Other than solving world hunger or eradicating AIDS, if you are an online marketer, at some point of time you must have killed your brain cells over the deliverability of your email communication or pondered upon all that you could do to boost customer engagement.

Though we have covered deliverability and engagement as separate topics in several of our articles and whitepapers, in this article we’d like to explore how you could kill two birds (deliverability and engagement problems) with one stone (read on!).

Fundamentally, deliverability and engagement are intertwined. One cannot have good deliverability with poor engagement rates, and if deliverability is poor, you certainly cannot expect first-class engagement. It’s a cruel vicious circle.

Presuming you do everything by the book (have the right infrastructure, best practices in place, do not spam, etc), you could then initiate a CSAT survey program. Why? Because surveys are interactive in nature and require your customers to share their perceptions and opinions (something all customers love!). Hence, as a general rule CSAT surveys have the potential to obtain extremely high responses, some of our clients have obtained as much as over 40% open rates and easily a 60% of CTR (clicks over opens).

These surveys not only boost your engagement, make your email marketing interactive (like it should be) but also give a boost to your sender reputation (the score ISPs assign to you; the marketer). So just one program can:

1. Find out what your customers think of you, your products / services, and share their feedback

2. Give you bonus points in the books of your customers for caring to ask for their opinion

3. Empower you with knowledge that when used wisely can help improve customer retention and long term profitability of your company

4. Get you thumbs up from ISPs

If you think that all this is good, but you might not be able to manage it, think again. Email is the most flexible and powerful channel to manage such automations and Kenscio can get you started and setup in no time. It is possible to:

- Automate the survey campaign

- Automatically exclude customers who have completed the survey

- Only target a segment of customers who have actually bought something from you

- Dynamically populate survey questions based on customer demographics, behaviour or purchase history

Whether you are into e-commerce, publishing, travel, finance, real estate or any other industry for that matter; if you serve customers, you should identify customer perceptions about you. This could be in form of Customer Feedback, Product Review, Service Quality, Event Surveys etc.

Every time you send an email survey, you initiate another opportunity to engage with your customers. Surveys built within an email message have better chances of getting a response, and the more responses you get the better will be your sender reputation with ISPs

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch to kick start your survey campaign.

Email marketers have quite something to look forward to this year, as some of their prayers will be answered.

If email marketing were the Garden of Eden, it would certainly have its share of snakes. There are dangers lurking at every corner. Spam traps, bounces, zombie addresses, costs, etc are some of the perils that top the list.

Kenscio ListCleanr is a solution that has been under development at Kenscio labs, to tackle this very challenge. Kenscio identified that a great deal of email marketers in India, get caught up with fixing reputation & deliverability issues, dodging spam traps, and they put quite a good bit of their time and resources struggling to get past spam filters. All of this can hinder a marketer’s ability to concentrate on factors such as engagement, subscriber loyalty, ROI etc.

In a growing market such as India, it is important for email marketers to be able to scale up at the opportune time. However, it is equally important to ensure that they do not end up being classified as spammers by ISPs, and never see the light of an inbox. So rather than being just another SAAS; Kenscio ListCleanr is a catalyst for email marketers in India.

Kenscio ListCleanr leaves almost no room for guess work. Probably this is why our clients have been able to consistently scale up and save upto 40% of their email marketing cost, while they benefit from an impeccable sender reputation.

To learn what ListCleanr can do for you, visit www.listcleanr.com.

Our friends in the Indian eCommerce space are gung ho about the current boom !  Never before have so many Indians – both in India and overseas filled up their shopping carts and proceeded to check out. Never have Call to Action buttons seen so much action.

Which brings us to one of the most important communication vehicles these propositions ride on……….daily mailers!

Digital direct marketing communication – your one on ones with potential buyers are not  as easy as ABC, but if you have been following our blog, you would’ve picked up the juiciest bits on email template best practices  and  set up a fantastic email template. You know the importance of deliverability and other success metrics and you are sure your recipients are definitely receiving your email campaigns….there’s just one more question you need to ask yourself…. are they reading them?

Some of the key considerations which email marketers must take into mind while creating a “read & respond”  campaign are:

• Relevance:  making the content relevant to each recipient. If a recipient knows that when your brand arrives in their inbox, this email is definitely something they have expressed an interest in and want to read, they will act on that.
• Segmentation: The best way to implement relevance is to effectively segment your database so you know what your customers are interested in and therefore what content will be the most relevant. You read a lot more on relevance on our blog soon!

You are now ready with that killer content, a solid Email Service Provider (ESP) behind you – btw choosing an ESP  can be quite a task , here’s hoping you’ve done it right , what next?

Ask Usain Bolt,  what the importance of timing is? No seriously, a great proposition, even with A/B split  tested subject lines and creatives  can turn horribly wrong if the timing is off . Common sense – nope …….experience !!  ( The school of hard knocks third semester )

A well timed campaign – other criteria remaining the same -  can work wonders on the open rates and further on the ROI of the campaign. Unfortunately, there is no formula or overall ‘ideal time slot’ which you can follow to achieve this elusive ‘golden hour’.  There are a number of factors that go in to your decision: what time is best to hit the send button? ( btw with a good ESP – it would be the Schedule button )

Timing – Day and hour depends on the answers to the following questions.

Who are your audience?

For a B2B audience, it doesn’t take an Einstein  to work out that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the optimum days. As we all know, Mondays are spent getting back in to the swing of work after the weekend and Friday sees offices winding down for the next weekend. Saturday and Sunday are redundant as offices are closed. Days before holidays are = Fridays and days after holidays are = Mondays irrespective of what days they fall on !

For B2C email marketing, timings are very different.  Very dependant on the demographic of your audience.  One can safely assume most prospects will mainly be checking their personal emails in the evenings, during lunchtimes and over the weekends. However it is best to test which brings us back to segmenting!  B2C sending can be a bit of a gamble without thorough testing of your specific target audience. Homework must be done and learnings interpreted. A great ESP will be able to deliver dynamic content with different propositions scheduled at different times of a day or even different days.

Is your campaign seasonal?

For the B2B sector, marketers must avoid sending their campaigns over school vacation season, long weekends  and of course  the many holidays that we have !

Again advice for the B2C sector is entirely opposite. If relevant, a seasonal approach can boost additional sales and therefore revenue. Most campaigns are timed to address seasonal offers!

So much for planned marketing communication…

However, there is another aspect to timing in direct digital communication.

Timing can never be as important as it is when the ‘Prospect ‘is on the verge of becoming a ‘Paying Customer’ …many a sales person have rued their chances – having communicated a little later than they should have.

The optimum time for any recipient to receive your communication is when they have shown an interest in your brand or product. Using Automated mails  or  trigger campaigns, based on browsing behaviour or when they last clicked on or opened an email gives you a clear indication as to when to send the email and what content to include.

A typical scenario of such lost opportunities would be apparent in a colleague’s recent experience  on a  very popular  online store. As he described it  “ I was on my way to check out and proceed to pay when I saw this dangling banner in the right column : Sign up for our newsletter and  get 10% off. I paused, thought I could save this 10% by signing up and using the voucher code. So I smartly opened another browser, signed up and waited for the voucher. About an hour later, neither my inbox nor my  spam folder had  any sign of  an email from these guys . I gave up hope and eventually had lost all interest in buying that item at 10% higher than I could’ve”.

A simple Triggered email could have, rather, should have been used here  to enable interest being converted to action  at the point when the customer is most engaged.

Another cyclic practice is communication with non responders. Winning back non responders should be taken up as a part of your communication calendar and a definite cog in your wheel .

While still on timing, or should I say while there is time – it would be good to remind you to look for patterns in your open and click-through rates or other email metrics. Whether certain offers work better when sent at some time or another? Are there any influences that make your campaigns more successful, like salary days ( beginning of the month ) ? Are you responding to your customers at the optimum moment?

The only way for you to determine what works best for you is to, as always, test, test, test!

The One-Way Conversation

Building active, long-term relationships with your customers should  be one of the prime objective of email marketers. At the core of doing email marketing well is remembering that building a relationship requires conversation.

 So what do marketers do when email recipients aren’t interested in conversing? We found that, as a whole,  marketers showed a lack of conversational skills in dealing width the apparently uninterested subscriber. The idea of email as a dialogue is missing. By pushing out email without regard for consumer interests or preferences, marketers are putting their email reputation at risk. A poor sender reputation, in turn, creates deliverability problems for their entire email program. By moving from a “one-way conversation” to a true dialogue, marketers can re-engage inactive recipients.

Preference Based Subscription

We recommend that email marketers ask subscribers about their preferences for email frequency and email subject matter when they subscribe or make their initial purchase.

Once preferences are known, they should be honored. While this best practice may not be realistic for all businesses, marketers should, at a minimum, make sure that expectations for mailing frequency are appropriately set.

Where customers are not offered the opportunity to express their frequency preferences, they should be offered the option of reduced frequency once a pattern of inactivity is seen.

Message Frequency

While there are some circumstances where an increase in message frequency is appropriate (e.g. before a holiday, to match recent subscriber activity or in response to a purchase), it doesn’t make sense to consistently increase message frequency on a monthly basis to inactive subscribers. If a subscriber does not respond when receiving an email message every day, they are not likely to respond when receiving more than one—and in either case, they are likely to be extremely annoyed. That increases the risk that the subscriber will click the spam button, contributing to deliverability problems for your company’s entire mailing list.

The longer marketers continue to mail to large numbers of inactive subscribers, the greater the chances that their entire program will suffer as the result of reputation problems. Lack of response indicates that a subscriber is not interested in the messages. Eventually that lack of interest will lead to spam complaints by subscribers who have reached their saturation point. Spam complaints directly and negatively affect a marketer’s sending reputation, adversely affecting deliverability  to all subscribers.

This risk is compounded when companies fail to include clear permissioning for promotional emails during the initial checkout (sign-up) process. Without clear permissioning, “subscribers” never really subscribed, and they have no expectation of what will arrive in their inboxes. These recipients are naturally less engaged and more likely to complain due to lack of disclosure.

In addition, some ISPs are increasingly paying attention to whether or not their users respond to commercial mail. If a marketer is mailing at a high frequency and receives a disproportionately low response or no response at all over a consistent period of time, their sender reputation could be negatively impacted. This could lead to having all of the company’s email end up in the spam folder or, worse, having it blocked outright.

Missed Opportunities

Marketers are missing the opportunity to increase sales by re-engaging subscribers in the conversation. In addition, they may be interfering with their ability to optimize email content for their entire email list. This occurs because totally uninterested recipients dilute email response patterns, skewing email metrics and making optimization hard to achieve.

Recommendation:

Don’t experiment—ask! Implement a strategy to get subscribers to renew their permission with your email program, ideally in combination with a preference center, to find out what subscribers want to receive, if anything, and when. Testing does have a place in refining your approach to re-permissioning and finding out what approaches are most effective in generating expressions of continued and future interest.

Recommendations

Include win-back messages in your strategy for re-engaging non-responsive subscribers. Use a methodical analytic approach to determining what offers and creative are most effective, as well as identifying the most effective message timing. Consider basing your offer on the subscriber’s previous purchase. The strategy should specify how many win-back messages will be sent, at what intervals, and at what point in the sequence you will send a re-permissioning message.

Former purchasers represent “low hanging fruit” in email marketing, as it is always less costly to reach out to former customers than it is to acquire new ones. By focusing on developing and maintaining a dialogue with subscribers—a dialogue in which the subscriber sets the terms—email marketers can re-engage subscribers who have been nonresponsive, and reap the benefits of increased sales.