Deliverability Webinar: Factors that Impact Deliverability Hosted by the emarketing Learning ebizitpa

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1 Deliverability Webinar: Factors that Impact Deliverability Hosted by the emarketing Learning ebizitpa Question and Answer Session January 29, 2009 Q: In regards to the slide entitled Step 2: Build properly, should you avoid CSS and scripting even if you host the CSS file? A: Especially if you host the CSS file. One of the biggest mistakes in CSS is if you are hosting or linking your CSS to an external CSS source. All of your CSS needs to be within the HTML content itself. You cannot link to external CSS sources or that link will be broken by the provider. You need to use best practices to do in-line style definitions. However, if you are not going to do that, if you need to define your styles, define them within the without linking to an external style sheet because in the majority of cases, that link is going to be broken and that CSS will not be rendered. Q: How many s a month should be sent out to clients? A: To the person that asks this question, I would ask: How many s did you tell clients you were going to send them when they signed up? Whenever I pose that question at a seminar or conference, people kind of chuckle and say, well we don t tell them that it is kind of haphazard. Part of what you need to do as an marketer is to figure out what is the proper amount of messaging. What is the proper time frame for your messaging? The first thing you should be aware of is making sure that you are getting the welcome message for the initial sign-up out as soon as possible. It is, hands down, the most read message ever. That is your chance to make your impact and it is an absolute must. As far as what kind of frequency is going to be too much, that depends a lot on what kind of communication you are sending. For example, how frequently do your prices or information change? Whatever you do, it is recommended that, during the sign-up process, you let people who are signing up know how frequently you are going to send to them. You will also want to look at some of the things we talked about, like your bounce rates or unsubscribe rates. If you are starting to see your list dwindle quickly, that is a good time to evaluate your frequency. If you are sending too often, there is a good chance that your list is going to end up shrinking through the unsubscribe process. If you are getting too many complaints over time, maybe it is the opposite frequency issue; you are not sending often enough

2 and you are losing touch with your clients. When they are finally getting your message, they have forgotten that they were signed up to begin with and report it as spam. It is a balancing act and, again, a lot of it is driven by the type of messages you are sending. Do you have frequent price or information changes? What have you communicated to your recipients? What have you told them you are going to do? Those are the things to take into account when you are deciding on frequency. One other thing to know is that a lot of companies now have what are called preference centers. One of the questions that these preference centers will ask customers is, how frequently do you want to hear from us? So if you are not sure, you could ask your recipients how often they want to hear from you. In conclusion, there are a couple different strategies and things to consider when deciding frequency. Q: Along that same subject, let s say you have a major list and you are segmenting that list. You send out a very customized message to one segment and then shortly after, or minutes later, you send a more targeted, but similar message to another segment, so you might send two or three s within a short period of time. Does that impact your deliverability? A: No, and that is no with a caveat. That is going to be based on how frequently you have been sending messages in the past. And the reason I say that is that a lot of the ISP s do not like to see long periods of inactivity and then short bursts of activity because that is how viruses manifest themselves; a lot of these spam s are being generated through viruses and bot-nets, which come in waves. If your recipients have not heard from you as a sender in a while, then all of a sudden you hit them repeatedly, that is a problem. But the situation that is being described in this scenario is that you are sending to segments of the list; you are not hitting the whole list three times. Since you are sending to segments, it is not the quantity of the times that you are hitting your list, it is the quantity of s with which you are hitting recipients and how often you are hitting them. If you are sending a targeted, relevant message, you do not need to worry about that as long as you are doing all the other things you need to do to maintain your reputation. Q: How does reputation come in to play when using a service provider like Constant Contact or Listrak? A: That is a good question and a nice way to break out the two services. The Constant Contact model has hundreds of thousands of clients, and is not able to provide unique IP addresses to all of those clients. In a lot of cases, with Constant Contact you are sharing an IP address and your reputation - with another sender. And in those cases, your reputation is only as good as the

3 other people who are sending through that IP address. Constant Contact has a deliverability staff who tries to make sure that their customers are all using opt-in lists and what not, but you are still in a bit of a quandary in that you are sharing your reputation with someone else. In Listrak s case, we assign our customers their own dedicated IP address. Having your own dedicated IP address means that you are the keeper of your reputation. Nobody else is sending to that IP address, so the complaints, bounces and invalids that get tied into your messages are tied into your IP address and will determine your reputation. What we do as a service provider is help our customers understand the factors that are going to go into their reputation and what they can do using our tools, such as tools for helping you manage your lists and manage your acquisitions sources. We have a subscribe code that we provide to our customers so that they can create a subscription for people to sign up for their list. We have list management techniques, such as suppression lists and unsubscribe links, and we unsubscribe abuse complaints. We build a lot of tools into the application to help make establishing your reputation a lot easier, but it still comes down to the marketer that is using our system to make sure that the addresses they are using were acquired in a good way and are upto-date, that they are including that unsubscribe link in their and just using good practices for example, they are not sending too frequently and their messaging is relevant. The one thing that we will never be able to do as an service provider is to help somebody with their content. I cannot tell you if your content is relevant, but I can tell you that we have tools within our system that can help tell you send content that is relevant. Our profiling system will allow you to track various pieces of information about recipients so that you can target them and send segmented s. We can help you establish relevancy through dynamic content and send messages that are dynamically built for people based on what you know about them. Your service provider provides you tools and does a lot of the leg work, but it is still a partnership. It comes down to what the marketer is willing to do on their end to employ the best practices. Q: When referring to ISP s, do you mean Internet service providers or are you talking about service providers like Gmail or hotmail? A: Both, because Internet service providers, or the company who gets you access to the Internet, such as Verizon or Comcast, are also recipients of s because they are providing inboxes and mailboxes to their customers. This also includes Webmail providers such as Yahoo! and Gmail. Q: The subject line is the hardest thing for me. What are some good tips?

4 A: The number one tip when it comes to subject lines is testing. Some people say to keep your subject line short and include your recipients first name, while others say you should use a long subject line and should not include your recipients first name. There is a lot of different research and you can tweak and send your message in many different ways. As an marketer, the key is to test and test and test. Good service providers provide testing tools within their application that allow you to segment your list and test different things, such as targeting the offer versus the benefit. Do you want to personalize or do you not want to personalize? Do you want to put a time limit on your offer or do you want to concentrate on free shipping? If you are bouncing all of these ideas around in your head, rather than sending one idea to your whole list that will either be hit or miss, come up with your best ideas, segment your lists, and send a portion of your list each of those different ideas and see which one performs better. Then use the one that performed best and continue to tweak this model. But testing is absolutely the best way. Again, it all boils down to what you are selling. Are you selling a service? Are you selling a product? Are you a discounted retailer? Are you a luxury brand retailer that is selling more on benefit? These are the things you really have to consider and get your hands around to come up with those subject lines. It all comes down to testing. Are you testing, tracking your testing and modifying your program as you go forward? Q: What is the difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce? A: A hard bounce is when the recipients mail server says it cannot deliver this because of some issue. That hard bounce is going to typically be because of an invalid address or a spam block. They are going to say either this is not going to be delivered or this address never existed. A soft bounce is when there is some other issue at play. A soft bounce is not necessarily telling you that this is a bad , or a bad address, it is saying that there is something else going on. It could be a throttling issue, or maybe their mailbox is full. So it may be a valid address, but the mail server wants to classify it a little differently and tell you that their mailbox is full and that is why it cannot be delivered. In other words, do not take the recipient off the list because their mailbox is full, find another time to try and deliver to them. It is really just a classification as to what the recipients mail server is trying to tell you with that bounce. There is a number code system that gets tied into all that is delivered. The difference is 500 level messages that come back are hard bounces and 400 level messages that come back are soft bounces. For example, when Yahoo! is putting on throttling limits and you exceed their throttling limit, it is going to come back with a 400 level bounce, saying we are deferring your messages because you are

5 delivering them too fast or your complaint rates are too high, so we are going to soft bounce you. This is versus a client saying I am rejecting your mail altogether because this mailbox does not exist that is going to come back as a 500 level hard bounce. Q: When you get a reply to an that goes out asking you to type in an encrypted word to verify that you are not some bot, how would that be classified? A: That is called a challenge response system. It is a technique that people employ to try and keep spam out and say to the sender, if I do not have a prior working relationship with you, I am not going to accept your s. They are asking you to prove to them that you are a live person by clicking on a link and putting in an encrypted stream. Depending on the challenge response system, that can actually show up as a delivered with a reply or it can show up as a soft bounce requiring that string, in which case you have to have an system in place to see those bounces and know that the request was put out there. Q: How big should your contact list be? A: The rhetorical question to that is: How many people do you have a relationship with to ? Your contact list should be as big as it needs to be to reach those people that you have a relationship with to send s. You could have anywhere from 50 people on a list to 2 ½ million people on a list. It all depends on what your communication stream is, what your goal is and what your relationship is with those people. Q: Should the name of your company be in your subject line? A: That is actually a really good question. You can identify yourself in both the from line and the subject line. Where and how you identify yourself depends on your brand and your relationship to the recipient. For example, I would not expect to receive an from the CEO of Target. I would expect to receive an from Offers or something else from Target. To me, receiving an from the CEO of Target would be offensive because I know I do not have a personal relationship with him, so do not send your s to me under that guise. Somewhere in between those two the from name and the subject line you need to identify who you are. And if you are a sales rep, reaching out to customers who already know you and you are using an program to do that, you probably do not need to put your company name in there. You also do not need to say to somebody that you talk to every other week that this is John from Edward Jones because when they see your address, they already know. This is versus a commercial , from Target or Kmart for

6 example, where I would not expect it to come from a person, I would expect it to be identified by the brand. There is a question of who and where and it is really going to be dictated by the relationship between the sender and the receiver. So yes, in either the from line or the subject line, if you do not have that really tight relationship, you need to be identifying yourself so the recipient knows what they are getting. Q: Is there any cost involved in getting accredited and/or certified? A: Yes, those are third party services that you purchase. The Goodmail certified mail program, for example, is on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis, so you pay for every token that is generated and their rate structure is based on that. The starting price on their Web site, I believe, is $2.50 per thousand, so you can calculate your costs depending on how big your list is. You would only be charged for the domains that are tokenized. Returnpath, the Centerscore certified program, actually charges an annual license fee based on your volume and on how many s you are sending and it will dictate what the pricing model is for you. There may be different breakdowns and volume tiers that will dictate how much the annual license fee is and you have to send within that volume. If you get outside that volume, they will come back to you and tell you that they need to adjust your annual license fee. Most service providers are now partnered with these providers and will work with you to fill out their applications and get the program up and running. Q: To clarify, accreditation is $2.50 each time you send an or just one time for your list? A: The certified rate is $2.50 CPM and that is for every message. Every message that gets tokenized will get counted in that bucket. So if you send ten messages and every one of those is tokenized, you are going to be paying for all ten messages. Q: When you are blacklisted, how do you go about getting off of it? A: Most of the blacklists have a form you must complete to be removed. Comcast, for example has a Web-based form and a mostly automated removal process. If you fill out the blacklist form, they will usually remove you within 48 hours, typically a lot sooner than that. The majority of the other ISP s have similar forms that you can fill out. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is look at your bounce code. If you are on a blacklist, this will typically tell you what blacklist you are on and will usually provide a link that you can go to in order to find out why you are being blacklisted or even take you to that form that will allow you to say why you should not be blacklisted. If you are working with an service provider, they should have a deliverability team or support teams that can help you get off that black list as well. Of course, the

7 next step is to analyze why you got blacklisted to begin with and ensure that you are adjusting your behavior or strategy to make certain it does not happen again. Q: What are too many images for your ? A: There is not a hard number as to what are too many images in an . What a lot of the content filters look at is the ratio of imagery to text. As long as you have a balancing amount of text to those images, there really is no limit. With that said, you also have to realize that there are a lot of filters out there that do not like your messages to be too big. For example, it is not a good idea to send an that takes five seconds to scroll through. You want to keep your s in the 20 to 60 kilobyte range. When you get outside that range, you are running the risk of tripping certain filters. You also want to make sure that your graphics are using the maximum amount of compression so that your images are not too big, but at the same time you know you are maintaining good image quality. The danger of putting too many images into your messages is the fact that more than 60 percent of clients now do not get images by default. So if the primary message of your is in images and the recipients images are blocked, what is the recipient seeing? You can test that by sending yourself s to an account that does not have images enabled and see what your looks like when the images do not show up. There are other things you can do, for example, using alt tags and title tags to make sure that when your images do not show up that something is still showing there; instead of the red X, show somebody a piece of text that talks about something relevant. As the designer, know what your looks like if those images do not show up. There is not a hard and fast rule as to what the appropriate number of images are, it is just a balancing act between what it is going to look like without the images displayed and how many images can be used before you start skewing the ratio of text to images too much and start tripping filters. Q: What is a typical open rate? A: I cannot really answer that question and the reason I say that is because open rates are so variable. The first thing you have to know as a marketer is that open rate means measurable opens. The only way you can measure an open is to embed an image within your and have that image be displayed. If images are being blocked by default, messages can be received but not be recorded as being opened if nobody ever downloads the images. The second thing to remember is that open rates are going to be dependent on a number of factors. Are you sending to a house list or a prospecting list? What is the relationship? What were your subject line, offer and call to action? What did your design look like? These are all things that are going to go into

8 determining whether somebody is going to open your message. At Marketing Sherpa, you can view benchmarking guides that survey ers and marketers with all kinds of different verticals and spaces, and include both B2B and B2C marketers. Some additional sources at which to find marketing benchmarking guides include the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) at Experience.org (the wing of the DMA) and Marketing Profs ( Q: As a small business owner, is meeting all of these requirements realistic? What is the highest priority when it comes to executing a successful campaign? A: As a small business owner, I would steer you towards finding an service provider that is within your price range that can take care of about 80 percent of these items and let you focus on the other 20 percent of the items, like your offers and creative. Let the service provider handle all the technical areas and work with their support group to set up authentication. Let them handle the throttling and the reputation monitoring, and as a small business owner, really focus on your list acquisition and your messaging. There are a lot of resources out there that you can find to help educate yourself, but aligning yourself with an service provider is probably the key component in all of that. Doing so allows you to focus on the things that you want to focus on, like driving sales or conversions, and not have to focus on the technical issues.