Look Beyond the Obvious for Answers

Email senders who are struggling with challenges such as increased churn, declining engagement or climbing spam complaints often hope simple solutions – like writing the perfect subject line or finding the one best day of the week to send – will fix their problems.

Sorry, but that magic pixie dust you can throw at an email problem to make it go away usually doesn't exist. Typically the driver is a combination of things and requires the marketer to drill down to find the answers to their problem.

On a discussion forum recently a marketer lamented that the company's emails were being junked and was certain that the use of "free" in the subject line was the culprit.

I'm pretty certain "free" was not the culprit, but this marketer had yet to even do a simple A/B split test to see if, in fact, "free" was a contributor.                                         

Getting to the root of a deliverability or performance issue usually requires a bit of detective work, some time, perhaps testing and even a little luck or inspiration. It is important to break your program down into processes and slice and dice your metrics to reveal what is really going on with your program.

The detective process often starts with an interrogation process:  asking the basic questions. As you pose these questions to yourself, your team members and vendors, the pieces of the puzzle will start to come together.

Often by themselves they might appear insignificant. But, like a crime case, when you start putting the pieces together, you can uncover the guilty party.

Here are just a few sample questions to get you started:

• Did you change email vendors or sending IPs recently?
• Did you start using a different "from" name?
• Have you checked to make sure your authentication protocols are working correctly?
• Did you change something in your opt-in process? For example, did you change your unchecked box to a pre-checked?
• Do you use different systems to send different types of emails, such as one for transactional and one for broadcast? Different message approaches of your confirmation emails from one system might be having an unintended impact on your regular emails.
• Have you changed frequency or added a new message stream that might surprise unsuspecting subscribers?
• Do you have a list source issue? Perhaps that enthusiastic new marketing coordinator thought it was a great idea to upload those trade show business card lists from three years ago.
• Do you have a data hygiene issue or process problem? Perhaps the opt-outs aren't being properly synched between your CRM database and your ESP, resulting in emails being sent to bounced or unsubscribed addresses.
• Do you know at what stage in the email relationship when most spam complaints happen? Representatives for a company I met with recently mentioned that the majority of their spam complaints happened after subscribers received their first or second broadcast message. These messages were sent from a different system and format from their confirmation emails, possibly leading to confusion by new subscribers.
• Are you analyzing your deliverability and performance reports by different attributes? These include ISP, list source, permission process (SOI vs DOI), demographic, type of message (promotion vs trigger vs notification/transactional), time on list, customer vs prospect, etc. This is where the real work often is and where you frequently discover some fascinating insights to both successes and problems with your program.
• Have you conducted A/B tests of different aspects of your program to provide greater confidence in your theories?

Detective work using technology to break down your deliverability challenges into processes can reveal the roots of your problems, suggest what you need to do to solve them and, most importantly, keep them from recurring.

Email marketing provides more transparency and analytics than almost any other marketing channel. As such, it is incumbent upon marketers to take advantage of their reporting capabilities to drill down into the numbers to find what's driving their program's successes and failures.

Happy drilling.

Last 5 posts by Loren McDonald

• Are You Dreaming or Doing? - December 7th, 2009
• Respect Subscribers by Managing Expectations - August 11th, 2009
• Open Rate? Render Rate? Do-You-Care Rate? - March 9th, 2009
• Is Free Really a Four-Letter Word? - January 26th, 2009
• How do I unsubscribe from your emails? - September 18th, 2008