While metrics are an invaluable marketing tool, they also can\u00c2\u00a0provide a false sense of comfort.\u00c2\u00a0 As an example, your email marketing delivery rate may not be telling you exactly what you need to know.<\/p>\n
Email deliverability is\u00c2\u00a0obviously critical – if someone doesn’t get your email marketing message, they can’t read it\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0act upon it.\u00c2\u00a0 However,\u00c2\u00a0the standard ‘deliverability rate’ provided by\u00c2\u00a0many email service providers doesn’t tell you the full story. Often, the number of emails delivered that is reported only reflects those\u00c2\u00a0messages not rejected by an ISP.\u00c2\u00a0 The deliverability rate may\u00c2\u00a0only be reflecting\u00c2\u00a0issues\u00c2\u00a0such an inbox being full or an email address no longer being\u00c2\u00a0valid; it doesn’t tell you how many emails actually make it to your subscribers’ inbox.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
After the ISP (or corporate email server) accepts the email, it may still determine that\u00c2\u00a0the message\u00c2\u00a0is spam and place it in a junk or spam folder.\u00c2\u00a0 In a recent ISP email deliverability study<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(pdf), Lyris found that Yahoo sends about 26% of messages\u00c2\u00a0to the junk folder and Gmail and Hotmail send about 18% each.<\/p>\n You need to make sure you understand whether your email service provider reports on deliverability to the inbox.\u00c2\u00a0 If not, you have a couple of\u00c2\u00a0options.\u00c2\u00a0 One approach is to sign-up for email accounts with major\u00c2\u00a0providers (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, etc.) or using existing personal accounts and then send your campaigns to those ‘seed email addresses’ in addition to your regular subscription list and monitor whether the email sent to the seed addresses are blocked, sent to the\u00c2\u00a0junk folder\u00c2\u00a0or make it to the inbox.\u00c2\u00a0 Another approach, which I recommend,\u00c2\u00a0is to use a service like DeliveryMonitor.com<\/a>, Return Path<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0or Habeas<\/a> to track deliverability to the inbox.\u00c2\u00a0 These services, which vary in cost and functionality,\u00c2\u00a0track and report\u00c2\u00a0deliverability to the inbox.\u00c2\u00a0 DeliveryMonitor, for example, is very inexpensive\u00c2\u00a0but still\u00c2\u00a0provides results across a large number of ISPs.<\/p>\n If you haven’t checked your inbox deliverability recently, now is the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While metrics are an invaluable marketing tool, they also can\u00c2\u00a0provide a false sense of comfort.\u00c2\u00a0 As an example, your email marketing delivery rate may not be telling you exactly what you need to know. Email deliverability is\u00c2\u00a0obviously critical – if someone doesn’t get your email marketing message, they can’t read it\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0act upon it.\u00c2\u00a0 However,\u00c2\u00a0the standard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}