t being compromised.

It is something that could be dropped into the design though opposed to the little links at the top as the benefits can be further reaching than just mobile users.  Most recipients won’t go through the process of purchasing items at work so they could then set themselves a preferred time to receive the email with triggers used this way.

Do you think that you’ve lost customers to mobile emails?  This might be a viable solution to you; there’s only one way to find out though – test, test, test….

We recently wrote a blog post on the new spamhaus domain blacklist and what that means for your company.  You can read that here to get up to date on the subject.

We thought we’d carry on this subject to offer you advice on how to make sure that you are doing all you can to avoid the domain blacklists.

Self-Built Mailing Lists

Arguably the best thing you can do to avoid blacklists is have an opted in, self-built list.  The reason for this is that the people on that list have specifically asked for your emails to be sent to them and they will be much less inclined to report it as spam if they have recently asked for these communications.

Correct Sign Up Processes

So you’ve decided to avoid the purchased list route and go for the self-generated option – fine work.  But then you go and sneak in the subscription details where you can and essentially sign people up without them really knowing that they’ve opted in.

This will straight away cause high complaint rates against your campaigns as you’ve not let them choose whether they want to be on the list.  If you’re unsure whether your sign up process is being done correctly, just think “is it opt-in?” Are your subscribers actually requesting this information or are you assuming that they will want it? 

Be Consistent

A trap that people can fall into is that they do have a self-built list but haven’t emailed that list in some time.  At this point, you run the risk of subscribers forgetting signing up for your emails and marking them as spam.  The longer you hold off from sending to them, the worse it will get.

Feedback Loops

A good way to keep control of your reputation with ISP’s is to have feedback loops set up.  Feedback loops allow ISP’s to report the spam complaints they have received from their users back to you.  This allows you to then remove these subscribers from future mailings and also keep track of how your campaign is being received.  Of course, if you’re a mailingmanager customer, this is already set up for you and monitored.

Authentication

This is a subject which really requires a whole post of its own, so I will try and put this is in an understandable nutshell.

Authentication was introduced to counter spoofing and phishing emails being sent to its intended recipients.  A spoofing email is that has had its ‘send from’ and ‘reply to’ addresses changed from the actual sending domain.  This can lead to phishing, which is when you receive an email from someone claiming to be your bank etc and asking you to fill in your details, but they are in fact trying to obtain your card details and money.

The problem is, legitimate email marketing can occasionally be caught in this same net if you use ESP’s.  This is because you’re masking the ESP’s sending domain with your own.  The filters sometimes won’t be able to differentiate between the two and will put your campaigns in the same category.

So Authentication was brought in to make sure that the legitimate senders could be distinguished from the ‘bad guys’.  The different authentication systems are:

Domain Keys
DKIM
SPF
Sender ID

If you are a current mailingmanager customer though, we will for this month only do this for you free of charge.  Contact us to request your authentication file.

Furthermore, any new customer that signs up for a monthly account before March 31st, 2010, will also receive the authentication set up at no additional cost.  The normal cost for this service is £75 + VAT.

I have brushed upon this subject in a previous post but as this Spamhaus DBL is coming into place, it is worth going into more detail.As I’m sure most of you know, sending reputation has been predominantly based on the IP address that your mail is originating from.  This means that if you had a serious blacklisting problem on your sending IP address, you could just move to another address and your reputation would start again.

With domain listing, you can’t escape as easily.  Your sending domain, regardless of the IP you’re on will still have that listing against it.  Obviously, the IP reputation will still be a bug factor but this added factor of domain based reputation means the sender has culpability for their actions.

So you can’t now escape your bad sending practices – definitely a good thing for the future of email marketing but what could that mean for you?  Well, let’s say you are a good sender but fall into trouble for some reason; you could end up having your works email address blocked due to your marketing activity.

A good way to avoid this is to put all of your marketing mails onto a different domain so that any of the repercussions of your marketing activities don’t directly effect the day to day running of your company.

Of course, that should never happen in the first place if you are a legitimate conscientious sender.