Sure, getting there can be half the fun. But for a marketer, if an e-mail doesn’t complete the journey to its desired recipient it’s no fun at all.

At Direct’s annual e-mail marketing roundtable last month, deliverability was a major item on the agenda.

Sure, getting there can be half the fun. But for a marketer, if an e-mail doesn’t complete the journey to its desired recipient it’s no fun at all.

At Direct’s annual e-mail marketing roundtable last month, deliverability was a major item on the agenda.

“As an e-mail marketer your business relies heavily on getting the mail delivered,” said moderator Geoff Smith, director of e-business development for Primedia Business Magazines & Media, Direct’s parent company.

“It’s been said that ISPs don’t deliver nearly 20% of all opt-in e-mail,” Smith noted. “Considering that the top four domains — AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail and MSN — make up approximately 50% to 60% of anyone’s consumer e-mail database, you can see that a problem with even a few blacklists can send your campaigns into a tailspin.”

Other issues were also on marketer’s minds, including the lasting impact of the Can Spam legislation; the pros and cons of working with outside e-mail vendors; the best benchmarks to use to track the success of marketing efforts; how to arrive at the right timing and frequency for campaigns; and how to forge relationships with ISPs and consumers.

“Messages really need to be tailored in such a way that the customer welcomes the e-mail and is excited to get something,” said Andrea Vitale, vice president for direct marketing at 1-800-Flowers.com. “The biggest thing is [determining] what’s relevant to the customer and what will trigger a response.”

SMITH: E-mail deliverability can be the largest factor that stands between a successful campaign and one that fails miserably. What tactics have you used to increase the chance of getting your e-mails through to your customers’ inboxes?

VITALE: Recently we’ve put a note on each of our outgoing e-mails asking the customer to add us to their address book so we can bypass some of the filtering. We use an external e-mail service provider, and it’s very active in doing what’s necessary to monitor our e-mails daily.

BRADY: I received an e-mail about three months ago from BMG Music Service that took the ‘Add me to your address book’ [tactic] to the next level. In case people don’t understand exactly what they need to do to add somebody to an address book, it [includes] a link breaking out the various versions of AOL and MSN so that whatever you use you could click on that particular box and get the full explanation. Originally it was a text message, so it was also very much differentiated from the normal e-mails that you receive from BMG. I just thought that was a really good practice.

VITALE: We actually do that in our e-mails as well. We’re finding that a good percentage of people are clicking through. But we have no way of knowing whether they are adding us to their address book or not. Once they’ve gone through that stream we lose them.

SMITH: I imagine that Countrywide not only sends out marketing messages but also statements and other legally binding messages to its customers.

MAYS: That’s true. My group specifically doesn’t manage all the customer service correspondence although this month we’re going to be taking over management of our e-notification program, which tells customers when their payment has been received. It’s vital to our organization to be able to communicate with our customers, especially from a retention aspect. We have very aggressive goals around e-mail capture, and getting into inboxes is a core goal. About a year ago we [had] a debate internally on whether we would want to launch our own e-mail campaigns or use an outside provider to deliver. One of the things that came up that outweighed the benefits of an internal implementation was deliverability. We recognized that we didn’t have the tools or staff or resources necessary to manage the ISPs or deal with all the challenges. We made a business decision to continue to outsource, primarily because of the concerns around deliverability.

BIESMAN: Take it from a guy who knows. Prior to coming to Countrywide, I spent about four years battling deliverability, which was basically a black box for me at Sony Pictures. We had the flip situation. We had an E.piphany installation. We managed campaigns from start to finish and really battled deliverability. To me it was a huge mystery. Even though we had good relationships with a number of the ISPs, and we were beginning to invest in the right software, we still had big issues. Having a third-party e-mail service provider mitigates a lot of that stuff. Certainly with Digital Impact we like to believe that their best practices are the state of the art. And there is no silver bullet. The things that they have in their toolbox — Return Path, they use a mail manager which kind of offers us detailed deliverability tracking, they do seeds on our behalf. We get a better sense of what happened when something does fail, and how we can resolve the issue with a particular ISP.

SMITH: Is anyone else using an e-mail monitoring service where they put seed names in your list?

RUTKOWSKI: We just started Pivotal Veracity. We work with DoubleClick. We think the deliverability is pretty good but you just never know when you have your own seeds challenged. And we are also doing an exercise with them where they are sending different kinds of e-mail, so they are rating deliverability as well as the content’s impact on deliverability. We also send our transactional messages under separate domain, separate systems than our commercial e-mail.

VITALE: We do the same thing. All of our commercial e-mails are handled through an e-mail service provider, and all of our transactional e-mails are done internally.

SMITH: It seems for this group, that at least from a deliverability standpoint using a third-party service provider is probably a better way to go because they have the dedicated resources to tend to those sorts of things.

BIESMAN: Unless you are 100% committed internally and have dedicated resources, I think it’s a real challenge.

BRADY: I think a lot of people are at least trying to test their e-mails before they go out, so that you overcome the content filters. And whether you’re a consumer marketer or a business-to-business marketer, it’s really important. I’ve seen many marketers begin to tweak their messages.

BIESMAN: There are some hard and fast rules I think every marketer can live by. However, I know that the ISPs constantly change their criteria for what qualifies as spam vs. what doesn’t.

VITALE: We do a good job of managing the top e-mail service providers that cover 50% to 60% [of the e-mail names out there]. What are people doing for that other 50%?

RUTKOWSKI: Yeah, you sort of shoot for the biggest bang for the buck and the biggest delivery. We skew very heavily toward the major ISPs. That’s a problem, and it’s hard to address. Deliverability generally is very difficult. You’re relying on your service provider to give you that data. And how accurate is it?

BRADY: I do think it’s important. Many of the e-mail service bureaus provide lists where you can look at the top 10 domains. So now you are going beyond the big guys. Or even the top 20 domains. It’s a rude awakening when you realize that one particular domain may represent 5% of your client base, and its performance is dramatically different than all the others. It’s really about doing the inspection and having the right tools at your fingertips so you can do that easily.

SMITH: Having the ability to find out what those benchmarks are is definitely important.

MAYS: One of the things we have done is to write into some of our contracts with ISPs that if we get more than 1% of our e-mails blocked from any particular provider, regardless of where they are ranked, that it would be investigated.

SMITH: As an extension on that, are any of you affiliating yourselves with professional organizations that have that charge, to rein in spam or to help the good opt-in e-mail marketers get their e-mails delivered?

RUTKOWSKI: I’m in a bizarre space that others are not in. We have a sister organization called Consumer WebWatch that actually publishes papers and does seminars about issues related to disclosure and content and that sort of thing. We as an organization generally don’t get involved in industry organizations because we have our own advocacy group that has its own position on things. But I’m removed from that and I often have to fight battles internally with whether paid inclusion is OK or not, and whether I can advertise on Overture or not.

VITALE: We rely very heavily on our e-mail service provider in terms of campaigning in the industry. I think we need to take a more active role as marketers. Internally we are starting to do that.

SMITH: Which ISPs are stricter than others about getting the e-mail though?

RUTKOWSKI: Well, AOL has been pretty chronically tough. They had that big old ‘Report Spam’ at the bottom of your inbox. You can get banned pretty easily by them. And their algorithms seem to always change so that’s kind of a moving target. Some of the smaller cable broadband providers seem to be black holes there, where it’s not clear what’s going on. Over time, I think we have more trouble with AOL than with anybody.

VITALE: They’re very aggressive.

RUTKOWSKI: Yes, and they’re so darned big.

SMITH: On the flip side, which ISPs are more friendlier? It’s been my personal experience that AOL is a tough cookie, they’re the 900-pound gorilla in the ISP market, but on the other hand they do a heck of a lot of things that will allow you as an organization to know what’s going on.

RUTKOWSKI: Yes, they will address the issues.

SMITH: Have you seen an increase, decrease or the same amount of e-mail being blocked since the Can Spam legislation?

RUTKOWSKI: On a personal level, it seemed that right after Can Spam that spam was going up and I was getting more. It’s hard to say, because we have corporate spam filters and I don’t really see what gets stopped. I’ve had my e-mail address for 11 years. I get a lot of spam, and I sign up for everything, and it just seems like [now] I’m getting less of it. I do know that I can’t bring in my radio commercials internally because MP3 files get blocked, but that’s just my personal frustration. We can get a little overzealous. ‘Guys, this is my job, I have to listen to the radio before we pay for it.’ But oh well.

MAYS: From a personal perspective it’s about the same. I haven’t seen a decrease in my personal or my work e-mail. As an e-mail marketer, since Can Spam I think we’ve seen a slight increase in the number of messages that are blocked. I don’t think it has anything to do with Can Spam per se. I think it’s more how aggressive AOL and some of the other ISPs have been, and less about the legislation.

RUTKOWSKI: I think Can Spam did nothing but make everybody put their address on their e-mail.

BRADY: Let’s not forget acquisition e-mail. Can Spam made me jump through a whole series of additional hoops.

SMITH: Benchmarks are an excellent way to give your organization a gut check on how well your e-mail campaigns are doing compared with previous periods and to identify opportunities to improve upon. Beyond open and clicks, what metrics are important for you to track in an e-mail campaign?

MAYS: One thing we are very conscious of is our unsubscribe rate. That is something we track on every campaign [to] make sure we have the right frequency and recency going. The other thing is at the end of the day for us, it’s really trying to tie back who actually funded a mortgage loan. That’s a big metric for us. Third, we always give our customers a different choice of responding. Obviously online, since it’s an e-mail. But we’re also very effective on conversion when we can drive them to a phone call.

SMITH: Typically what produces more sales, the phone follow-up or the online choice?

MAYS: That’s tough. We’re definitely a lot better in terms of conversion when we can get people to call us. I think that’s just the nature of the product. [Ultimately] there are a lot of closing documents that you have to talk to a live person [about]. We are more effective when we drive them to the call center.

BRADY: Cataloger-type clients often will see 15% to 20% of their revenue driven by e-mail, but the individual [may] decide to call the call center. And if they have their own inbound call center [with] their own reps who actually have access to all the customer records, they usually can do a better job of cross-selling and upselling. But still, the lion’s share of the revenue is being driven online.

RUTKOWSKI: We have products that do phone inbound, and mail inbound, Web inbound. We have a higher per-order rate on the telephone because ] the reps] can do a better upselling job than a program can.

VITALE: Our metrics are pretty much standard. Obviously, average sales per order are extremely important. We look at clickthrough, conversion, overall response rate. We also look at the end result by segment.

RUTKOWSKI: We also look at forwarding rate. Our readers and subscribers are influential people in their circles. If they get something and they know their friend Fred is buying a car, they’ll forward something.

VITALE: And obviously the products that they clicked on, that they purchased from the e-mail. We can tell a lot from a merchandising perspective by what people are clicking through and buying, so we can alter the product mix accordingly.

BRADY: One of the pieces that makes it easier is visual reporting, where you can see the hot spots. You can look at your full layout and say ‘Gee, the tips and hints section at the bottom is getting a higher amount of clickthroughs even though it’s at the bottom.’ I’m still a numbers person and I want everything in an Excel spreadsheet, or exported to an Excel spreadsheet.

SMITH: Year over year, are you seeing open and clickthrough rates going up, down, or staying the same?

VITALE: We’re not seeing huge variances.

RUTKOWSKI: It depends on the segment. There are large variances by segment. If we are sending a renewal notice, that’s different than one of our unsolicited messages about our price services. We have some issues. Our Web site has been up for seven years, so some of our e-mail addresses are getting old. We have magazine subscribers who have been on the list for 40, 50 years. Now we’re getting their children in on the Web site, and we know that we’re losing e-mails not because they don’t want us to have them but because they forgot that they changed their [address].

VITALE: Do you ever do e-mail appends?

RUTKOWSKI: No. Only because we as an organization have privacy issues about ‘If you didn’t give us the e-mail address why would we e-mail you, even if we had your e-mail address before.’ This has been a big uphill battle with our inbound mail business, to make sure that at every customer contact we try to get or confirm e-mail addresses. That’s been a challenge in the magazine world, but we’re working on it.

BRADY: If you look at DoubleClick’s quarterly trend report, clickthrough rates are going down. Now, it’s not dramatic, I’m not saying that the sky is falling, but they are going down somewhat. Part of it is the deliverability issues, where you know it at least made it to the gateway. But what happens to it after that? I like the study that was done some time ago that said every consumer has an inner circle, and that inner circle is only 16 marketers that they will read messages from fairly religiously. The rest are, ‘Well, when I get around to it I’ll open it.’ So I think it’s some of those factors. But I do think it’s going down a little bit.

SMITH: Are bounces going up? Is that another correlation that you can attribute to declining clickthrough rates?

BRADY: No, I think bounce processing is actually getting better. I think people in the industry have called attention to it, and either the ISPs actually put systems in place that say ‘Four soft bounces and then we automatically retire it,’ or marketers actually are building or employing their own strategies.

SMITH: What have you found to be the best day of the week, or best time of day, to mail? I know it used to be Tuesday and Wednesday.

RUTKOWSKI: I like Tuesdays and Thursdays around 10 a.m. Eastern.

VITALE: Mondays at 7 a.m. Eastern. We’ve done a lot of testing and that seems to be the most profitable time. I did read something recently that also confirmed that that’s the best time.

BRADY: My business mail and consumer mail all comes to the same account. Mondays I’m frenzied.

VITALE: Inundated.

RUTKOWSKI: All my vendor stuff comes in over the weekend.

VITALE: But when you think about it, if it’s a business e-mail address, [when] you come in Monday morning you may get a lot of commercial e-mail. However, people aren’t [working] over the weekend, therefore you may have less clutter from that perspective. We’ve done testing and that’s the best for our business. It doesn’t mean that it holds true everywhere.

MAYS: We are really in that Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday time frame. Thursday mornings have actually pretty worked well for us. We’ve been doing a lot of that lately, primarily because we try to drive a lot of business into our call center on the weekend. Friday and Monday have never been good for us. And weekends really haven’t been strong. It’s really the middle of the week.

BRADY: You mentioned ‘early in the morning.’ You’re on the West Coast. You may have a different perspective from the rest of us. What’s early morning for you? Is it 7 a.m. Pacific, which is 10 am Eastern?

MAYS: Yeah, it is West Coast time, but typically we’re trying to get our stuff out the door by 6 in the morning. We’re trying to get in the inbox before people arrive at work, so we’ll try to adjust for the time zones.

SMITH: What about frequency? How often do you mail?

RUTKOWSKI: I mail my renewal notices once a year, about a month before the subscriber expires, saying we’re going to ding your credit card and makes sure we have the correct credit information. But we also send system messages out constantly, and my opt-ins go out monthly. My reactivations go out twice a month, but it’s a rolling, large matrix of contacts — one, three, six, nine months after the cancellation — and you offer them products in sequence.

VITALE: We mail weekly, but depending on the segment we may not mail a particular customer weekly. An inactive customer we might mail twice a month, less frequently. But [1-800-Flowers.com is] a very holiday-driven business, so during the holidays we may increase the frequency, and then we get very good response.

RUTKOWSKI: And probably last-minute works very well for you.

VITALE: Last-minute, yes.

RUTKOWSKI: American Greetings says most of its business catches on at midnight Feb. 13 to Feb. 14, when everybody has forgotten.

VITALE: Oh, totally. The week before a holiday is our busiest time.

MAYS: We do a quarterly e-newsletter on top of the promotional e-mails that we do monthly. And the only time we break that rule is when we have one of our event-trigger campaigns. For example, we have a rate-watch subscription where when mortgage rates hit a certain threshold the customer is notified.

SMITH: How do you segment your databases?

RUTKOWSKI: We look at things like what products someone has bought because we have such a long history with people. We have a lot of products that work around car buying, cyclical kinds of things. So we are always trying to figure out when that might be happening, and we try to touch them around that. Basic segmentation for us is, are they a subscriber to one of our products currently, are they a former subscriber. The more products they subscribe to the more likely they are to buy anything else from us. Sometimes we look at seasonality. We also look at where people are living in the country. Snow blowers are not a big deal in Southern California in January, whereas the Northeast is thinking a lot about them.

MAYS: We kind of have a central segmentation strategy specific to the customer, to my group, to what we do that the offline and online communication teams both use. That strategy ensures that the offer we’re going to deliver via e-mail is the same offer they’re going to get through a direct mail or a monthly statement or if they call our customer service representative and get a soft sell that way. It’s really just an integrated marketing approach. As a mortgage provider, what drives our segmentation is primarily eligibility. And then we enhance that with modeling, analytics, behavioral data, looking at how people are interacting with our organization in terms of customer service or Web site behavior, that type of thing. And also event triggers, or things that are happening on their loans. For example, we have people who might be on a fixed-period mortgage, where the payments are fixed for the first three or five years and then they adjust, and there is some movement around the adjustment time.

VITALE: I would say some of what we’re doing is based on if someone is a new customer, we will give them a certain type of correspondence. If somebody is a buying customer over 12 months they will get another type of correspondence, and if they become inactive after 12 months we’ll give them reactivation communications to try to entice them to purchase from us again. We also have a gift reminder service. Those are probably the highest responding e-mails of all because of the relevance. ‘You purchased for a birthday last year, here are some suggestions if you want to buy for this recipient this year.’ We’re in the process of really delving into our database, and we’ve identified some value clusters. Our next phase is to become highly personalized in our e-mail communications, so even active customers will get different types of e-mails based on the products they typically buy or how much they purchase from us.

SMITH: I would imagine as a gift company it becomes more of a challenge in identifying trends with your customers because they are gifting. We all know that you give one gift to one person and maybe a completely different type of gift to another person.

VITALE: Yes, definitely, the recipient is different than the person who is purchasing. Impulse buying and things like that aren’t as much of a trigger for these customers. It’s really more ‘How does [giving] the gift make the customer feel?’

SMITH: A logical segmentation strategy is based on purchase history.

RUTKOWSKI: The old hotlines.

VITALE: Direct mail 101.

RUTKOWSKI: It really is. The same rules.

SMITH: Obviously you change your message to different segments, but do you change the frequency as well?

VITALE: For inactives, definitely, for people who are not engaged with us in any channel. It doesn’t have to be online. Yes, we definitely do not communicate with them as often as someone who is highly engaged with us.

BRADY: A really critical area for marketers is figuring out what ‘inactive’ means. It’s extremely important to identify that group within your member base, your customer base, your prospect base and them come up with a strategy. One thing a lot of marketers appear to do is look at a three- to four-month time frame, and then say this group of individuals — hopefully it’s as small as possible — has not clicked on a link in any of our messages over that time and we have been communicating with them either weekly or biweekly. That sends the warning flare up that there’s something we’ve got to do to start triggering that behavior. Maybe images were suppressed, maybe [messages were] being delivered to a bulk folder. I’ve seen some experimentation with text e-mails as part of a reactivation strategy, just to kind of assure that the message is readable and that it got through.

RUTKOWSKI: My renewal notices are all text, so hopefully they get through.

SMITH: I would imagine that there’s a difference between a group of people that doesn’t open, doesn’t click, doesn’t do anything to show that they are even alive vs. those who do open and click, yet still don’t purchase.

RUTKOWSKI: My feeling is that as long as they are not unsubscribing we’ll just keep sending stuff to them — ours is a real cyclical business. You come to us when you are modeling your house, then might lose us for a couple of years. Then you might buy a car, and then you might have a child two years down the road. Hope springs eternal at Consumer Reports. You’ll have a major purchase cycle sometime soon, and we’ll be there for you.

SMITH: Are there any uncommon segments you have found to be good performers? Ones that have surprised you?

MAYS: I guess there is one thing that’s a little surprising that I’ll throw out there, which is a group of customers that [Countrywide Financial goes] out to that doesn’t appear to be qualified for a particular product. It’s a segment we refer to as a general communication group. We don’t really think we have a refinancing or home equity offer for them, but we go out and communicate with them, just let them know that we do have products out there. Kind of a soft sell, more of a retention flavor. But we actually generate more business off that list than we anticipated.

SMITH: What is one lesson you have acquired over the years that has been invaluable to your e-mail marketing efforts?

BRADY: We’ve got such marvelous technology at our fingertips, but it’s not always easy to implement. If you’ve got somebody in the shopping cart and they’re completing an order, [if] you keep that session information for let’s say at least a week so the person can go back if they were interrupted, that’s worthwhile.

RUTKOWSKI: That might adjust the abandonment rates.

SMITH: That also goes a long way to tracking the original advertisement that drove them there.

BRADY: And in the multichannel world sometimes it’s pretty hard to get that.

RUTKOWSKI: That sort of speaks to deferred conversions. Which is another thing: You send an e-mail and they think about it and they come back two months later to your page and you don’t know. We think we get a lot of that, but it’s all speculation. Is that 5%, is that 30%? We could track if they were coming in through the same vehicle, if they used the same click.

MAYS: There are some difficult lessons to be learned when handling consumer e-mail campaigns. It’s always important to understand your surroundings and pay special attention to natural disasters. You have to be considerate of what might be happening in the lives of people affected by fires, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes or other catastrophes. Companies need to ensure that they have the capabilities to quickly strip away certain e-mail addresses in the event of a disaster, as they wouldn’t want to approach a customer during such a vulnerable time.

VITALE: One of the things we found to be very effective is to use e-mail as an incubator for some test ideas, and then translate that to the offline direct mail world. Sometimes it doesn’t translate, but in our case we seem to have some programs that have translated very well. It’s a very quick, easy and inexpensive way to get some information and then use it to inform a lot of the more expensive media to communicate with your customers.

RUTKOWSKI: I’m a big fan of straightforward subject lines. We have tested those extensively, and tried more sensational stuff [like] ‘Unsafe Ski Helmets!’ vs. ‘Your Monthly Update from Consumer Reports.’ We always do much better with that boring latter [type] because it’s what [recipients] expect, what they want. They don’t want sensationalism. You’ve got to be real clear on the name, and you’ve got to get your name in the first couple of characters. We always lead with ‘Consumer Reports’ and then whatever they want to put behind it because they truncate it.

BIESMAN: It’s easy to get caught up in metrics and numbers and things like that. I always try to remember that a recipient — a live human being — is at the other end of a communication. More times than not, they want to be marketed to if they are marketed to properly. And that’s what really excites me about this medium. Sometimes we lose sight of that as marketers.