The First 11 Days – Holiday Deliverability Means Being Relevant

Repost from Pivotal IQ Blog

It's the time of the year when you start thinking about how many
pounds your turkey will have to be to feed all of your relatives and
what kind of shenanigans will ensue when Uncle Bob has one too many
highballs. However pre-occupied you may be with family and the
impending feasts, there's a little voice—a scared little
voice—wondering what you could possibly do to improve your overall
deliverability and marketing performance.

Let's face it, times are tough, economics being what they are, we
all must deliver a command performance to ensure our continued success.
Your email is more important than ever in establishing a necessary
dialogue with your customers that will compell them to read, click and
convert.

The first thing to understand about the holiday season is that everyone
under the sun is trying to deliver a command performance and will be
sending their mission critical mail. According to experts (and first
hand experience of just looking in my own inbox) volumes are increasing as marketers mail their holiday specials in hopes of creating the necessary hype to make Black Friday as lucrative as possible.

Does less equal more during the holidays?

That's an important question. We here at Pivotal Veracity have a unique perspective
on how the market is performing. Since we work with some of the largest
brands and mailers in the world, we are privvy to performance vectors
that give a clear indication of what's happening in the market. The
following chart chronicles the trend that the first 11 days of this
holiday season, starting on November 1st, 2009, has had on
industry-wide deliverability:

The chart clearly demonstrates that  overall inbox placement has
exerpienced a downward trend from a high of 89% across all industries
and mailers starting on November 1st to just 77% by today. As the
overall inbox rate has dropped, both spam and undelivered mail
(bounces/smtp rejections) have increased accordingly. If we are all in
agreement that the volume of mail has increased in anticipation of the
holidays, then we must assume from the numbers above that less is not
more inbox and that your customers and their ISPs are reacting to the increased traffic they are experiencing.

Regroup, evaluate and adjust your strategy

It's very important to know what's really going on with your email.
If you see that your delivery rates are dropping then you may be
getting lost in the inbox. Set up time to check your delivery every
single day and adjust accordingly. Don't blanket every single user
every single day or two with an email; instead, select and target your
users appropriately, If you don't email the oldest 1% of your list, you
you will potentially cut down on the complaints and bounces that drag
down the performance of your overall list.

Try sending on different days: We know that Tuesdays are high
traffic days, but during this time of year Tuesday is the 405 Freeway
with a jack-knifed big rig in either direction at 5:00pm on a Friday.
The idea is that you stand out from the crowd and sometimes you may
have to stand out from what you've done up to this point in order to be
noticed.

Remember, the name of the game is engagement
and it takes many forms. Don't try to engage every single one of your
customers in the exact same way, they are all individuals and social
media has made us all want a personalized conversation.

Take to heart the basic concepts of deliverability as touted by such global entities like AOL: "Send mail that users want to receive."
This is the very core of engagement and the most critical principle by
which you can operate to ensure success as we move into December when
volumes will go up even more and the battle for your customer's dollars
heats up.
 Cheers!

-Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations

& Industry Communications
www.pivotalveracity.com