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What Would You Tell your CEO?

July 1, 2010 by Chip House

Imagine yourself sitting down for coffee with the CEO and CMO of your company. Now, assuming you had just a few minutes of their undivided attention, what would you try to convey to them about deliverability? In addition to ensuring they learn just how smart you are, what one or two things would you leave them with? What things does your C-Suite most need to know and take action on to improve not only the deliverability of the email programs your company sends, but could also revolutionize how your brand is perceived in the marketplace?

That is the question I posed recently to several thought leaders in the email space. The result is a great document we call “Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious about Permission & Deliverability.” A few of the contributors also contribute to Deliverability.com, such as Carlo Catajan from Yahoo, Andrew Kordek from Groupon, and George Bilbrey from Return Path. Others from Earthlink, McAfee, Email Marketer’s Club, Pivotal Veracity, Goodmail and the Online Trust Alliance also weighed in from “where they sit” as part of the email community. I think the advice they provided is spot-on accurate and a must read for any marketer needing to optimize their deliverability.

The main takeaways of this paper are:

Permission Matters. In fact, Permission Comes First.
As Andrew Kordek put it, “Remember, everything you do in email marketing is a reflection of your brand. It starts with permission—and everything your subscribers experience until they unsubscribe can—and will—impact complaints, deliverability, and the willingness of others to join and become engaged in your program. Your subscribers are in charge. The rest is up to you.”

The ISPs’ responsibility is to their users, not to marketers.
To the CEO, I’d summarize it as follows: ISPs are businesses too and they like customers as much as the rest of us, so they want to keep them happy. Your unsolicited email/spam (or the “bacon” your legit email has become) is annoying subscribers, and so it in turn annoys the ISPs as it can cause them to lose that user to another mail provider.

Geralmy Swint from Earthlink talks about it this way. He says, “To the Executive: A single spam report doesn’t mean you’re a spammer, but it’s important to remember that better senders get fewer spam reports. If your mail gets more spam reports than the next guy, you might be doing something wrong.

Here are a few of the things I would recommend to keep your spam complaints as low as possible:
• Remind subscribers that they signed up, and offer them an easy way to unsubscribe
• Identify yourself clearly in the message
• Honor the recipient’s request to be removed from your list
• Respond quickly to unsubscribe requests
• Don’t buy lists or send email to people who didn’t opt-in”

ISPs are now tracking metrics like opens and clicks, so marketers need to optimize on these items to continue to achieve good results.
Marketers should already be optimizing on subscriber actions and engagement anyway, though the stats show many are not. At ExactTarget we analyzed lists where the retailer was seeing below average response rates and showed that nearly 40% of a typical list was unengaged – meaning subscribers that had not opened or clicked on a message in 90 days. Another 30 – 45% of the list had just a few actions in 90 days. This is truly the 80/20 rule in action. We've found with the appropriate frequency and relevancy you can engage a much larger segment of your audience. That's why user-defined frequency and content preferences are key.

So, what would you tell your CEO about permission and deliverability? Let me know here or tweet me at @cehouse.