Bronto Blog

In the second of three posts (see first) written by our partners at Return Path, Stephanie Miller discusses issues affecting email deliverability. Want more deliverability information? You can check out their blog, the Email Marketing Water Cooler and sign up for real-time alerts when new content is published.

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In our previous post, we explained what sender reputation is. By far the biggest factor that affects your sender reputation is complaints. While there are a number of issues that can cause subscribers to complain, a big one is lack of relevance. In other words, your email is not seen as valuable and it’s very tempting to just hit “this is spam” and make it go away.How do you make your email relevant to your subscribers? Focus on them. How can your email make them thinner, richer, happier, more successful? How can you make their life easier? How does your email help them?

Sure, you want to sell your products and services. But by using interesting content that is focused on the needs and wants of our audience you will be producing emails that have tremendously high value. Your marketing messages then tag along for the ride. Most importantly, you keep your complaint rate low which will go a long way to assure inbox delivery.

If you are ready to kick your relevance up a notch, you can use behavioral targeting to make promotions more relevant. Consider the following customer triggers as perfect opportunities to send super-targeted messaging:

• Purchase: Past, recent or with a certain category
• Site activity: Browsing, abandoned cart
• Email activity: Open, click
• Sign up

But remember, relevance doesn’t have to be fancy. Simply sending subscribers email that will be interesting to them, versus email that is interesting to you, is a winning strategy that any marketer can execute.

Up next - Image Suppression: How it Hurts Your Efforts and Depresses Your Deliverability

Stephanie Miller, VP of Strategic Services, Return Path