In these blog posts we’ve looked at some key factors that affect your email reputation. To give you a quick and readily referenced guide for day-to-day practices, we’re going to summarise some key points from these articles here and hope that you follow them. They are guidelines to help you make sure that you can focus on getting the message across rather than stumbling over how to do it. Whilst these summaries are useful guides in and of themselves, if you’re reading this without reading the other blog posts I’d highly recommend you go back to them and study them in more detail. Hey, if you can spare the time, of course. If not, then get these suggestions below under your belt and you should find you have some time to go back and read them. Hopefully from that you’ll get a better understanding too!

Segment your audience

Use segmentation to target sections of your audience. The best metric for this is probably on the basis of engaged behaviour. Target those who are engaged for better results. If you need help deciding on those audiences and you don’t have time for the Analysis yourself, you should speak to your Customer Success Manager about our Analytics tool, which will at least get the audiences sorted out for you. We’ve got a number of models that we can help you set up for RFM, RFE, Conversions and more. All of which we’ll happily help you set up (for a fee, of course), and then you’re super popular with your boss because he knows you’re targeting your audiences properly.

Target the Audience appropriately

It should be clear from this that  you need to target the less engaged in a different manner from those who are more engaged. Be aware that the conversion process is probably on a longer tail than you might otherwise wish for,which should be clear because these people are less likely to purchase immediately. That’s not to say that they won’t and that targeting them is a waste of time and resources. They’ll need different techniques than your regular purchasers will, and again, we can help with that aspect of things. To roll out the old tired cliche, our Customer Success managers are standing by to take your call… Only partially kidding there; they are genuinely keen to make your campaigns a success and share their expertise. You might be wondering from the above two points what all of this has to do with Email Reputation. In point of fact, it’s got everything to do with it because it makes you a model sender, with a good reputation for delivering wanted information at an appropriate time. And that will reduce the likelihood of people Unsubscribing, complaining or otherwise refusing to accept the information you’re trying to deliver. And that’s a Good Thing, because then they’re more receptive to a purchase.

Take List Hygiene seriously

Ensuring that List Hygiene is taken seriously and that completely unengaged individuals are filtered out will ensure your reputation is maintained. An added bonus is that it will make your stats look better! Imagine if you’ve got an audience currently of 30,000 subscribers but you’ve never tried any of the List Hygiene practices we’ve mentioned in the earlier blog post. So you read that and decide you’ll clean your list of all email addresses you hold that you can’t deliver to. Let’s assume that means 3,000 people come off your list. WHAAAT? All of a sudden your audience has dropped by 10%. Your boss isn’t happy. You’re worried. Was that a good idea? Short answer: Yes.  Longer answer: Yes, and here’s why. At present you calculate that it takes 3 campaigns to these 30,000 people to get your business a return of £50,000 in sales. That’s 90,000 emails sent. But now you’re sending only 81,000 emails. And you’re still getting £50,000 revenue in sales. Wow! That’s better. You’ve saved the company money! And nobody really got hurt (unless you count the slightly bruised egos of those who told you it was a bad idea and that some of those people you got rid of would have bought at some point. Sure, they might well have done and they may well do in the past, but let’s let them come to us and re-target them via other channels. As soon as they’re engaged on the email channel we can boost that sales value again because we’ll have engaged people who purchase.

Work at your Reputation (but don’t sweat the small stuff)

Remember that this reputation management requires work between yourself and your ESP to ensure consistency. If you send emails when you have told people you’re going to send them, and you consistently behave in that manner, then your reputation will for the most part remain untarnished and you can carry on sending in this manner ad infinitum. Don’t forget though, that if you’re planning on changing your sending patterns, it’s a good idea to let your audience know, otherwise they’ll be confused, and they may not react well to the change. Even worse, they might consider you’re not who you say you are any more and disengage with the brand, because the change scared them to some extent. In some cases, you might even be regarded as sending phishing emails, when they’re genuine! That’s a bad situation. So if you’re going to change, tell them where, when and how, so they’re more accepting of it. And then tell them again. And again. And finally, but most importantly on this score, if you make the change, stick to it! (or change it again but see the advice above about changing)

Remain a Good Sender

Remaining a Good Sender will ensure that delivering emails is a key benefit for your company and generates you a consistently good revenue stream. What do I mean when I say remain a Good Sender? This relates to the section above, because what you’ve done is tell people how and where and when you’re going to be sending them emails. Because of this, people trust you. They trust the emails, the content, and the ancillary things that go along with that. And when they do, you’re a good sender. That’s a good thing. In an earlier blog post we talked about getting into the Inbox and the first part of all of this is being what an ISP regards as a Good Sender. Someone who can be relied upon to deliver a certain style of message at a certain time with relatively expected content. Not that adding an offer or two to an email is going to make you a bad sender, because it’s known that your business does things like that.  I regularly receive emails with “Offer of the week” or “Offer of the Day” as part of the content, and I accept that. It might seem odd to reference the Godfather, but “it’s the cost of doing business.” As such, it’s expected, and shouldn’t harm your Good Sender reputation. Which is great, because that’s the first hurdle over getting into the Inbox.

Conclusion

Hopefully these posts have de-mystified some of these expectations and understood behaviour patterns, and you can see and will follow the guidelines mentioned above and in previous posts. If you do, then chances are you’re going to have a long and successful career in Email marketing with your firm. Read the series here Part 1 : Part 2 : Part 3 : Part 4 : Part 5