Will nearly 100 percent of my marketing email end up in my customers' spam folders?
The answer may be "yes" if your company doesn't change its email practices.
Fewer consumers are willing to spend right now, while most companies are anxious to improve their revenue numbers. If customers aren't buying enough, the solution may seem simple—send more email. Alas, customers who are not eager to buy are unlikely to be receptive to additional emails from you.
Instead of being financially rewarded for emailing more, you may be punished by a slackened or even negative response, and you might find that your revenue plummets while your email languishes in spam filters.
How can you determine how your email is performing?
Don't fixate on a single metric
There are many sides to the performance puzzle. For example, bounce-backs can't give a complete picture of your delivery success. You should also watch the number of delayed deliveries, sometimes known as soft bounces; these are emails that didn't make it through on the first delivery attempt.
Also, pay attention to your opt-out rates. The expected rate may depend on the kind of customers you have, but anything above one percent may indicate dissatisfied recipients. Less than half a percent is preferable, and less than a quarter of a percent should be achievable. Look at how your opt-out rate is trending: Even if your rate is low, a steady increase may signal a change in how your recipients perceive the value of your mail.
Timing is another factor. How long after your email goes out are you still getting clicks, views, and opt-outs? Knowing this information may help you estimate how long your email stays in people's inboxes and how far ahead you must plan in order to reach the largest audience.
Finally, keep in mind that email can drive response in other channels. Your Web site analytics should show traffic spikes correlated with your email campaigns. If you can track sales at your brick-and-mortar stores, you may see an increase in foot traffic as well.
Use all the tools you have
Most ESPs and email software can link email to Web analytics so that you can see what email readers do once they get to your Web site. Are readers responding to the offer you put in the email, or are they more interested in other things? Getting the right offer into the email itself will increase engagement.
Run deliverability reports if your email vendor offers them, to determine what proportion of your email passes common delivery filters and what proportion reaches user inboxes at ISPs rather than junk folders. Formatting, content, and historical user response are factors that determine those rates. Such a report may also give insight into how long it typically takes a message to travel from your sending servers to the customers' mailboxes.
It's also important to pay attention to what your email looks like to recipients. Users are more likely to opt out when messages look bad. Worse, they might hit the "report spam" button and affect your ability to reach others at the same ISP. Use preview tools if your vendor or software offers them; otherwise, set up free accounts at Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail to view emails as your customers see them.
Conduct recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) analysis of your email campaigns to understand the level of engagement of your customers. Customers who are not as engaged are more likely to opt out or simply tag you as a spammer, which will cause your deliverability to suffer, especially in a market where fewer people want to be engaged and more companies are desperate for added revenue.
What's important to get email through delivery obstacles?
ISP mail filtering is intentionally inscrutable
Many ISPs live in fear that providing clues as to how their filters distinguish well-behaved email will allow spammers to exploit that knowledge. The filtering rules vary from one ISP to the next, and they change constantly to adapt to new tricks by spammers.
ISPs experiment with strategies that may have side-effects they didn't predict, so a message that reached the inbox today may not tomorrow. In the end, good sender behavior and customer loyalty are your best defenses.