Rehab for Your Sender Reputation, Part 2
How to repair damage caused by e-mail marketing messages that are unrecognized, unexpected, or unwanted.
How to repair damage caused by e-mail marketing messages that are unrecognized, unexpected, or unwanted.
It’s easy to damage your e-mail sender reputation through sloppy or improper management of your e-mail program and sending practices. Repairing the damage is harder, but it can be done if you’re willing to do the work.
In part one, I outlined the reasons your recipients click the “report spam” button, even on the messages they opted in to receive and why ISPs block your messages or route them to the bulk folder.
Here, you’ll find strategies for detecting and resolving problems that lead to spam complaints and ISPs’ actions.
Why Relevance Isn’t Enough
If you’ve ever found yourself in e-mail delivery hell, you’ve probably heard variations on this advice:
Neither piece of advice is wrong. They just don’t always give you insights or tell you how to act on the advice. Relevance, for example, is relative. If you consider any e-mail offer relevant if it goes out under your company name, you probably won’t admit that your subscribers have different ideas.
Marketers and industry experts will always debate the merits of removing inactive addresses. (I explain why I vote for reactivation and then pruning in the column, “The Right Way to Trim Inactives.”) The answer both for rehabbing a damaged sender reputation and for avoiding major trouble in the first place is to provide value for your recipients with every e-mail you send. This value comes from sending the e-mails you promised at opt-in, being clear and recognizable in the inbox, and resolving problems as soon as they crop up.
Revisiting the Three Us
The Three Us of delivery — unrecognized, unexpected, and unwanted — explain why recipients click the “report spam” button for your e-mail. Here are strategies to overcome each one:
Preference centers and surveys usually uncover relevancy problems and can help you reactivate subscribers who haven’t acted on your e-mails in a set amount of time. Go back to older names on your list, and offer them a chance to update their e-mail preferences to make the messages easier to target and deliver on the value your subscribers are looking for.
Managing Issues That Damage Reputation
The sign-up source can usually uncover the problems where you are adding large amounts of inactive addresses, allowing you to make changes. These changes could be simple, such as adding error checking, requiring the address be entered twice, or adopting confirmed opt-in (particularly for partners or offline address collection where mistakes are common).
Alternatively, ISPs sometimes change bounce codes. You might need to update your automated removal process. If you see a spike in bounces, check your database logs. Make sure the addresses that should be removed are actually being removed and not remaining on your list. Sometimes this requires help from your service provider.
This problem surfaces most often when marketers send to old and inactive addresses, either by mistake or in a misguided effort to get some return from their sleepers. In either case, the result is the same. The address once was valid but is no longer being used by the recipient. After sending invalid-address bounces to alert senders to remove it, the ISP eventually gave up and converted it to a trap address.
Final Thought: The Good News
All these challenges should be temporary and can be met with proper list hygiene and complaint reduction strategies. These will improve your reputation and restore inbox delivery.
Join us for Search Engine Strategies San Jose, August 10-14, 2009, at the McEnery Convention Center. Spend Day 1 learning about social media and video strategies with ClickZ.