Marketing Tech Talk #4

Email deliverability a hot topic for digital marketers

It seems when it comes to email marketing the first issue discussed is relevancy, and the second is deliverability. Making it to the inbox involves a complex set of issues, and is a perennial challenge for email marketers.

A recent “Email Marketing Benchmark Summary Report” is from Ascend2 last month, found that

• 32% of marketers “Reaching the inbox” the most difficult challenge to email marketing success
• 27% of marketers wanted “improved deliverability optimization” upgrades from their ESPs

One reason why marketers find reaching the inbox a difficult challenge is that the definition of spam is no longer shouldered solely by the permissibility of sender; rather the responsibility is with the  message itself. In this evolving ecosystem where subscribers’ expectations of email have risen; an unwanted or untimely communication condemns the message to the spam folder.

Today’s podcast will attempt to answer the following question.

“How can I identify opportunities for improvement in my email marketing process to increase my deliverability and inbox placement rates to positively impact conversion?”

Laura Atkins shares her thoughts on conversations with Google at M3AAWG

To help us answer that question, we have invited Laura Atkins, Founding Partner of Word to the Wise, a firm specializing in helping clients get email to the inbox.

In this program, we explore the impact of Google’s recent announcements at the 2014 M3AAWG conference in San Francisco. These include:

1. Google’s expectation of senders to authenticate and use and maintain an opt-in process for subscribers (5:29)
   • Specifically retailers, whose challenges to collect clean email address at the point of sale are mounting (9:01)
   • The importance of separating transactional email and promotional email domains? (12:56)
2. Google’s new Feed Back Loop aimed to provide a report card to aid ESPs  (18:29)
3. Google’s UI change in how list-unsubscribe headers appears in the subscriber’s view of the email message.

Listen or download the entire interview now. The podcast is 26 minutes long, the perfect length to listen to during the morning or evening commute.

Guest: Laura Atkins, Founding Partner of Word to the Wise

Laura has over fifteen years’ worth of experience in helping companies mitigate and manage mailing risks, respond to spam complaints and interact more effectively with ISPs. She works with clients to define email-related goals and to identify and implement policy and procedural changes that further those goals. She regularly helps to mediate client delivery and blocking issues with anti-spam blacklists and internet service providers.

Before founding Word to the Wise, Laura led the outsourced abuse desk group for the Mail Abuse Prevention System (the industry’s first anti-spam blacklist). In this role, she advised ISPs on the most effective ways to manage their customers and complaints about their customer’s behavior.

With her background in molecular biology, Laura is well suited to investigating and troubleshooting complex processes from scientific and analytical perspectives, allowing her to expertly investigate and resolve email delivery problems for a variety of types of email senders.

Keep up with latest email deliverability news by visiting Laura’s Word to the Wise blog.