Deliverability:A Challenge for 8 of 10 Marketers
What are marketers doing about deliverability? Our recent survey reveals their concerns.
What are marketers doing about deliverability? Our recent survey reveals their concerns.
Our recent survey on marketers’ experiences with deliverability turned up a big contradiction and a surprising black hole of knowledge about what really is more likely to get email blocked or filtered.
The contradiction: Eight of 10 email marketers say getting email messages delivered is a challenge for their organizations. However, only 1 in 10 rank improving deliverability as a top priority.
The black hole: Marketers apparently don’t realize how much spam complaints can influence message blocking and filtering. Nearly 90 percent of respondents track hard bounces and unsubscribes in each delivery, but only 58 percent monitor spam complaints. Also, 53 percent say their email content and coding or permission practices have the greatest influence, but only 13 percent cited spam complaints.
Some highlights from the survey, which assessed emailers’ attitudes toward deliverability issues and their experiences:
Key survey results are presented below. You can view the full results and more analysis here.
Missed Opportunities May Thwart Improvement Goals
Most marketers monitor campaign-related metrics but not those that provide more detailed delivery reports:
Although 82.4 percent of marketers say they monitor delivery rates, delivery-specific metrics such as bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints don’t measure delivery to key ISPs or corporations, or inbox placement. Knowing who’s blocking your email can help you target the problem and boost delivery. This information can turn up either in delivery reports sent during and after a campaign or from a third-party audit.
Deliverability a “Significant” Challenge for One-Third of Respondents
When we looked deeper to see how people who reported significant deliverability challenges viewed other survey questions, we found they were more likely to define deliverability as inbox delivery with images and links enabled. They’re also the most likely to track campaign delivery metrics and ISP blocking.
Filtering the Thorniest Deliverability Issue
Given all the attention on working with filters, it’s no surprise to find they rank high on marketers’ radar. When we looked deeper, we found ISP filters are the top concern for marketers who utilize installed software for email delivery (55 percent), while corporate filters bedevil 44.5 percent of marketers who outsource email delivery (email service providers and agencies).
Half of Respondents Modify E-mail Templates to Address Deliverability Problems
Modifying an email template can remove some elements that trigger blocks at ISPs, such as bad coding, over-large images, and spam-like content. It has less impact on the marketing budget than contracting with third-party vendors, however. The fairly strong adoption of authentication technologies is encouraging, while using an accreditation service is still very early in the adoption cycle.
Though Deliverability Is a Challenge, It’s Not a Priority
Business goals clearly outrank deliverability, and rightly so. Yet the problem with respondents’ dichotomy is poor deliverability clearly hurts the bottom line. A better delivery rate is a rising tide that raises all boats, from list growth to open/click rates and eventually ROI (define).
Controllable Issues Have Greatest Impact on Deliverability
Once again, marketers concentrate on factors they directly control, permission and content, although spam complaints, whitelisting, and blacklisting generally have a greater effect. This attitude likely exists because marketers can’t see how those factors work at the ISP level. This question also reveals another disconnect: though 57 percent of marketers say they track spam complaint rates, far fewer relate them to email delivery failures.
If you were one of the 400-plus email professionals who filled out our survey in recent weeks, we thank you. Future ClickZ columns will address concerns the survey raised.
As always, keep on deliverin’.
Want more email marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our email columns, organized by topic.