Your Data and Deliverability Questions Answered
Many companies we talk to ask us how to improve email deliverability and protect email data. Tim Roe, RedEye’s Director of Data and Deliverability, has been helping RedEye clients improve deliverability and achieve whitelist status for the past 8 years. Tim was recently appointed onto the board of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Email Marketing Council and has served on the DMA Email Council Best Practice and Legal hub since 2010. In this section you can read some of the common questions raised regarding data deliverability and learn how to overcome these issues by reading Tim’s expert advice.
If you have any questions of your own you would like answered please send them to ask.tim@redeye.com.
Your questions answered…
“Quite a large volume of our customer database has no email address alongside it, or has an email address that is no longer valid. We are looking to find up to date email addresses for these customers and have heard a good way to do this is email appending. Can you tell us what this is and whether you think it is a good idea?”
“I have heard that spam signatures can negatively affect the deliverability. What are they and how can you tell if you have one?”
“We are currently using an abandon basket email, and it is working really well. However, we are convinced there must be more opportunity for using behavioural emails. Can you give me some ideas please?”
“We have recently moved email service providers, and the new provider has told us they are unhappy with the marketing permission we have on our email addresses. We clearly state in the terms and conditions they will get marketing emails once they become a customer and they can unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive emails. I thought that was ok?”
“I have recently heard someone talking about using email as a branding tool, and even if an email is not opened, it can have a ‘branding’ value. This seems to suggest you can send emails to people even if they never open them. Do you agree?”
“During a data audit project within our organisation, we have “found” a substantial number of email addresses on one of our databases that we are not mailing. The marketing team are under a great deal of pressure to add these email addresses to the mailing list, but we are concerned it might affect our email programme. We have good open and click rates and our IP reputations are good. What can we do to protect what we have and make the most of the new data?”
“We have been advised by an ISP that if we were on the Sender Score Certified whitelist managed by Return Path we would get fewer problems with deliverability. Could you tell me what the benefits of membership are, and does it really work?”
“My company wants to try and achieve more revenue from email and is considering increasing the amount of times we mail our list. I’m concerned that if we mail too often we might cause people to unsubscribe or complain. If I monitor these rates carefully, is this a good approach?”
“Our company email newsletter has gone into junk in my webmail account, but not in some of my colleagues email accounts. The CEO wants to know why our competitors’ emails go into his inbox, and our company one goes into his junk folder. I need to provide some answers. Can you help?
“We are experiencing deliverability issues and have been advised to remove anyone who has not opened and clicked an email within the last 6 months from our database. A substantial amount of these people are still buying from us which is stopping us from putting a deliverability strategy in place. What can we do?”
“There’s been a lot of discussion recently about basket abandonment emails and when the best time is to send an email to potential customers who have abandoned their baskets online. Advice on the web suggests sending basket abandonment emails within 24 hours, others suggest leaving it several days. It’s all very confusing, can you help?”
“My open and click through rates seem to be falling, yet my unsubscribe and complaint rates are low. Does this mean people want my emails because they would unsubscribe or complain if they didn’t?”
