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against the enduring strength of email marketing. What these doom merchants miss is that, although email marketing is not without its obstacles, marketers with the right strategies still make a killing through the email delivery channel.

The numbers speak for themselves. At least 72% of Americans prefer email as their primary channel of communication with businesses. And for every dollar spent on email campaigns, marketers see If the audience exists and average ROIs are robust, then the reports of email marketing’s death are greatly exaggerated.

complacency some marketers have adopted in the face of changing trends and technology. In the last few years alone, ISPs and email providers have

to unprecedented levels. In turn, many status quo tactics no longer work. Only marketers cognizant of the nuanced changes happening behind the scenes will avoid a further decline in email deliverability.

The research we have conducted over the course of creating this white paper has helped us to identify market changes over the last 18 months, why those changes matter to deliverability, and how to regain a hearty ROI for email marketing campaigns.

Many marketers would have you believe that email marketing is moments away from receiving its last rites. Their belief is that buyers have grown immune to the marketing messages in their inbox, pointing to a steady decline in email deliverability over a number of years with a recent, quite radical plummet. Healthy open rates hover between 14% and 29% depending on the industry, click rates barely breach 5%, and market averages are not what they once were.

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The Rise and Fall of Email Marketing Email deliverability in the early days was not a strenuous marketing activity. Subscribers could be included in large scale blasts without domains being penalized. Open rates and click rates were not the vigilantly watched KPIs that they are now. Deliverability was strong because the market was less saturated and inboxes were less cluttered. Not until 2000, when an estimated 61% of large and medium sized businesses were taking advantage of this low cost channel, did things start to change.

Around that time, the industry began to see a widespread crusade against spam. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was enacted to regulate commercial emails and give recipients the right to opt out. Over time, ISPs and email marketers have taken proactive

their customers do not want, leading to the drop in deliverability of email campaigns for marketers who have not adjusted in the wake of these covert changes.

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Current Email Deliverability When did the most noticeable changes to email deliverability occur? Our estimates indicate that several factors sparked a substantial decline in the last 12 to 18 months for marketers using old deliverability practices.

For starters, inbox placement rates, which indicate whether or not an email makes it to the intended inbox, have gone down from 87% to 76% in the United States. That means that almost one out of every four emails get completely lost in the void. Moreover, 26% of email campaigns experienced low read rates in the last year in part because of the changing trends in the email channel.

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The Root Causes of Decreased Deliverability

Though the struggle for a growing number of marketers is apparent, the underlying causes are not so obvious. ISPs and email service providers are notoriously enigmatic about their algorithmic changes, in part to hinder spammers, spoofers, and cybercriminals in their malicious activities. Only as a side effect have traditional email campaign strategies encountered difficulties in deliverability.

However, the catalysts for decreased email deliverability are not a total mystery. Industry experts are beginning to identify the following pervasive factors as having the most influence on the success of email campaigns.

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GREATER SPAM FILTER SOPHISTICATION

ISPs and email providers have begun to exercise their roles as inbox gatekeepers in earnest. Machine learning algorithms are now used by the major providers (Gmail and Outlook) to learn from traditional

blocking out undesirable emails.

Email providers are even assessing the opens and clicks of email recipients to dictate a sender’s reputation. In essence, that means that some email campaigns get caught up in negative feedback

even lower read rates. Without taking prompt action, domain reputation can quickly tarnish.

EVOLVING RULES ABOUT DOMAIN REPUTATION

According to Arrendale, CEO and Principal Deliverability Consultant for Inbox Pros, the largest change over the past 12-18 months is pretty clear. According to Chris, “IP reputation has always been the

becoming the forefront because you can separate

marketing domains, and transactional domains. Previously you could change your IP addresses and your reputation would reset. Now with sub domains and top level domains, it can be a little trickier.” In the past, spammers were able to hop from IP to

addition of sub domains and top level domains has

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marketers at legitimate companies actually get hit

“Marketers unaware of all these changes will use their internal corporate domain as their marketing domain

reputation takes a hit because they cannot abandon their company’s brand or top-level domain the way

spammers easily can.

And that data is not limited to individual inboxes. For example, Gmail computes and analyzes the data from individual spam reports and then aggregates that data in search of common threads. When their

and types of messages coming from certain senders, those marketers can lose points from their reputation. Since Google and Outlook now make up around 50% of the market share (with even more on the horizon as 80% of Fortune 500s have adopted Microsoft cloud solutions), even more email campaigns are exposed to this elevated level of scrutiny.

“...some email campaigns get caught up in

negative feedback loops as low read rates

read rates. Without taking prompt action, domain reputation can quickly tarnish. “

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STEADY USE OF MAIL MERGE

Email automation tools like MailChimp, SendGrid,

emails to a large subscriber list. But alongside the rise of smart marketing tools is the increased adoption of free mail merge alternatives, which often impair the very campaigns they are designed to assist.

Mail merge options are a no frill form of email customization and lack all of the authentication and tracking aspects of more robust email automation tools. In the past, a lackluster performance in either

the increasingly complex scrutiny of ISPs and email providers make mail merge tools all but useless.

Chris Arrendale explains, “Mail merges won’t have any bounce handling or feedback loops set up. All this method does is take a list and merge each

line and the sending email. There is no information

advice on which bounces should be scrubbed. Any of the insights available through an email automation platform are absent.” All of which, at this point, are essential to maintaining a strong domain reputation and return on investment.

“Until a larger segment of domains implement

those DMARC protocols, many email

campaigns will be called into question and

will have a more dubious reputation under

the parameters of ISPs and email providers.“

HIGHER DEMAND FOR AUTHENTICATION

The pursuit of greater email provider security and domain

lagging behind the times.

DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) authentication is intended to provide a streamlined way for both domains and email recipients to authenticate emails. Once widely adopted, this domain authentication measure will help to limit the

adoption rate of DMARC protocols is only at about 29%of brands worldwide.

Until a larger segment of domains implement thoseDMARC protocols, many email campaigns will be called into question and will have a more dubious reputation under the parameters of ISPs and email providers.

in�uence of phishing and spoofing tactics. However, the

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How to Regain Ground with Email Deliverability

What is encouraging about these findings is that any deficiencies in an email campaign can be remedied. Though not every action marketers can take will elicit instantaneous results on this buying channel, certain straightforward tactics can have a strong effect on improving domain reputation and overall email deliverability.

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1. ESTABLISH DOMAIN AUTHENTICATIONThe matter of domain authentication is at the root of many problems facing email marketing campaigns. Most major email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) accept DMARC, SPF (Sender Policy Framework), or DKIM authentication (Domain Keys Identified Mail). Implementing these authentication policies, in order to encourage ISPs and email providers to allow email.campaigns to pass through their filters, is simpleenough for businesses that know what to do. Internal IT personnel or tech-savvy marketing experts will simplyneed to access the Domain Name System (DNS) and add DMARC, SPF, or DKIM records in a few short steps.

Once the records are inserted, it will be importantto monitor and control the release. With DMARC authentication, settings can be established so that if an email claims to be from a certain domain but fails a DMARC check, the message can be quarantined or rejected. The intent is to protect the integrity of a domain’s reputation, but if DMARC is deployed the wrong way, emails that are authentic might be inappropriatelyscreened. In most cases, this is not a problem, but it’s still critical for administrators or trained experts to carefully monitor the early sends to avoid such problems.

As email sophistication grows, email providers are 2. VERIFY RECIPIENT EMAILS

more frequently monitoring the bounces and failed deliverability of messages. Bad data, in addition to costing sales departments $32,000 per rep, can also

bury a domain’s reputation. Before any email list is ever used, it’s important to vet the source and ensure that the data is as accurate as possible.

whether a recipient email account exists, is active, and is

two steps boost open and click rates by minimizing the number of recipients who receive emails they will never

services go the extra mile and detect whether your lists contains any known spam traps.

3. EMPLOY EMAIL BEST PRACTICES

deliverability is to start implementing email best practices. Though the spectrum of possible practices is very wide, one measure that has been found to keep opens high and spam complaints low is the use of all text emails.

service, there are several key considerations to keep front of mind:

• What level of service will be required? • Is the vendor able to verify emails with top email domains? • What is their reputation among their customers?

Doing research in this phase eliminates any malfunctions when the time comes to start reviewing email lists.

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The reason is twofold. One, emails need to be easily read on mobile platforms. Over 68% of emails are opened via mobile devices and successful campaigns are increasingly designed

Two, email recipients are more likely to open all text emails. A/B tests have shown that the inclusion of HTML can decrease open rates by anywhere between 23% and 37%.

elements as being common in commercial emails and thus send them to the Promotions tab. When attempting to avoid

4. USE DELIVERABILITY ANALYSIS TOOLSSome marketers propagate the myth that email providers are out to make their lives miserable with all of the changes

the time to consider the strategies of Google, Microsoft, and other email providers can quickly determine who these changes are meant to serve: email account holders who want to limit the messages that clog their inboxes.

In spite of that primary focus, several tools have been released to help marketers gauge their email deliverability on a granular level. In July of 2015, Google released its Postmaster Tool, a tool to help marketers analyze domain reputation, spam complaints, and other important information about how Google-hosted inboxes are perceiving their emails. Many of the major email providers have similar tools. For example, Microsoft Outlook’s Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) and AOL’s Postmaster have comparable features with dedicated support.

The key to using these tools is to integrate them with any data or KPIs being gathered or analyzed from other sources to ensure the most complete picture when determining the success of ongoing campaigns.

5. CLEAN EMAIL LISTS

show that 33% of email addresses turnover every six to twelve months, making an extensive portion of email lists obsolete. Even if emails remain active, it is still important to remove subscribers who consistently ignore messages. Any email that goes unopened has an impact on the reputation of email campaigns.

We also recommend that every six months, marketers should go through their unengaged and unresponsive contacts to clean out those who are decreasing open rates. Rather than deleting them outright as hard bounce contacts, we recommend keeping them in a separatelist to check on at a later date. Those contacts might only be ignoring you because theyare not in any buying stage right now.

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The Secret to Maintaining Strong Email Deliverability

One message that has been clear throughout our research into email deliverability is that, without advanced warning, established strategies can lose their edge, taking a bite out of the channels’ potential profits. The fact that inbox placements dropped by 9% in one year is sign enough of that.

Yet rather than shying away from email marketing campaigns entirely, successful businesses choose instead to revive their efforts with the best data available, which has a significant influence on deliverability.

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At DiscoverOrg, we understand the high correlation between deliverability and accurate data. That is why we gaureentee 98% accuracy of email addresses in all of our datasets by ensuring every record is human-verified by our team of researchers.

www.DiscoverOrg.comTel: 800-914-1220 | cmiller@DiscoverOrg.com

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