Key takeaways
- 73% of companies faced email deliverability issues. The primary cause identified is inaccurate audience data.
- Data-driven and highly personalized campaigns amplify the impact of bad data. Accuracy matters more than ever.
- Adopt a data harvesting, management and storage strategy and validate new email entries (confirmation requests and discrepancy notices).
- Perform list-hygiene checks: investigate hard and soft bounces and test for duplicate addresses to spot trends early.
- Learn key KPIs (open, conversion, click-through rates) to analyze audience response and improve timing, personalization and subject-line decisions.
Introduction
Three out of every four companies experienced deliverability issues in the past year.
After reading an eye-popping stat like that, chances are you’re shaking your head in disbelief and doing a healthy double take as you try to process the meaning behind this stunning revelation. After all, isn’t email marketing supposed to be the only “surefire” way to reach out to members of your target audience members on a regular basis? While there’s definitely some truth in that viewpoint, the reality of the situation is that far too many brands fall into the trap of deliverability issues. To ensure that you’re not a member of this unfortunate segment of the email marketing community, let’s cover the root of this problem, as well as what you need to do to shield your upcoming campaigns from the threat of falling flat in the inbox.
Digging into Why Marketers and Brands Fail on the Deliverability Front
As the team from Media Post’s Email Marketing Daily blog explains, the discussion surrounding this stark rise in deliverability issues all stems from a report issued via the Experian marketing research team. In this report, the experts at Experian found that an overwhelming majority of companies and marketers – 73 percent to be exact – struggle with delivering marketed messages to their target consumers.
The cause for this disturbing trend all comes back to the utilization of inaccurate audience data. Essentially, as campaigns become more and more specialized and focused on unique subjects and personalization, the need to implement data-driven email marketing tactics rises significantly. However, leaning more and more on data means that any hiccups, errors, or inconsistencies becomes even more impactful on the end result of an inbox outreach promotion.
In other words, data matters more than ever before in the history of email marketing, so if you’re relying on incorrect or inaccurate information, chances are you’re doing more harm than good when it comes to giving consumers what they really want. It’s an unfortunate scenario that’s completely avoidable for brands that are willing to take the implementation of data seriously.
Making Sure You Don’t Succumb to the Same Issues
If you’re interested in being the one brand out of every four that doesn’t face down deliverability issues thanks to the poor usage of data, then it’s a good idea to enact a sound data harvesting, management, and storage strategy. At the top of the list for this approach is the validation of new email address entries to your contact list.
As mundane as a small error during the sign-up process might seem, failing to accurately acquire contact info guarantees a deliverability issue between your brand and this unique consumer. Thankfully, setting up confirmation requests and notifying the contact member of a discrepancy during sign-up ensures that you eliminate the threat of incorrectly collected data from your email marketing experience.
Additionally, investigating hard and soft bounces, as well as regularly testing your contact list for duplicate entries, can also help cut down on deliverability issues. Not every problem stems from a bounce event or multiple submissions to the same address, but taking the time now to uncover a consistent trend on either of these fronts gives you and your team the ability to put an end to a growing data problem before it truly evolves into a full-scale email marketing issue.
From here, FierceCMO’s Drew Woolley suggests placing an emphasis on learning more about your tracking metrics as a way to round out this process. By familiarizing yourself with the various key performance indicators (KPIs) that represent your brand’s interaction with a target audience, you can better analyze this information – which in turn helps you draw sound, data-driven conclusions from this insight.
Specifically, take some time to get to know how open, conversion, and click-through rates relate to the response generated by your audience. Misunderstanding these connections during the planning or review process often ends up hindering your ability to key in on appropriate timing, personalization, or even subject decisions – something that stymies both deliverability and the raw impact of your inbox content.
As you can see, deliverability issues caused by the mishandling of data are a real threat to the email marketing endeavors of brands like your own. Fortunately, with a deep understanding of this data issue leading the way – as well as having the right approach for how to fight back on your side – there’s no reason why you can’t rise above the growing tide of deliverability concerns and truly enjoy the benefits that come with properly implemented email marketing operations.
FAQ
The main cause is inaccurate audience data. 73% of companies struggled with deliverability and the trend traces back to relying on incorrect or inconsistent contact information.
Set up confirmation requests for new entries and notify contacts immediately if there’s a discrepancy during sign-up. These steps help eliminate incorrectly collected addresses before they enter your list.
Investigate hard and soft bounces and regularly test your contact list for duplicate entries. These checks help uncover consistent trends you can address before they evolve into larger deliverability problems.
Focus on open rates, conversion rates and click-through rates. Understanding how these KPIs relate to audience response helps you draw data-driven conclusions about timing, personalization and subject-line choices that affect deliverability and impact.
When campaigns become more specialized and personalized, they depend heavily on data. If that data is incorrect or inconsistent, those errors have a greater negative effect, potentially doing more harm than good to the recipient experience and deliverability.
Enact a sound data-harvesting, management and storage strategy, validate new entries at sign-up, investigate bounce patterns, remove duplicates and learn your key tracking metrics so you can make informed, data-driven adjustments to timing, personalization and subject lines.
No. Not every problem stems from bounces or duplicates. Still, investigating those areas helps you identify trends and stop a growing data problem before it becomes a full-scale deliverability issue.
