Addressing Delivery Issues in B2B Email Marketing

Addressing Delivery Issues in B2B Email Marketing:

Email marketing is still a prevalent method of advertising that is employed by businesses in many industries. Although it may not have the same pizazz – for lack of a truly appropriate word – currently possessed by social networking and media outlets, it can still be a perfectly reliable method of reaching your customers to supply news, coupons or offers and other forms of information they may otherwise have not been privy to.

However, like many of the marketing methods that rely on the internet, it cannot exactly be described as foolproof. Issues with delivery and projected expectations sometimes come up when engaging in the email aspect of an online marketing campaign. These problems are not particularly difficult to solve, but they should nonetheless be addressed fairly quickly to ensure that any adverse effects will be minimal.

Myth vs. reality in email marketing success rates

One of the primary culprits that afflicts email marketing efforts is an incredibly frequent discrepancy in how the results of email delivery rates end up appearing to B2B businesses. In more than a few cases, companies see a number that appears promising – but may be, in fact, a cause for some concern.

The metric noted on the delivery report may often be as high as 98 percent, but it may not be adjusted to address the possibility of emails being funneled into a customer or client’s junk mail folder. Due to the stringent restrictions many computer users place on their email accounts to avoid being bombarded with genuinely unwanted spam, your emails may end up languishing in someone’s junk folder, to be either ignored or summarily deleted.

In other words, the number on that report may only take into account emails that result in a hard bounce – a return of the message to its sender due to incorrect email addresses or domain names, typographical errors and a block on your server by the recipient.

If hard bounces and junk or spam re-directions were both subtracted from a perfect 100 percent rate of delivery and user examination, the actual delivered metric would be closer to 80 percent – nothing to sneeze at, necessarily, but probably far from optimal.

Keeping your email marketing messages out of spam sections

The processes governing email spam filters are strictly technical. Barring the possibility of genuine artificial intelligence in the future, no such system will ever exercise a human’s judgment as to what is superfluous email and what isn’t.

Algorithms judge email based on the presence of regular expressions, certain keywords or the email address of the sender. If for any reason your emails violate these standards, they could end up being flagged as spam. This can be especially detrimental to email marketing.

Preventing this involves optimizing the content of your emails for maximum relevance based on knowledge of the preferences of your subscriber base. Also, you need to be sure that your mailing list is current – that it doesn’t include recipients who are no longer steady or at least reliable clients in some manner. Failing to do so risks the possibility of cutting into your inbox placement rate.

Solutions can include using software tools, such as Litmus, that can determine the efficacy of your email marketing campaign. Such an assessment will be based on how it will appear to your recipients and how it will stack up against the possibility of spam filter interception.

The most important aspect of online marketing, though, is the quality of the content you’re delivering. If you’re sending out material that is relevant to your clients’ needs while also benefiting your company’s bottom line of increased revenue and ROI, your B2B email marketing is bound to do well.

Addressing Delivery Issues in B2B Email Marketing is a post from: B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify