Email Marketing Archives - Act-On

Planning for a Successful Holiday Email Marketing Campaign

Brandon Blair — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 17:49:19 +0000

The holidays are the busiest time for email marketers. This is the time of the year where volume and frequency are adjusted to try and meet those year end goals. At that same time we need to remember that our subscribers are being inundated with holiday emails as well. In today’s blog, we’re going to discuss how to develop an effective holiday email marketing strategy using time tested email deliverability management strategies.

Email Volume and Frequency

During the holidays, ISP and Mailbox Providers (MBP’s) are on high alert because of the increased volume and frequency. Their job is to protect users’ inboxes from unwanted and unsolicited emails as well as to protect against malicious spam and phishing attacks. So whether you plan on increasing volume and/or frequency, it is imperative that you be prepared for the increased scrutiny on the receiver side.

Holiday Email Marketing Strategy

1. Benchmark Your Email Marketing Performance During Offseason

One exercise we advise – set up your baselines in the offseason (non-holiday times) so you can review how your holiday emails compare with your regular communications. This will allow you to set accurate and achievable goals during your holiday email marketing campaign.

Gather these essential metrics:

What are your delivery, open, click, hard bounce, soft bounces rates etc.
Understanding users’ inboxes are busier – what’s the best, most efficient time to send your email?

If you work with our Email Deliverability Team, this is the perfect time to complete a review or audit of your holiday email marketing strategy to get a sense of where you stand and how you can improve.

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2. Ensure Relevant Messaging & Email Frequency

Engagement is king and nothing gets you bounced out of your users inboxes faster than irrelevant emails. Holiday time is busy, for everyone. You’ll want to avoid wasting subscribers’ time with emails that don’t interest them or aren’t inline with what they originally signed on for. Relevancy is key but never more than during the holiday season.

Another thing to keep in mind is what frequency the subscriber signed up for. If you send a weekly email and then during the holidays start sending daily, you will drive list attrition at a much higher rate and your holiday email marketing strategy fill fall apart.

A good recommendation is to have an email communication preference center that allows users to adjust communication preferences like frequency as well as topics. Having a preference center in place will help avoid reputation detractors such as subscriber complaints. Having the preference center allows them to opt-down instead of opting out completely or worse yet, clicking the “this is spam” button.

3. Focus on Segmentation and Data Hygiene

Data hygiene and keeping a clean list is always the best practice to avoid hitting un-mailable addresses, spam traps, and overall poor email deliverability and reputation. This is especially important during for your holiday email marketing campaign.

As you increase your sending volume and expand your audience (which might include inactive addresses), you should ensure that bounce rules are in place before you send any holiday emails. To help reduce the number of bounces before your first holiday send, we recommend using a service like Webbula or Neverbounce to help identify any inactive email addresses, spam traps or possible threats in your lists. We have both of these services at Act-On that run through our deliverability team. If you are interested, please contact your AM or CSM for more information!

Segmenting your audience and targeting small groups will help when mailing less engaged users. You can segment your audience by different demographics and behaviors to help you identify what users are engaging with.

Pro tip: Will you be increasing your sending volume this holiday season? We recommend that your holiday email marketing strategy includes a ramp up in sending frequency. This will help get ISPs familiar with you sending that type of volume and will help reduce some volume-related issues. As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn’t increase your email volume by more than 50% of your previous day’s level or previous week’s highest point.

A Successful Campaign Means Planning Ahead

The holiday season is a busy time for ISPs and blocklist networks. With an influx of mail we commonly see delays in email delivery and sometimes temporary deferrals on senders that raise any flags. If you’re working with our team of deliverability experts, you should talk with your consultant to develop a plan to send and monitor your holiday emails.

If you plan to increase volume, our team can help develop a ramp plan to safely reach your targeted audience. Even if you’re planning to change your sending habits during the holiday season, there’s still a chance that your domain or IP could face issues. We highly recommend that you still always monitor your email performance, before, during and after the holidays.

Deliver the Gift of Joyful Holiday Emails

If you’d like to learn more about how you can develop effective holiday email marketing strategies using marketing automation, please schedule a brief demo with one of our experts.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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3 Email Deliverability Myths Debunked

Brandon Blair — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:38:11 +0000

At Act-On, we love to separate the truth from the myths in marketing and email. As email deliverability experts, we often educate customers on misconceptions that can misguide even seasoned marketers. Understanding the truth behind these myths is crucial for optimizing email deliverability and engagement.

Here, we’ll debunk three common myths: that the Promotions tab is bad, unsubscribes are detrimental, and the largest list always wins.

Myth #1: The Promotions Tab is Bad

Many marketers dread their emails landing in the Promotions tab, believing it dooms their campaigns to obscurity. However, this perception is outdated and inaccurate.

Reality Check: The Promotions Tab Isn’t a Death Sentence

User Intent: The Promotions tab is designed for marketing emails, making it a place where users expect to find promotional content. When users check this tab, they are often in the mindset to discover new offers and products.
Increased Engagement: Emails in the Promotions tab can benefit from higher engagement rates. Recipients who actively visit this tab are likely more interested in promotional content, leading to higher open and click-through rates.
Deliverability Impact: The biggest impact occurs when recipients see emails in their Primary inbox that they expect to be classified as “promotional” or “marketing.” This can lead them to ignore the emails altogether, contributing to a negative impact on your domain’s reputation. In some cases, it may even prompt them to mark your emails as spam, further damaging your deliverability.

The bottom line:

Focus on creating valuable, relevant content that resonates with your audience. Encourage engagement through compelling email subject lines and personalization. Respecting the Promotions tab can enhance trust and long-term relationships with your subscribers.

Myth #2: Unsubscribes are Bad

Seeing unsubscribe numbers climb can be disheartening, leading many to believe that unsubscribes are inherently negative and should be minimized at all costs.

Reality Check: Unsubscribes Can Be Beneficial

List Hygiene: Unsubscribes help maintain a healthy email list by removing disengaged subscribers. A smaller, more engaged list is far better than a larger, disinterested one.
Engagement Metrics: Having subscribers who want to receive your emails improves your engagement metrics, such as open and click-through rates. High engagement signals to ISPs that your emails are valued, which boosts deliverability.
Reputation Management: Allowing easy unsubscribes reduces the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam. Spam complaints can severely damage your sender reputation and deliverability. For more key info, check out email opt out best practices.

The bottom line:

Unsubscribes are a feedback opportunity. Unsubscribe feedback can provide valuable insights into why subscribers are leaving. Use this information to improve your content and strategy, ensuring that you retain and attract the right audience.

Myth #3: The Largest List Wins

A common belief is that a larger email list equates to greater success and revenue. While having a substantial list can be beneficial, the focus on quantity over quality can be misguided.

Reality Check: Quality Trumps Quantity

Engagement Over Size: A large list filled with unengaged or irrelevant contacts can hurt your deliverability. ISPs monitor engagement metrics, and low engagement from a big list can lead to emails being marked as spam.
Targeted Campaigns: Smaller, well-segmented lists allow for more personalized and targeted campaigns. Tailoring your content to specific segments of your audience can significantly improve engagement and conversion rates.
Sender Reputation: Maintaining a positive sender reputation is crucial. A smaller list with higher engagement rates can protect and enhance your reputation with ISPs, ensuring better deliverability.

The bottom line:

Focus on organic list growth through ethical practices. Building your list with genuinely interested subscribers leads to more sustainable and long-term success.

Our deliverability team helps customers get into the inbox and engage their audiences every single day. Read more about their services or sign up for a demo.

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Debunking Email Personalization Myths: Part 1 of 2

Act-On — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 23:01:02 +0000

The email inbox is a deeply personal space. In 2009, HBR compared it to an underwear drawer — “We all have one and are all embarrassed by both its organization and contents.”

Now, fast forward 15 years: every email tends to be a personal space. My email from Brand A can look totally different from yours — we each see different subject lines, headers, images, or content themes.

Personalization has become the norm in B2C email marketing. And B2B teams are increasingly segmenting and personalizing content for different buyer personas and customer journeys.

Yet, certain myths around email personalization persist — outdated truths, overreactions, or just flat-out misconceptions. But any myth that prevents marketing teams from personalizing email can damage opens, engagement, and revenue.

So in collaboration with Litmus, we’re busting up some myths in this two-part series on email personalization. Once you’re done here, hop over to the Litmus blog for part two.

Watch the video for more on the email personalization myths we discuss in the blog.

Myth 1: People are creeped out by email personalization

Remember when Target made headlines for knowing a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents did? That viral story dates way back to 2012 — when the general public was beginning to realize how companies were collecting and using their data. Understandably, people were shocked and outraged. It was the truest example of personalization gone wrong.

Times have changed. These days, leaving an item in your shopping cart in the hopes of triggering an abandoned-cart discount offer is a smart money-saving tip, not a sign of intrusive marketing.

According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 69% of customers appreciate personalization, if it’s based on data they’ve explicitly shared.

B2B buyers bring this mindset to work. Personalized messages now signal relevance — when the company behind an email knows who their recipients are and what they care about, it’s a good thing. This bears out in our own email testing: using the recipient’s first name and the company’s name in the subject line drove an average 83% improvement in click-to-open rates.

Personalization is no longer creepy — it’s table stakes.

Myth 2: Email personalization = first name (and that’s it)

Shallow personalization is easy to spot. We’ve all received the equivalent of a “Hi Matt,” (or the embarrassing “Hi [FirstName]”) opener on an email that otherwise contained zero personalized messages. It falls flat, every time.

Inserting a first name is the default option for teams who are just trying to check a box — but email personalization can and should go much deeper.

By segmenting your audience and customizing your content, you can personalize email to deliver meaningful relevance:

Tailor the subject line or headline to their department
Create differentiated messages for different job titles, referencing distinct pain points for individual contributors, managers, or executives
Link to case studies from other companies in their industry
Dynamically recommend content similar to what they’ve browsed or clicked on before
Map your content to the customer journey — use nurture sequences designed to gradually send more in-depth information as they click, download, or otherwise interact with your content

This helps your emails meet your contacts where they are, with content they actually care about.

[FirstName] will thank you.

Myth 3: Email personalization is difficult to implement

On the other hand: just because deep personalization is possible doesn’t mean it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. You can drive a lot of value without an enormous amount of effort.

Teams ready to go beyond “Hi FirstName” can start small and strategically, such as:

Curate a targeted list of prospects based on two or three criteria — maybe an important title within a high-value industry.
Create one customized campaign with personalized subject lines, messaging, and suggested content. Just one campaign — you can do it.
Measure how your personalized campaign’s success rates compare to your baseline to see what’s working and what’s not.
Once you learn what’s successful, duplicate the process for your highest-value segments.

Everyone else can stay in the “generic” bucket until you make your way down the priority list. You’ll learn as you go, while driving meaningful results.

You can also start by personalizing content based on how people enter your database. This was our approach when we revamped our own nurture sequences in 2023. Our campaign clickthrough rate soared from 1.32% to 17.93%.

Finally, technology makes this work much easier. Most marketing automation platforms (like Act-On) have segmentation capabilities, while email marketing tools like Litmus Personalize provide easy ways to automate dynamic content. GenAI can also be helpful — give your email to a writing tool like ChatGPT or Jasper, and ask it to tailor different versions for specific personas.

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Myth 4: Privacy regulations make email personalization impossible

Digital marketing has, thankfully, come a long way since the days of inadvertent pregnancy announcements. Consumer privacy protections, from GDPR to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, now restrict how brands can monitor, gather, buy, or sell consumer data. They’ve also inspired a lot of doom-and-gloom headlines about the end of third-party cookies.

But email personalization is alive and well, thanks to zero-party data and first-party data. This is data your prospects explicitly share (like form fills or survey responses), or that you collect on your own channels (like webpage visits or content downloads). And it’s incredibly useful for email personalization.

For example:

A lead fills out a form to download our ebook on marketing analytics, giving their company name and title
We share additional content tailored to their role
They eventually click on and read our buying guide for marketing analytics platforms
We use lead scoring to track their buying journey — and automatically hand them over to sales

This is email personalization, powered by reputable zero- and first-party data.

One caveat here: make sure you have white-hat, double opt-in signup processes in place. This ensures your recipients actually want to hear from you, and prevents inactive subscribers who never open your emails — potentially harming your overall email deliverability.

Myth 5: Personalization is limited to copy alone

Back to our earlier “FirstName” myth. Since copy is the most frequent form of personalization, many people think it’s the only way to customize content. But messaging is only the tip of the personalization iceberg.

You can also tailor email experiences with:

Colors — In ABM campaigns, reflect the brand’s visual identity back with customized color palettes
Images — Populate distinct header images for industries, locations, or other segments
Send time — Customize each recipient’s send time based on their last open (Act-On’s adaptive send feature takes care of this for you)
Interest signals — Provide social proof by displaying live click totals, showing subscribers what products or content are driving the most engagement
Countdown timers — Include a live countdown to a webinar or event to create urgency
Dynamic live polls — Include a poll with in-email results that update as users respond to the poll

With the right tools and strategies in place, the sky’s the limit when it comes to email personalization.

But what about…

Embarrassing errors? Measuring results? And driving actual ROI?

For more myth-busting mayhem, we’ve pulled in our pals at Litmus (some of the smartest email marketers we know). They’re tackling five more personalization myths on their blog — go check it out right now.

The Ultimate Email Marketing Toolkit

Act-On — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 19:13:33 +0000

At Act-On, a leading marketing automation platform, we know a thing or two about email marketing. If you’re struggling to break through the inbox noise and generate real leads, you’re not alone. In today’s competitive landscape, crafting effective email campaigns can be challenging. That’s where this powerful email marketing toolkit comes in.

This is more than just resources – it’s your roadmap to increased lead generation, improved engagement, and boosted ROI on your marketing efforts.

This email marketing toolkit will help you:

Diagnose & fix your email campaigns

Conduct a comprehensive email program audit to identify weaknesses and unlock hidden potential. Analyze key performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to pinpoint areas for improvement. Assess list hygiene, segmentation strategies, and automation flows to ensure your emails are optimized for engagement and deliverability. Implement actionable fixes to enhance effectiveness and drive better results.

Deliver emails with confidence

Master the art of email deliverability to ensure your messages land directly in inboxes. Learn how to maintain a strong sender reputation, avoid spam traps, and comply with authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Optimize email frequency, content formatting, and send times to improve inbox placement rates. Implement proven strategies to reduce bounce rates and minimize unsubscribes while maximizing audience engagement.

Connect with your audience on a deeper level

Learn to personalize emails at scale and build genuine connections with every recipient. Use dynamic content, behavioral triggers, and segmentation to send relevant messages that resonate with individual subscribers. Leverage data-driven insights to craft personalized experiences, from customized subject lines to tailored product recommendations. Strengthen relationships with automation, interactive elements, and storytelling techniques that create a lasting impact.

Test & optimize your email campaigns

Unlock A/B testing best practices and prompts to refine your subject lines, content, and CTAs for maximum impact. Experiment with different email formats, copy variations, and design elements to determine what resonates best with your audience. Use heatmaps and engagement analytics to understand user behavior and make data-driven improvements. Continuously test and iterate to ensure your email strategy evolves alongside audience preferences.

Write magnetic headlines

Master the art of crafting irresistible subject lines that grab attention and boost open rates. Learn the psychology behind effective headlines, from curiosity-driven hooks to urgency-inducing phrases. Use power words, personalization, and A/B testing to refine your approach. Discover the impact of length, punctuation, and emoji usage to optimize for both desktop and mobile readers. Elevate your email marketing success with subject lines that convert.

Leverage marketing automation

Email marketing automation strategy is the cornerstone of the modern marketing department. This toolkit will give you everything you need to know to improve results and optimize processes.

Click to read Email Marketing Tool Kit

5 Lead Nurture Campaigns that Build Pipeline and Support ROI

Act-On — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:33:26 +0000

Pressure has been building around improving ROI and lead nurture campaigns present an often overlooked opportunity. Sure, the pressure has always been there to some extent, but it has recently increased, according to B2B marketers. And many say that while expectations for ROI are increasing, their budgets are not. Hardly seems fair, right?

A recent survey of marketers by MarTech.org found that, of those surveyed:

An effective way to improve ROI is focusing on strategic changes in your nurture campaigns to build stronger pipeline. Want a few ideas for getting started? Let’s dive into our favorite 5 lead nurturing strategies and examples.

Audit Existing Lead Nurture Campaigns for Performance

Do you have engagement programs scheduled to kick off after a prospect attends a webinar, downloads content, or takes other actions with your brand?

If so, that’s a great first step. The second is figuring out how to improve lead nurturing campaigns even more. Begin by checking your open rates.

For example, we did a complete audit of our nurture sequences last year and found the open rate was around 25%. That’s a decent performance, but there was an opportunity to improve. Our internal guru, Kelsey Yen, revamped our nurture campaigns, and our open rate jumped from 25% to 48%. Our clickthrough rates increased from 1.32% to 17.93%. Not bad, right?

Here’s a quick rundown of what Kelsey did:

Inventoried what we had. She looked at the current program metrics to determine which messaging worked and which didn’t.
Aligned with intent and the buyer’s journey. As she looked through the data, she also figured out which messaging performed best with our target ICP but also aligned with where a person was in their journey (top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel).
Created streams based on how people entered the database. She accounted for how each person entered our database. Did they download an eBook, attend a webinar, or do something else? The goal was to capture the data to ensure they were tagged appropriately to get into the correct nurture sequence.

Of course, this is a quick summary of the process. We published the full details here, if you want to check them out and apply our lead nurture campaign strategies to your own program.

^{Lead nurture campaigns help you build affinity with both customers and prospects.}

Nurture your Silent Prospects

Obviously, you want to focus on the prospects taking action and proactively moving through their buyer’s journey, but what about the prospects who won’t budge?

Focusing on non-action prospects is an underrated strategy, and here’s why: It’s not always about the actions prospects take; sometimes it’s about the actions they don’t take.

Imagine a known prospect visiting your product page but not performing the desired action. And when we say “known,” we mean they’ve interacted with your brand in the past, so you have their email address (courtesy of your marketing automation platform). You can use that non-action for a trigger email and to kick off a campaign.

Maybe this means sending the prospect an appropriate eBook based on their interests or sending a related webinar replay. The goal is to keep the conversation going. You want to turn that non-action prospect into an engaged prospect.

Go Deeper with your Existing Customers

Growing customer lifetime value (CLV) isn’t a new concept to marketers. Yet only 25% of marketers rank customer lifetime value (CLV) among their top five marketing metrics. And here’s something else to consider: Research shows that while most businesses make sales to between 5% and 20% of new customers, they close deals with 60% to 70% of existing customers.

Here are three lead nurture campaign strategies ideas to help you go deeper with your existing customers and grow your CLV:

Segmented product recommendations. Use customer data to segment your audience based on their buying history and current behavior. Then send targeted content to them based on the data, to encourage related purchases.
Design reengagement campaigns. Target inactive or dormant customers by sending personalized messages with exclusive content, limited-time offers, or other premiums based on past interests.
Ask for feedback. As you work to nurture leads, consider asking for input about your products or services. For example, let’s say you offer a marketing automation solution. You might ask: what do you wish you could do when creating nurture campaigns that you currently can’t? Maybe the customer wants help coming up with good subject lines because it’s time-consuming (by the way, we actually created that feature). You can now use that feedback during product iteration and updates.

These three strategies are excellent opportunities to showcase additional product or content recommendations and fill the pipeline with new opportunities.

Design Campaigns Based on Lead Scoring

A Gartner study found that businesses using lead scoring experienced a 77% increase in ROI with lead generation. The research also revealed that 70% of leads are lost due to inadequate follow-up.

Lead scoring allows you to master the follow-up and can trigger emails about scheduling a call or booking a demo for your “hot leads.” For example, Starshot’s team uses Act-On’s precision lead scoring capability to automate the process, enabling them to focus on marketing-identified “hot” opportunities and move leads through the pipeline faster and more strategically.

A warm lead might receive relevant content such as a case study, a white paper, or other educational content. And a cold lead might trickle into a nurture campaign focused on reengagement. You can then offer them highly personalized content based on where they are in their journey.

Launch an Educational Nurture Campaign

Have you ever purchased a product, got excited about using it, and immediately run into frustrating roadblocks? Yeah, us too!

When this happens with one of your customers, you run the risk of churn and the loss of future revenue opportunities. You can combat this challenge with educational nurture campaigns. Design your campaign with common customer challenges in mind.

If you aren’t clear on the challenges, talk with your customer service and sales folks. They’ll have plenty of ideas! Then create educational content, blog posts, eBooks, or webinars to address those challenges and build loyalty and satisfaction.

Bigger budgets would be nice, but in the meantime …

The rest of us are just working smarter. And part of that strategy can include nurture campaigns designed to build a stronger pipeline. As you work to achieve that, consider that lead nurturing software, such as marketing automation, helps you get there faster and easily show ROI.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Email Marketing Myths Debunk’d

Act-On — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 23:01:00 +0000

When it comes to email marketing tips, there are a few things that we have all been told to do. From using specific CTAs to sending at certain times of the day, but does some of that conventional wisdom really make a difference? After extensive tests, see what we uncovered.

When’s the best time to send an email? What kind of personalization actually drives engagement? Do people prefer designed or plain text messages?

Email marketers have strong opinions on these questions. And we spent the last few months A/B testing every send to separate fact from fiction on topics like timing, design, language and personalization! Take a look!

Click to read Email Marketing Myths Debunk’d

Email Deliverability Best Practices: The Best Guide Ever

Act-On — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 22:29:25 +0000

PART 1: Introduction

Email deliverability (aka inbox deliverability) isn’t yet a buzzword on the lips of every digital marketer out there. But it needs to be. Think about it. You work hard on your email marketing programs. All that work is wasted if your emails never make it to the inbox to fulfill their destiny. That’s why the best deliverability service team in the business came together to write this the Email Deliverability Best Practices. It’s the best guide ever. Read on for chapter one.

^{Email deliverability is worth careful strategy and study if you don’t want other elements of your email strategy to suffer.}

What is Email Deliverability?

In simplest terms, email deliverability is the overall health of a sender’s email program. You might have read online that deliverability is all about hitting the inbox. True, that’s the end goal, but that’s not all.

Email delivery rate is just one aspect of a holistic approach to email deliverability. Focusing only on delivery rate omits important aspects of your email program that contribute to your overall health and reputation as a sender.

A holistic approach to deliverability takes more than delivery rate into account. Before diving in, make sure you’re familiar with these common email marketing and deliverability terms.

10 key Terms

1. Authentication

Authentication is a process that confirms to ISPs that you are who you say you are, and that your marketing automation platform is sending on your behalf. Common authentication methods include DMARC, SPF and DKIM

2. Bounce

A bounce is an email that cannot be delivered to the recipient’s email server.

3. Hard Bounce

An email that bounces because the address does not exist.

4. Soft Bounce

A soft bounce is an email that bounces back for reasons other than a hard bounce (e.g., due to a full inbox or server outage). Soft bounces are often temporary, and senders can typically fix them.

5. Click Rate

Number of clicks divided by number of emails delivered.

6. Click-Through Rate (aka Click-to-Open Rate)

Number of clicks divided by number of emails opened.

7. Data Hygiene

The overall quality of your email list and the associated data. Effective email strategy, and strong deliverability, always rests on a foundation of high quality lists with the right information.

8. Delivery Rate

The percentage of emails that are delivered. Calculate it by dividing the number of emails delivered (total emails minus bounces) by the total number of emails sent.

9. Email Channel Health

Metrics like engagement, conversions, and even the ROI of your email program. You may be saying, “Isn’t that email strategy, not deliverability?” And you’re hitting on just the point we’re trying to make: you can’t separate solid email strategy from strong deliverability. And you shouldn’t try.

10. Inbox Rate

The percentage of emails that are delivered to a non-SPAM folder. It can be estimated, but as a sender, you’ll never know the exact inbox rate.

11. Open Rate

Number of emails opened divided by number of emails delivered.

Inbox Delivery: A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

Let’s start with a scene. A marketer walks into Act-On (or, more likely, joins us on Zoom) and meets with our Deliverability Team. They’re understandably eager to get started. They kick things off with what should be a simple question:

“What is my inbox rate?”

The Deliverability Team hesitates, knowing their answer is going to disappoint the marketer a little. They reply:

“We can narrow it down to a relatively tight estimate…but it will always be a mystery.”

The marketer looks confused. How can this be? They came here to get answers!

Well, today’s inbox is not what it used to be. For starters, what do you consider the inbox? The major ISPs (Inbox Service Providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! and Microsoft) all have their own way of filtering incoming emails according to the user’s expectations and customizations.

For instance, Google has its customizable tab system that includes categories like Inbox, Social, Updates and Promotions. Microsoft uses its own tab system divided into Focused Inbox, Promotions, Social, and Other. And of course, most major platforms offer users customization options to filter and route emails to their own subfolders.

Further, the ISPs use their own “bucketing” systems based on recipient behavior to route emails. These systems are opaque from a sender’s point of view–you can’t see what’s going on behind the curtain. A different message to the same group from the same sender, based upon content and reputation at the time of sending, might have a totally different placement.

As a sender, you don’t have visibility into any of this activity. You’ll only know whether your email was accepted or not. If an email is accepted, you can’t know whether it hit the “Inbox,” or a “Clutter” or “Promotions” folder where it’s less likely to be opened.

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Find the Right Tools to help with Inbox Delivery

Having the right tool for the job is a key component of email deliverability best practices. Fortunately, there are tools available to give additional insight into the inbox—Act-On’s Email Deliverability team uses Inbox Monster, which provides reasonably accurate representations of the inbox.

For customers enrolled in Act-On’s Email Deliverability Services, we tailor a 250ok list to get an idea of the inbox landscape and to provide guidance on improvements. Other tools include Glock Apps and Return Path, to name a few. But all of these apps come with a hefty caveat: their information is an educated guess, and not guaranteed to be accurate.

Optimize and Test for Mobile

Roughly half of all emails are opened on mobile. Making sure a send is renderable on both computer and mobile is a necessity. Not only that, but many inboxes are configured completely differently on mobile devices compared to desktop. Often, ISPs will route an email directly to spam if it isn’t rendered properly on mobile. Avoid poor performance on mobile devices by using your marketing automation platform’s mobile preview feature to check how your email looks and reads on mobile devices.

Sender Reputation and Email Deliverability Best Practices

When you have a good sender’s reputation, your messages are more likely to hit the inbox. Likewise, a bad reputation will make emails bounce or hit the SPAM folder at a higher rate. Each ISP and filtering company puts different weight on different factors to determine a sender’s reputation.

Reputations can often be found on the postmaster page of the major ISPs. For instance, Google’s postmaster site rates domains on a 4-tier scale: bad, low, medium, high. Other ISPs have different scales and different reasons for affecting reputation.

A good reputation is paramount to a sender, as it can help compensate for any deliverability issues that arise. It also leads to a higher ROI for emails. Good reputation is based on hard work, adherence to best practices, and versatility in a changing landscape. Data quality will have the largest impact on your reputation, followed by maintaining an engaged audience.

Sender Reputation Factors
How they impact you, and whether you can see them

Visible to Sender/Negative Impact	Visible to Sender/Positive Impact
-Spam complaint (at most major providers) -Hard bounce -Soft bounce (from reputation) -Repeated emails to unengaged recipient -Unauthenticated sends -Unformatted/unrenderable content -Hidden links -Bad or blocklisted links -Unsecured links	-Opens -Clicks -Forwards -Replies -Authenticated sends –Double opt-in confirmation
Hidden from Sender/Negative Impact	Hidden from Sender/Positive Impact
-Sending to a spam trap -Deleted messages -Ignored messages -Email views less than 1 second -User reports as abusive or phishing -Spammy content -User hitting the “This is spam” button (Gmail and most B2B domains)	-Email views greater than 1 second -User creates folder for email -Email promoted to better folder (e.g., Promotions to Inbox) -Moving a message from SPAM -Adding sender to address book -Starring/marking as important

Fixing Your Bad Email Sender Reputation

Repairing a reputation requires tight control of all email sends and more granular oversight. This is your chance to convince the ISP that you’re following best practices, and that your messages are useful for your audience. Keep these tips in mind if you find yourself with a damaged reputation in need of repair.

Use only the very best data. Maybe this means that pile of leads from the trade show you just attended has to wait. But it’s better to wait until the repair is complete and your reputation is back on track than send to those untested leads right now.
Shorten your engagement segmentation period by one-third to one-half. Only email those who are actively engaging with your messages. You’ll likely need to sunset many emails during the repair.
Perform list hygiene. We’ll cover this in detail in Part 2. In short, you’ll need to perform both third-party list hygiene and sunsetting on your unengaged contacts to ensure data integrity.

Once reputation repair is complete, you’ll need to continue to follow best practices to avoid your reputation slipping. ISPs have long memories; with each reputation hit, it becomes a little more difficult to repair.

Performing a Hard Reset of Your Email Program

A hard reset is exactly what it sounds like: the marketer stops sending any emails from the affected domain/IP for a minimum of 30 days. This might seem extreme, and it can be extremely difficult to convince stakeholders at your organization. But desperate times call for desperate measures. (One reason we recommend that marketers maintain separate traffic streams for different types of emails on different domains: this way not all company email activity has to stop in the event of a reset or reputation repair).

Once the sending has been paused for the requisite 30 days, sending can resume with the following strict setup:

Only send to the most engaged email recipients
Ramp-up volumes must be observed closely
Pause immediately if volumes of emails are not accepted

Maintaining a good reputation is absolutely critical to ensuring inbox placement and avoiding the spam folder. While a bad reputation can be repaired, you should always follow best practices, maintain quality data, and keep your audience engaged to prevent damaging your reputation in the first place.

PART 2: Strategy

We always recommend that email marketers consider email deliverability best practices as a core element of their email strategy, not an afterthought. Remember that in Part 1 we discussed how engagement, performance, and overall channel health make a significant impact on deliverability. Addressing all the above elements in a comprehensive email marketing strategy will save endless time and frustration down the line. Sending one-off emails without fitting them into a strategic framework is a recipe not just for low performing emails, but for getting your content flagged as SPAM.

^{Going back to the drawing board isn’t necessary if you factor email deliverability into your strategy from the start.}

Segmentation: A Strategy & Deliverability Two for One

Ensuring your email is sent to the right audience is extremely important for deliverability and engagement. Without proper audience targeting, you risk wasting resources and dinging your reputation as a sender.

Of course, you’ll always have some necessarily broad emails to groups of contacts you haven’t learned much about yet. But these should be minimal compared to more targeted sends. Whenever possible, you should send emails to targeted segments who you’ve learned something about through your nurture efforts or lead gen campaigns.

Segmenting by Position Level in the Organization

We recommend segmenting by position level. Grouping your contacts based on their role within an organization will empower you to provide more relevant content and resources to assist them throughout the buying process. Collect this information via form fills and update your CRM to help your segmentation efforts.

Segmenting by Funnel/Journey Stage

Another smart segmentation strategy. Matching the content to their stage in the customer journey means your messages will be more relevant and persuasive. Near the top of the funnel, it’s more likely that you’ll receive opt outs. That’s okay! This is how the process should work. In a way, those contacts are doing you a favor by letting you know your marketing isn’t relevant to them. Find ways to learn more about your customers at this stage (e.g., interactive surveys) to aid your targeting efforts as they move down funnel. You’ll likely see fewer SPAM complaints for mid and bottom funnel contacts.

Finally, consider segmenting by engagement level. Segmenting your data is always important because it allows you to target the right people. But segmenting based on engagement is even more important for maintaining a good sender reputation.

Due to the individual nature of each sender’s engaged group, it is critical to define engagement for each sender. An engaged individual has taken some predefined action within a certain timeframe, such as clicking through to a piece of content. Your email marketing strategy should define the actions that point to an intent to buy based on previous closed/won deals.

Balancing Deliverability and Email Timing

When and how often to send email is a key part of your strategy, and can have unforeseen consequences for your deliverability efforts. Consider the factors below when scheduling out your campaigns:

Email Volume

Your email volume can have a drastic effect on deliverability and reputation. High volumes require a good reputation, lower volumes less so. Best-in-class senders can get away with sending millions of emails in under 20 minutes, whereas a low reputation sender may struggle to get 20,000 emails accepted and delivered to the inbox in 3 hours.

It’s also important to keep your sends consistent. Intermittent and erratic email volumes can tank your reputation and deliverability; consistent sending can bolster it. ISPs want to see consistent sending without dramatic spikes or plummets week-to-week. At most, you can increase consistency by 2 to 2.5 times before it begins to impact your deliverability.

To increase your volume without dinging your reputation, plan a slow, steady ramp up in volume. Start with a very low sending volume. A weekly doubling of volume is a good rule of thumb for most ISPs. If you run into issues, pause your efforts at the previous volume until the issue is resolved or a week has passed.

Email Cadence

The cadence, or the frequency a sender wants a recipient to receive emails, should be a part of your overall email marketing strategy. Unsure how to determine the best cadence for your customers? The frequency of emails should be informed by the sales cycle of your product. For example, if you have a 9-month sales cycle, a weekly email cadence is too frequent for your average customer.

Top- and middle-of- funnel recipients and current customer emails should be spaced out to avoid fatigue. In contrast, bottom-of-funnel prospects and newly onboarded customers (including active renewals) demand a higher cadence of emails to support and inform.

Email Fatigue

We’ve all been there: you sign up to receive emails from a potential vendor because you’re curious about a product, only to be inundated with all-too-frequent emails. It’s sort of the email marketing equivalent of agreeing to go out for coffee only to show up and find your date on bended knee with an engagement ring in hand. To avoid the SPAM reports and disengaged recipients that can result from email fatigue, devise a strategy for who you target and how you target them.

Fortunately, marketing automation offers tools for managing and preventing email fatigue. Act-On allows users to set up email fatigue suppression rules to ensure that no single prospect receives more than your optimal number of emails within the timeframe that you define. You can also set up your automated programs to have waiting steps designed to lessen the number of emails received. By controlling your cadence based on user action, a program can be sped up or slowed down.

Data Cleanup and Sunsetting Emails

It’s important to remove (i.e., sunset) unengaged recipients from your programs at some point. Your sending cadence and level of contact should determine when you choose to sunset these emails. A prospect who is unengaged should be treated differently than a hand-raiser or a current customer. Reducing the number of opt outs, hard bounces, and unengaged recipients from email lists helps your automated email programs run faster.

Unengaged recipients drag down your stats and lower your reputation with every email without an action. Worse, they can also be a source of spam traps.

PART 3: Content

Developing and distributing relevant, compelling emails won’t do you any good if they all end up in the SPAM folder. On the flip side, emails that get delivered successfully won’t help engage your prospects and move them down the funnel if the content is lacking. Good email content needs to be optimized for deliverability and content best practices.

As a rule, any portion of an email can get you blocked or reported as SPAM. To make optimizing content more manageable, we’ve broken this chapter down into two separate sections: the first focused on optimizing for engagement (which improves sender reputation over time), the second focused on optimizing for inbox placement.

^{Send your key metrics up and to the right with content that maximizes your deliverability results.}

Content That Determines Engagement

The connection between open rates and deliverability should be obvious by now: ISPs consider an opened email the sign of an engaged recipient, which has positive impact on your deliverability. But click-through rates for your email content also contribute to your deliverability for the same reason. Recipients clicking through the CTAs in your email might not be relevant to inbox placement immediately, but it has a cumulative effect over time, as ISPs consider it engagement signal. (Learn more about how to re-engage disengaged recipients).

For engagement and deliverability, the top three lines of an email are the most important: the “From” line, the subject line, and the preview text. We’ll also discuss CTAs in this section.

“From” Addresses and Display Names Matter

The “From” address can have a huge impact on deliverability and engagement. Upwards of 40% of recipients decide whether or not to report something as SPAM based on the “From” address alone! We suspect that statistic has a lot to do with companies and employees becoming more savvy about increased hacking and phishing attacks around the web. With a more educated audience, it’s more important than ever to establish trust from the start, and that means the “From” line.

Similarly, spammers often try to trick their recipients with deceptive display names and mismatches between the display name and the email. (For example, using someone famous in the display name, like Warren Buffett, when the email address is something completely unrelated). For this reason, display names are very important for deliverability.

Follow these fundamental rules and best practices when configuring your display names and “From” lines:

Avoid Using “noreply@” in the Display Name

You should always send from an email that someone can reply to, even if the response is forwarded to another company email. ISPs check for this when scanning email, and if the reply-to link is broken, it may affect inbox placement. Further, even if your message lands in the inbox, using a “noreply@” address can discourage engagement. Send from an email that motivates your target audience to open and read your message.

Don’t Use Generic Addresses (e.g., postmaster@, admin@)

These addresses have specific meanings in the world of email and the internet, which means they should never be used for marketing and sales purposes. (For the same reason, senders should also avoid sending to these addresses).

Let’s say your from address is “marketing@skynet.com,” and the display name is “CEO of Skynet.” That’s a mismatch. If the email address and the display name don’t jibe, it’s a signal to the ISP that something phishy might be going on (pun intended).

Only Use a Personal Display Name Once You’ve Formed a Relationship

Although emails that have a personal email as the display name typically have slightly higher open rates, misleading an email recipient can have deliverabiliy consequences. Use more broad and general display names at first. (Think, “New Customer Team” or “Skynet Marketing.”) Later, you can introduce a specific person who will be emailing, and transition to emailing “as” them. (e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger / ahnuld@skynet.com).

Clarify the Sender When Using Broad Email Addresses

“Marketing” is an ineffective display name because nobody knows exactly who that is. Instead of using an email address that is hard to identify, use your display name as an opportunity to stand out and define your brand.

Avoid Deceptive Display Names

Whatever you do, don’t use a misleading display name. ISPs see that as a spammer signal. Think of all the emails you’ve avoided opening with display names like Crown Prince of Zamunda.

Use Proper Capitalization

Always follow the same capitalization format when writing your display name. Improper capitalization sticks out like a sore thumb and throws up red flags to SPAM detectors.

Do Not Use Emoji in a Display Name

There’s a place for emoji in email marketing (often, the subject line). It’s not the display name. Keep it professional when identifying yourself.

Subject Lines and Email Deliverability

Email marketers have some idea of how to craft engaging and motivating subject lines, but there’s always more to learn and new ideas to try. Think about it too long, and the challenge can seem daunting: you only have a few words to capture your audience’s attention, but you also have to avoid red flags and misleading words that can trigger the ISPs’ SPAM scanners.

For deliverability, it’s all about setting expectations and staying consistent. The subject line should set up the email to follow; if they’re too unrelated, you can send recipients bouncing back out of your message. Of course, from a content perspective, you want subject lines to be somewhat unexpected. If it’s the same thing they’ve seen over and over, your line is unlikely to break through and inspire action. Balancing these competing demands can be challenging. Follow these Dos and Don’ts along the way to ensure you don’t negatively impact deliverability as you pursue subject line excellence.

DO	DON’T
Clearly state why to open an email Check out this month’s promotional pricing	Mislead readers to trick them into opening If you don’t buy, you’ll regret everything!
Use urgency with specifics Conference registration ends Friday!	Use urgency without explanation Hurry! Last chance, don’t miss it!
Use correct capitalization Tips for optimizing SEO on your website	Use ALL caps or no caps SEO TIPS YOU CANNOT MISS
Use emoji sparingly Happy birthday! We value your business!	Use emoji throughout the subject line Save on for your
Personalize the subject line to make it personal Tiffany, seen our new blog on dental hygiene?	Personalize using confidential or sensitive information Tiffany, happy with your gum transplant?

Preview Text and Inbox Delivery

The final thing recipients see before deciding whether to open an email is the preview or first line text…if they actually see it, that is. Ultimately, the ISP and their platform determine which information to display. For instance, some ESPs always show the first line of the body copy of your email, even if you’ve provided specific preview text. Certain apps show as many characters as a reader’s screen and settings will allow but some limit preview text lines to as few as 40 characters.

There are a few mistakes related to the first line of email that senders commonly make.

When crafting your preview text, make sure to avoid the following:

Information About Website View Mode: Trouble Viewing? View online
Improperly formatted HTML Code:
Alt-Text for Image or Banners: [Banner][Banner][Banner][Banner]
Addresses or Other Location Info: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington D.C.

Calls to Action (CTAs) and Email Deliverability

Clicks on your CTAs improve deliverability in the long run because nearly every ISP interprets clicks as positive engagement. The CTA is the most important link in your email: it can make a huge difference in recipient engagement levels, even in the case of similarly designed emails. These best practices will help you craft CTAs that get seen and clicked to drive conversions:

Make Your CTA Separate and istinct

The most common way to make CTAs stand out is to include a button that is centered and separate from other text within the body of the email. Part of the reason this method is so common is that it is the easiest way to enhance your CTA and motivate readers to click.

If a button does not seem like the most appropriate choice for your email, you can embed your CTA within the text, but make sure to use elements like color and phrasing so the CTA stands out.

Avoid Images for CTAs

In our experience, image-based CTAs cause confusion. Recipients either don’t expect the image to be clickable, leading to depressed click-rates; or, they accidentally click on the image, leading to falsely inflated click-rates. In the latter case, this can often lead to an increase in SPAM complaints if recipients feel they were misled.

Choose a Single Primary CTA

Though an email may have multiple CTAs, it should always have one primary CTA that stands out from the rest. If you do include multiple CTAs, make sure it’s clear where users need to click, and what they’ll be clicking through to. Your main CTA should draw the reader in and serve as the focal point for the entire email.

Content That Gets Marked as Spam

Most of the elements discussed in this section don’t directly affect engagement, but they can affect inbox placement. Many senders fail to pay attention to these important elements, which can create deliverability problems for an otherwise quality sender.

Alt-Text and Email Deliverability

Every image in your email should have alt-text. Alt-text is an important accessibility feature for the visually-impaired. But it’s more than that; lack of alt-text can increase the probability of your email being marked as spam. Google and other ISPs check alt-text to make sure it matches the content of an image. For the best alt-text, use concise, accurate language to describe the image’s content. Descriptive is the watchword here: don’t try to stuff the alt text with keywords or marketing messages. There’s a time and place for that.

Links and Email Deliverability

Links and URLs in emails are one of the most scrutinized elements of an email by spam filters. Malicious actors often use links to external websites for malware attacks and phishing for personal information. Additionally, the reputation of the domains you link to in your emails is a major indicator of whether the email is spam or legitimate. For these reasons, we recommend following these best practices when dealing with links in emails:

Always Use HTTPS for all Your Linked URLs:
Linking to secured websites with SSL certificates improves trustworthiness and the likelihood of inbox delivery. ISPs routinely place emails with unsecured links in the spam folder due to the number of data breaches on the web.

Don’t Link to Blacklisted Third Party Sites:
If you link to a domain that’s on a spam blocklist, your email will likely bounce or be placed in a spam folder, regardless of your email reputation. (Protip: Act-On’s customers can use the built-in link validation tool of the Act-On platform to test their links).

Avoid URL Shorteners:
Using a URL shortener is one of the best ways to secure a one-way ticket to the SPAM folder. ISPs distrust shortened URL links because they’re an easy way for phishers and spammers to hide their true destination. (In fact, Gmail doesn’t even trust emails that contain links from Google’s own URL shortening tool!) Avoid shortened URLs altogether.

Make Links Clear and Easy to Identify:
Emphasize link text using the industry standard practices: a text color visibly different from surrounding text, and underlining. Also, make sure recipients can see the underlying URL when they hover over the link. Malicious senders love to trick users by hiding links where they’re least expected, and pointing them to dangerous or unsecured sites.

HTML and Email Deliverability

Many spam emails have sloppy HTML or include additional formatting, often used to hide misleading content, such as links that recipients can mistakenly click. As a result, ISPs and spam filters consider messy or unnecessarily complex HTML as a red flag for SPAM. Messy code can also increase the size of your email, causing long loading times, which can also get your email rejected. Avoid these worst practices:

Font color similar to background color
Embedded Javascript
Extra large font sizes
An invalid font face
Non-standard ASCII characters
Bad tags or too many closing tags
iFrame in HTML
Including attachments within the HTML

Words/Phrases to Avoid for Email Deliverability

ISPs and major spam filters process and scan the content of hundreds of billions of emails each year. They know which word combinations are typical of spam emails, and if your email includes these phrases, your deliverability prospects are not good.

Avoid these words and phrases typical of SPAM:

Free
100%
Try now, buy later
Save
Last chance offer

Copyrighted Images and Email Deliverability

Improper copyright usage complaints can be sent to anyone in an email transfer chain — including ISPs, data centers, filtering companies, and blacklists. Any of these agencies can take action to shut down emails with claimed copyright infringement violations.

The simplest way to avoid this is to make sure you either own or have permission to use the images in your emails and landing pages. If you’re using public open sourced images, make sure they’re also hosted on the open source site where they originated from.

Privacy Policies and Email Deliverability

Make sure all domains referenced in your email have a privacy policy on the domain website. Much like with SSL and link shorteners, a privacy policy is a requirement in the evolving world of deliverability. Many jurisdictions now require a privacy policy for websites that offer or sell any service, even if there is no ecommerce platform on the site itself. ISPs have followed suit and check links for privacy policies as part of the inboxing equation.

Did Our Email Deliverability Best Practices Deliver?

We’ve covered a lot of information in this email deliverability best practices guide, but deliverability, and maintaining a strong reputation as a sender, is literally a full-time job for email marketing professionals. Continually testing and optimizing your email marketing is the only way to ensure that deliverability, engagement, and other positive results continue to grow. Maintaining good list and email hygiene is key to ensuring your emails get seen and that you are targeting individuals who want to engage with your content.

To discuss your own deliverability concerns, and see how Act-On can help you with your sender reputation, get in touch with the best email deliverability service team.

(Current Act-On customers can reach out to their customer success team at any time for assistance.)

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

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Email Sender Name: Best Practices for Email Marketing

Act-On — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

What is the Email Sender Name?

Marketers often ask about the email sender name (also known as the email display name or “from” name). In email marketing, sender name refers to the visible name the recipient sees in their inbox. With 1-to-1 email, the “from” name is obvious: it’s the author of the email! But when you’re sending on behalf of a brand, you have a lot more options for the email display name.

The display name is different from the “From” address. Most email clients don’t display the address until the recipient opens the email. Some careful people will take the extra step to verify the “From” address is legit. (These days, authentication systems like DMARC keep most of us safe from spoofed emails). Reassuring your audience with a credible “From” address will help you build trust.

They may seem small, but the email sender name and the “From address” can play a role in whether someone opens your email, or ignores it; engages with it, or reports it. Here’s how to make sure you’re following the best practices for email sender names and addresses.

Email Sender Name Best Practices

Use a brand name your recipients can instantly recognize as yours. If your recipient gets an email from a company they don’t recognize, it’s a one-way ticket to the trash.

Keep the email display name as short as possible. You don’t want to risk the email client cutting off the text.

Consider altering the email sender name according to the content you’re sending. For instance, the New York Times might include “NEWS ALERT” in the from line for breaking news updates. For marketing messages, they may simply use New York Times. Southwest Airlines sends their offers from “Southwest Click ‘N Save” instead of “Southwest Airlines.”

Use a distinct display name for important emails that aren’t marketing, like “Act-On Support” or “Billing Department.”

Sender Name ‘Don’ts’

Do not change your email sender name too often. This gives your audience an inconsistent brand experience, and could even result in your emails ending up in spam. If you’re feeling indecisive about which display name to use, you can always try A/B testing before deciding.

Avoid using an email address as the from name. That’s a major red flag for spam bots and filters.

Do not use a person’s name as the email marketing from name. Make an exception if your brand is a person’s name, e.g., Charles Schwab. You might also make an exception if using a person’s name really fits your message. For instance, maybe you have a webinar coming up and one of your executives is speaking. It’s worth testing if the email gets more opens using their name as the email display name. If you do use a person’s name, follow it with a comma and the company name anyway. Including the brand name is always a email sender name best practices.

Email ‘From’ Address Best Practices

Use a “From” address that matches the display name. Remember, this builds trust and helps encourage your audience to open your emails more frequently.

Use your main website domain or a subdomain in the “From” address. Absolutely need to use a separate domain? Just make sure you get it as close to your brand name as possible, for reasons we mentioned earlier.

Create distinct “From” addresses that give the audience more information about what you’re sending and why. For instance, you might have “newsletter@awesomecompany.com” and “coupons@awesomecompany.com” to serve those respective content types.

‘From’ Address ‘Don’ts’

Do not use a no-reply address. This can ding your response rates and your deliverability. It suggests that you’re having a one-way conversation, not trying to build connections with your audience. Worse, it can make recipients think twice about adding you to the safe sender list or address book. You’ll also miss out on potentially valuable feedback from your email audience if you actually don’t monitor those replies.

Do not use free B2C webmail addresses like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. This might seem obvious, but you might be surprised how often marketers try it. It will usually get you nothing but a lot of bounce backs.

We Rethought our Email Marketing Flow Chart and Tripled Email Open Rates

Kelsey Yen — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 18:42:44 +0000

When you set up email marketing sequences, it’s far too easy for them to get lost and forgotten, with staff turnover and programs continuing to run on autopilot. Revisiting your email marketing flow chart and marketing automation should happen regularly.

We’ve been running automated programs for many years here at Act-On, and eventually ended up with 37 different sequences running! Now, that might seem like a lot (and it is!). But really, what caught our attention was the results. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t fantastic either. Average at best. And we wanted better than average, and I bet you do, too.

So, we did a complete overhaul of our email marketing flow chart and automated programs, which resulted in a near tripling of our email open rates, with a 2,900% increase in click-throughs.

And I will tell you exactly how we did it, the lessons learned, and my best tips to replicate our success, but first things first.

What is an Email Marketing Flow Chart?

An email marketing flow chart is a visual representation of the steps and decision points involved in an email campaign, helping marketers design and automate customer interactions. It outlines the sequence of emails based on triggers, customer behavior, and engagement, ensuring a structured and strategic communication approach.

Typically, a flow chart starts with an initial action, such as a user subscribing to a newsletter or abandoning a shopping cart, followed by decision branches based on responses—such as opening an email, clicking a link, or making a purchase. Each decision point leads to a specific outcome, whether it’s sending a follow-up email, segmenting the audience, or stopping the communication. By mapping out the email journey, marketers can optimize engagement, improve conversions, and create a personalized experience for recipients.

Our Big Overhaul: Step-by-Step Process

The first step was inventorying what we had. We looked at our existing programs and discovered that audiences were flowing in and out of our nurture sequences, but that flow didn’t necessarily make sense based on the buyer’s journey.

People entered our programs based on their ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and while this was good, it wasn’t as personalized as it could be.

For example, financial services marketers aren’t all at the same point in their buyer’s journey and aren’t all interested in the same things.

So it’s no wonder our open rates weren’t great! A financial services marketer interested in email marketing isn’t likely to open an email on social media marketing. We had to get more personalized.

This need for greater personalization required us to focus more effectively on two areas: the stage in the buyer’s journey and specific interest. Here’s how we tackled the process and how you can build and improve your email marketing flow chart:

Inventory What You Have

Before you start building your email marketing flow chart, look at current program metrics to determine what messaging is working and what isn’t. One thing that stood out for us, is that some of the programs had instances of duplicate content. An insurance marketer, for example, might receive the same eBook twice (oops!).

Additionally, some program assets were outdated and needed refreshing to stay valuable to the target audience.

^{This is not Kelsey Yen hard at work updating our email marketing flow chart and programs, but hey it could be!}

Align with Intent and the Buyer’s Journey

Our goal was to create programs that closely aligned with a person’s intent and his or her journey. So, we evaluated our audiences to determine what messages resonated best with the ICPs but also aligned with a person’s specific interest and stage in their journey, whether that was top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or bottom of the funnel.

We kept messages that performed well, but reframed them to fit better with the buyer’s needs.

Create Streams Based on How People Enter the Database

A person might be a financial services marketer but be interested in email marketing. In this scenario, we wanted to speak to their specific interest in our automated programs, but this required understanding how they entered our database.

Did they download an eBook? Attend a webinar? Or interact with us in some other way? We needed to capture this data and make sure they were tagged appropriately so we could account for this in our email marketing flow chart and get them into the correct sequence.

Now, here’s the fun part: This meant we had to go back and find how a person had entered the stream and ensure they had been tagged appropriately at their lead source. Doing this ensured we had the correct data points moving forward.

Our Results Six Months Later

After about six months since we overhauled our email marketing flow chart and automation programs, the results were amazing. With the previous programs, we averaged a 25% open rate among all our programs, with a 1% click-through rate and roughly 1.4% opt-out rate. Decent results, but not fantastic.

With the new program, the average open rate spiked to 59%, click-through rates jumped to 31%, and we have a 2% opt-out rate (which is still within normal range, and hey, we’d rather have you opt out than struggle with deliverability issues, right?).

^{The results speak for themselves…but we’ll unpack them for you anyway.}

We also downsized from 37 programs to just six – a testament to the fact that more can be less!

It’s also evidence that if you deliver what people need, based on their intent, where they’re at in their journey, and who they are, success is much easier to achieve.

Getting Started with Email Marketing Flow Charts

The best starting point for your email marketing and marketing automation flow charts is always to follow the data. What’s working and what isn’t?

And these insights don’t need to be limited to your automated programs. Speak with your sales teams to learn about what they’re hearing from your ICPs. Also consider:

Who are we trying to target?
How are they finding us?
What do they need from us?
What are our current wins, and how can we replicate them?

Once you understand all that, you can ask: How can I simplify the process of finding what’s needed for my audience? Because it’s all about being helpful, right?

In other words, if a person is trying to find information about email marketing, how can you simplify that journey so they don’t have to find material on their own?

And remember, less is more sometimes. You don’t necessarily need programs for every persona type and industry. Think more about what a person is interested in, where they’re at in their journey, and how you can best serve them (that’s how we got from 37 programs down to six!).

Go back to that core problem you’re trying to solve for an audience, come up with something, and then iterate on it. Then, test, measure, and pivot as needed.

Plus, here’s another thing to consider: A big part of success is having the right marketing automation platform behind you. If you’re feeling limited by your current platform, or just frustrated, we’ve got you covered! Check out our guide for successfully switching platforms, so you can hit your marketing goals easier:

Email Compliance: Key Changes in 2024

Brandon Blair — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 19:39:43 +0000

Email marketing laws are constantly changing. Service providers like Google and Yahoo regularly update guidelines and evolve their standards to protect their email account holders. If you’re using email as a marketing channel, you need to stay abreast of the 2024 email compliance changes to avoid a negative impact on your campaigns.

For 2024, one significant change looms on the horizon: Google, Yahoo and other mailbox providers are making sender guideline updates scheduled to take effect in February 2024. These changes are designed to enhance email security, improve user experience, and ensure that emails reaching users’ inboxes are not only relevant but also safe. Read on to find out what’s changing, and how you can respond generally, and specifically in the Act-On platform, if you’re a current customer.

^{Prepare now for email compliance changes coming in early 2024.}

Tightened authentication requirements

Mailbox providers are tightening its authentication protocols to combat phishing and spoofing attempts. Starting February 2024, email senders will be required to implement the latest authentication standards, including:

This new email compliance requirement will help ensure that emails are verified and can be trusted by recipients.

Improved user engagement metrics

Providers are placing a stronger emphasis on user engagement metrics to determine the relevance and quality of emails. Senders with consistently low engagement rates may find their emails filtered out of the primary inbox. To maintain a positive sender reputation, businesses are advised to focus on delivering content that resonates with their audience and encourages user interaction. It will be important to implement a behavioral segmentation strategy to focus on the correct audience.

Optimization for mobile devices

The majority of email opens happening on mobile devices. Due to this mailbox providers are urging senders to optimize their emails for mobile viewing. Non-responsive or poorly formatted emails may be penalized in terms of deliverability and user experience.

Minimization of unsubscribed emails and spam complaints

Providers are placing a heightened focus on reducing unwanted emails. Senders should ensure that their email opt out mechanisms are clear, easily accessible, and promptly honored. Failure to comply with unsubscribe requests promptly may lead to negative consequences for sender reputation. They will also be focusing on instances where they are seeing a 0.3% or over spam complaint rate. Consistent periods of time hitting 0.3% or over will result in lower reputation and possible deliverability issues.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, staying compliant with email provider guidelines is essential for maintaining a positive sender reputation. Ensure successful email deliverability by proactively adapting to the upcoming Sender Guideline changes. By doing so, businesses can enhance the security, relevance, and overall effectiveness of their email communications. Take the necessary steps now to ensure a smooth transition and continued success in your email marketing efforts.

How to Respond for Act-On Customers

If you send 5,000 or more messages to Yahoo or Google domains in a day, you will have to abide by the new sender guidelines. One of the biggest takeaways from the 2024 email compliance changes is that mailbox providers will now be requiring a DMARC record in order to fully pass authentication. For more on how to ensure your Act-On emails are deliverable, check out this guide.

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