Why are marketers losing £550million p.a. through poor email delivery?
The email marketing industry is maturing – and about time too as the channel had been around for over 10 years. Practitioners are getting better at what they do, budgets are up, ROI is growing, new technologies are being exploited – and, importantly, the email channel is now seen as a fundamental part of the marketing mix rather than a cheap tactical fix. The largest ever survey of emarketers - the E-consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2008, which surveyed over 600 marketers – finds both positives and negatives. Paul Crabtree, marketing director, Adestra explains more.
So, emarketers are still losing an estimated £550m in potential lost sales revenue because they haven’t covered off a basic and fundamental step in the email marketing cycle – deliverability. Without effective delivery of your campaign into recipients’ inboxes, you stand little chance of any reaction from customers at all. Simple and basic you might think, yet despite the fact that more than half admit to having had trouble getting into recipients’ inboxes within the last 12 months AND 80% having no idea how much sales revenue they are losing through poor deliverability, the majority of email marketers (60%) say they don’t need to improve deliverability and see it as their lowest priority. Clearly there’s a lack of tracking and measurement to identify the problem (and recognition of potential lost revenue) – but that’s a-whole-nother column for MAD.co.uk!
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In actual fact deliverability has improved slightly from last year’s census, and the DMA figures back up this improvement, however the attraction of advanced segmentation/personalisation/dynamic content and other techniques appears too strong for some – showing key basics are not being addressed and it’s a case of running before you can walk. Anyway, the point is this – ignoring deliverability can be extremely costly and improving it is not straightforward and requires ongoing effort by marketers.
When asked ‘In what areas do you think your organisation needs to improve its email marketing capabilities?’ – top of the list of priorities is Behavioural response marketing (72% cite as priority area), closely followed by Strategy and campaign planning (70%), Campaign optimisation (64%), Segmentation (64%), Personalisation (63%). So where’s deliverability…that comes bottom of the list with the majority of emarketers believing it to be ‘fine as is’. As E-consultancy states: “The relative lack of importance attached to deliverability reflects the lack of awareness around this issue.”
Of those that could measure how much they were losing through non-delivery, email marketers estimated it to be 11% of their budget and agencies put this figure higher at 14%. That means 11-14% of every campaign you broadcast is being wasted. If you could deliver over 10% more emails into the inbox, then your corresponding open, click through and ultimately conversion rate will benefit. Conversely, problems with deliverability will hit your campaign results hard.
It appears deliverability is being largely underestimated by marketers – but it is absolutely critical. The bottom line is deliverability equals sales revenue - a one per cent improvement, or even less, will boost revenues significantly. If email marketers don’t get this fundamental process right there is no point spending any more of their budget on email marketing - they may as well flush it away.
With the value of sales generated by direct marketing running at £125billion, and of this total online sales via the internet reaching £52billion (source: DMA Economic Impact Analysis 2006), Adestra estimates email marketing to generate around 10%, or £5billion worth, of sales.
Emarketers need to be tracking, and staying on top of, deliverability on an ongoing basis as it can fluctuate up and down. It is not a ‘one-off fix’ – improving deliverability in the short term does not mean it is permanently improved. Best practice methods need to be implemented and there are a number of proven methods to improve that all-important deliverability rate:
How to improve deliverability
Applying a series of data management and technical ‘standards’ can make a significant difference in a matter of days.
- Work with an ESP that has the tools to identify and suppress previous bounce backs
- Implement good deliverability policies including:
o Technical: implement authentication and certification schemes.
o Data: suppress hard bounces and ‘report as spam’ requests from ISPs
o Pre-send testing: Check your message content via spam tools pre-send
o Monitoring: tracking deliverability rates to identify and remedy problems
- Invest in data cleaning campaigns and ensure accuracy in your database
The report also highlights the fact that a worryingly high number of marketers are not getting the basics right – a quality database, relevant content, good deliverability and follow-up trigger mechanisms are all essential for email effectiveness.
The full E-consultancy report is available now from www.adestra.co.uk/census
