Email marketing truths, half-truths, and anything but the truth

Three examples where absolute email marketing truth is...relative

As the original "killer app", email marketing has accumulated a lot of truths and best practices through its long history.

Some of those survive because they remain relevant, but some persist simply through the power of repetition and tradition. A constant challenge is working out what's really true in email.

What's a genuine best practice? What's a recommended practice for most (but not all) cases? What apparent truths are no longer relevant or accurate in an ever-changing online business environment?

Here are three examples of commonly-heard generalities about email marketing that are grounded in truth, but where the devil is in the details...

1. Email is about relationships

I'm not going to deny that. After all, in my previous column I argued that more attention should be given to the subtle, indirect and relationship impacts of a regular stream of emails passing across the inbox of your prospect or customer.

But there are two dangers here if you take this truth at face value.

First, email is rarely the only point of interaction between subscriber and sender. Email drives relationships, but the email relationship is also subject to the power of the wider relationship and other out-of-email interactions between sender and subscriber.

That concept should pervade all our thinking and analysis, because this wider relationship changes subscriber perceptions and reactions to things you do with your email.

Compare the likely reaction of brand fanatics with that of brand agnostics if you ramp up email frequency. And should email campaigns take the blame when the lack of subscriber response is due to the dreadful customer service?

Want an example of the wider relationship in action?

Just ask yourself how many valueless emails, tweets and Facebook updates you still tolerate because you don't want to unsubscribe, unfollow or unfriend for fear of offending someone you know personally.

Equally, and second, just because we call it a relationship doesn't make it a strong one. Real-world personal relationships are based on mutual benefit, but are forgiving and tolerant. Email and commercial relationships are more selfish.

There isn't the same level of emotional credit to draw on: if you coast and let standards drop, email loyalists can turn into the emotionally unsubscribed.

2. If people haven't clicked or opened any emails over the past few months, send them a special offer as a reactivation email. If they don't respond, then delete them from your list

That sums up most advice on inactive subscribers. If they're not responding, then three bad things are potentially going on:

• You're paying to send emails that get no response
• At some point, non-responders might reach a tipping point and mark your email as spam, which can hurt your sender reputation
• ISPs are beginning to gauge how people interact with email to decide where to put those emails. No response means the email is less likely to get prominent positioning in the inbox.

So you send them a turbo-charged email with a funky subject line, unbeatable offer or strong emotional appeal to just open and click this once, please, so none of the above takes effect.

The principle is sound, but...

First, someone who didn't open or click your email isn't necessarily inactive. They may be "responding" to your emails somewhere else or bypassing your tracking system (especially if their email client blocks the tracking images used to measure opens). If you define actives only based on opens and/or clicks, you risk chucking good customers off your list, too.

Second, if they are truly inactive and ignoring your emails, then might they not simply ignore your reactivation email too? Have you trained them not to pay attention? That might explain why most reactivation campaigns rarely produce stellar results. In a recent article, Matthew Simons writes:

"In our experience 5% reactivation should be seen as a good result"

So you might consider doing something different, perhaps, like using plain text, shaking up your from/subject line etc or some other "wake-up slap" tactic.

If you don't address the reason they went inactive, then don't you just start the cycle anew? It may feel good to shift a few clickers back into the active file, but if nothing changes, you'll be sending them another reactivation email a few months down the road.

3. You must use a dedicated IP address

ISPs and third-party email services calculate your reputation as a sender of email from a mix of factors, including spam complaints generated, how many invalid email addresses you mail to, etc..

Broadly speaking, the better your sender reputation, the better your chance of getting your email delivered.

Your sender reputation is still mostly associated with what we can think of simplistically as the "physical source" of your emails: the IP address which sends them out.

If you use an email service provider, you may share an IP address with other senders. Their emails and your emails go out from the same source, so "your" sender reputation (actually the IP address's reputation) is determined by both your practices (do you keep your list free of dead addresses?) and those of the other senders (do THEY keep their lists clean?).

Ouch! You don't want the bad practices of other senders dragging down your reputation and hurting your delivery.

The solution is to use a "dedicated" IP address: one reserved for your use only.

Again, an accurate generalization, but let's take a closer look.

First, building a reputation for an IP address is a delicate task. They need "warming up" where you grow and manage the email flow to ensure the sending pattern remains unsuspicious. And they need a minimum volume of outgoing email to develop and maintain any kind of reputation.

A lot of smaller lists simply don't have the volume of email required or expertise to build a reputation: such senders would need to band together on an IP address to collectively reach the volumes required to get on the reputation radar.

Sounds familiar? Yes, it's the shared IP address concept.

Second, quality ESPs should be managing the shared IP reputation to reward good behavior. If you are a good sender, they should be putting you together with other good senders.

See what leading deliverability expert Laura Atkins says:

"Smaller senders may not have the volume or frequency required to develop and keep a good reputation on an static IP. In these cases, sharing an IP address with similar senders may actually increase delivery."

Of course this begs the question of just how much email you need to be sending to warrant your own IP address. A good question to ask your ESP or friendly delivery expert.