Partner Article

How to control your email marketing strategy

The Real Time Marketing is a major asset for advertisers because it offers them the opportunity to interact with consumer in real time and spread the right message to the right person at the right time. The reputation clearly makes a part of this trend during this year.

When we want to improve the deliverability of email campaigns, perceived legitimacy of brands communication is related to the recipients reactions which are analyzed and scrutinized in real time.

Filtering techniques getting more and more complex. So now we must take the reputation factors into account:

Deliverability becomes “User Centric” for MSP (Mailbox Service Provider): Microsoft, Yahoo, Gmail …
Individual behavior plays a prominent role in choosing the filtering criteria. MSPs use this information to determine the quality of your program.

With noticeable progress of domain-based ââmessage authentication the advertisers and their brands are put forward. The right strategy in 2013 introduces a major change: Global Brand Management (GBM). To do this, a consistent and balanced management of multichannel communication program is required: press, web, social networks, point of sale, email campaigns …The reputation will be scaled at the level of the worst program.

This global approach is based on:

Multi graphic support: brand-book is necessary to create your communication strategy.
Use of a consistent writing style.
Same level of quality.

The example of community managers can serve as a model of their global management of all social networks.

The reputation depends on a fine tuning of your communications considering the status of your target. You have to follow three main rules:

1. Welcome your targets through a welcome program by presenting its communications and benefits, you must put forward the idea of ââentering a privileged club. Enhance your target upon arrival.

2. Support your targets throughout their life cycle through effective listening, while measuring their appetite for delivered email campaigns. After that, it is necessary to adapt your way of communication and implement ad-hoc marketing pressure.

3. Abandon: how to say goodbye. When a target didn’t show any sign of reaction for a long period of time, you must establish a separate reactivation program and if the inactivity is confirmed, it is best not to continue the sendings.

Use and maintenance of recipient database

Database is like a mechanical precision system that requires regular maintenance, so far you must:

Use your database in a reasonable way: consider and interpret the feedback from ISP’s and the complaints.
Oversee your partners email campaigns: for the opt-in inscription partner, partners must be clearly stated and be consistent with the initial area of interest. It is also requires to minimize the spread of the “shared consent”. The partner of my partner is not my partner. You should also don’t hesitate to re-optinize the partners’ target.
Consider rapidly the right to object under penalty of a major alteration of reputation.

Stay identifiable and divide your operations

Several programs can coexist: loyalty, acquisition of several brands and countries. These activities can generate different reactions. It is necessary to separate them to avoid side effects.

The overall aesthetic of a message is credible and indispensible for reputation

Be careful with grammar and encoding scheme, it damages the credibility of your communication. It is equally important to provide good quality images and use an appropriate communication style to your target: aggressive, abusive or inappropriate solicitations can cause violent reactions. Misleading subjects (fake transactional communications, legal transfer message, etc..) considered as opening levers, can mainly caused massive withdrawals which will damage your credibility.

Moving from monologue to dialogue

The recipients don’t imagine the complexity of delivering process which have place before they receive a commercial email. Their behavior will then “speak for themselves” and will contribute the “note e-reputation” to the brand. These reactions can be positive (click, opening) or negative (complaint or non response). This behavior is closely scrutinized by the destination platform. Thus, some kind of the “reputation catalog” will be created containing domain names, IP addresses and keywords.

Improving the measurement to respond better

You have to evaluate your program by piloting your reputation with the appropriate tools:

Blacklists monitoring (follow organisations that gather information about bad actors using their IP address or domain name)
Monitoring tools provided by some MSP and ISP (FBL, postmaster websites …)
Tools for statistical monitoring or analysis modules (Xiti, Google Analytics, etc..) measuring the overall performance: opening rate, clicks…
Tools for domain name management, helps to differentiate email programs (loyalty, conquest …). It allows to control the email reputation by customizing all email campaigns parameters: marketing and technical sending domains, tracking links, IP address, sender’s name, return address.

In conclusion, take into account 2.0 consumer expectations and analyse clients’ feedback is at the heart of the e-marketing challenges. Hence, it is extremely important to understand your target and to create a successful email campaign. Businesses face a big challenge: anticipate consumers reactions to make reputation a real strategic asset and not only a digital tool.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Guillaume Laché .