I'm calling a time out for general celebration among the email marketing people! You are invited!

The good news is that while many marketers still don’t use segmentation or keep their files particularly clean, marketers are planning to adopt more of these strategies, including advanced segmentation (42%), personalization (37%) and behavioral targeting (34%), according to the Email Marketing Industry Census 2010 from eConsultancy and Adestra. 

Does that seem like only a minor victory? I confess I'm an optimist by nature.  It’s not like we've arrived, true, but it's a lot more encouraging than in past years when marketers planned only to keep the status quo.  In some ways, email marketing is its own worst enemy.  It works so well and provides such high ROI that it sometimes seems like the magic fountain of email marketing revenue never abates.  It’s hard to make a case for doing the hard work of segmentation, list hygiene and creative testing if the channel still “works” without them.

Fact is that most email marketing programs don’t work as well as they could, and many leave  significant revenue on the table.  Even simple segmentation can boost campaign results by 150% or more, in my experience.   If there is a lack of targeting or too frequent mailings we have churn, subscriber fatigue, missed results, higher complaints, lower inbox placement, and slumped  LTV.  With a thoughtful, subscriber-centric content and contact strategy, we earn more sales and revenue, higher short term and long term response and value, stronger subscriber satisfaction and improved word of mouth.

That seems like a very clear choice to me.  Why not segment to create a better experience for subscribers?  And earn higher revenue for our business?!

Mailbox providers like Yahoo! and Gmail, and blacklists owners like those at SpamHaus blame marketers for sending too frequently to subscribers who are not engaging.  The penalty is that senders will be blocked from reaching any subscribers on their networks. And once a sender or marketer is blocked, it's increasingly hard to convince the mailbox providers that subscribers really do want those messages.  Marketers must maintain active files in order to prove that their efforts are actually providing value to subscribers. All that dead wood on our files will eventually come back to haunt us.

Consider these three new truths about email marketing and deliverability:

1. Permission is not enough to ensure messages reach the inbox or earn a response.  Return Path’s Global Email Deliverability Benchmark report found that 20% of legitimate commercial email never reaches the inbox in North America, and 15% goes missing in Europe.   Marketers and other senders must track and improve the key metrics that affect email deliverability like complaints, unknown users and file responsiveness.

2. Despite the noise about "engagement" being the new metric to watch, complaints are still the key factor in sender reputation and inbox placement. Complaint data (clicks on the Report Spam button) have always been about engagement.  They are a proxy for subscriber satisfaction.  Some ISPs also use subscriber level data as part of the “cocktail,” but complaints are still the most influential element. There will likely always be new metrics introduced into sender reputation calculations because spammers are always changing their tactics. For instance, Hotmail has a panel, Yahoo! is experimenting with click-through rates as a qualifier of subscriber activity, and several global ISPs use “This is Not Spam” data (clicks from the junk/bulk folder) as a way to track “false positives” (messages in the bulk folder that subscribers want in the inbox).

3. No ESP or delivery vendor can correct a poor sender reputation. Sorry, but marketers must own their own sender reputation. A good email broadcast vendor (either hosted or on-premise) will maintain a solid infrastructure and help you authenticate, track complaints and manage bounces properly. But no vendor controls your data sourcing, frequency or content strategy – all of which contribute to sender reputation.  Do not get complacent.  Make sure you have the data you need to actively manage and optimize inbox deliverability. Sender reputation is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing measure of your current practices.

Let’s do it in 2010, everyone!  Let’s prove the naysayers wrong, and show that email marketers are smart, savvy and disciplined enough to do the right thing by subscribers.  And let's show those smarty-pants social marketers that email still can earn the highest revenue in the digital marketing mix!