Lesson 10, Future of Email
The Future of email has already arrived – in part because i was meant to post this 2 years ago 🙂
Last year we heard several discussions regarding trusting senders, security and their performance. Several ISPs started implementing TLS encryption, see here to read more about this technology. As discussed in previous articles its now far from safe to send emails as plain text, extra measures are needed in order to protect the flow of data.
This can be defined as an assessment of an individuals response for some type of offering. For the instance of email marketing, a user may open or click through an email, they would therefore be engaging with your email campaign.
Commonly this term is referred to as User Engagement rate, whereby these interactions are measured. Each ISP may measure these in different ways, each action may have a different rating; this is something important to consider.
One thing we need to avoid as an email marketer or a Deliverability expert are Blacklists, these are lists which can either block or limit your marketing campaigns. Blacklists are there to help police the email marketing world, and to ensure abusers are punished or held into account based on their activities. There are several types of Blacklists, such as domain blacklists, IP blacklists.
A good resource to use to see if your listed on any of the blacklists is debouncer.com another resource to use is MX tool box which can help you run these queries. In addition you can use is ‘whatismyipaddress‘
Lesson 7, Feedback Loops (FBLs)
More often or not, we complain if we receive unsolicited emails. We can complain in many forms.
Typically with emails we’d hit the ‘spam’ button and let that manage itself, we may even delete the emails or unsubscribe manually, although that is a labourios task, as even the best filters let spam get through. So we’d simply be wasting time by doing this.
Thats where feedback loops come into play, also known as an ‘FBL’ these are used to process user complaints.
What is a feedback loop?
A feedback loop in email form is a process of managing complaints from mailing list members or ISP users, inbetween ISP and ESP, or any source who has enrolled into a feedback loop. See more information here.
Lesson 6, Single Opt in, Confirmed Opt in & Double Opt In
The biggest factor that affects your Deliverability from the offset is your data collection process, which in turn directly affects your data quality. Here we are not just talking about who you enter into your database but also how you do that. The first thing is you need to be clear with your sign up process about setting expectations for perspective members, and making sure it is relevant to them. There are many issues that we face naturally from poorly designed sign up forms, for example if the syntax of the email isn’t checked we are likely to encounter an increase in bounces, which will in turn have a negative affect on our reputation.
That is key, now it’s time to talk about how you enter members into your database and differences in the methods. In regards to the layout and design of your subscriber form, i found this blog post which had some good tips in regards to sign up process. No matter which method of sign up you use, it’s always important to validate your data on sign up, check out a basic form here there is of course many ways of doing this. It is also important to see where your users are signing up from.
There are a few opt in processes, they are: Single Opt In (SOI), Confirmed Opt In (COI) and Double Opt In (DOI) below i will go into more detail about each form:
[Beginners guide to Deliverability] Lesson 5, Spam traps & Honey traps
Lesson 5, Spam traps & Honey traps
The key point here is your list hygiene or that of your clients. You can’t just drive your results with a good configuration, and a creative with great marketing. It helps, but its also about the data quality, and within that your list hygiene.
What is your list hygiene?
Your list hygiene in a deliverability sense is the condition of your list, and your management to try and prevent the list working against you. Often or not we are looking at such things as inactive members, repetative soft bounces, hard bounces and your unsubscribes.
For the purpose of this lesson i want to concentrate on inactive members and what part they play in regards to affecting sender reputation. The inactive segment of your clients database contains spam traps;