Why It’s Crucial To Manage Your Email Marketing Reputation

A new report on the level of global spam email in 2011 makes grim reading. It now seems that over 8 in 10 emails now being sent are categorised as spam and as a result, even genuine email marketing messages simply end up as junk.

Unfortunately, many business marketing strategies still rely on traditional mass email send-outs and also consistently fail to check their databases for obsolete or incorrect email addresses.

Spam is a fact of online marketing life and advances in filtering software systems often mean that legitimate company emails can all too easily become ensnared. A business will, inadvertently, gain a poor IP address reputation due to negligent email marketing routines, and consequently, the probability of their messages being opened or read steadily diminish. An overwhelming majority of businesses are now designated as ‘low’ reputation email senders, which means that just under 7 out of every 10 emails sent will make it to the recipient’s inbox.

In the multichannel age of social media networking and reputation building, the use of email as a key messaging tool is still considered as high value and the preferred method by 9 in every 10 recipients in a customer relationship journey. It makes sense for companies to take more diligent care of how their email campaigns are conducted rather than simply rely on infrequently checked data and poor quality email creation and content.

Evaluation of brand identity is dependent on constant reputation management and must extend right across the web. Trust, credibility and relevance underpin site authority with humans and search engines, alike and all companies, from SME to corporate must take an holistic view of their online presence, and how their search and social activities are integrated.

Rather than being seen as a dying medium, email marketing is now very much a part of the social process. The risk of being ‘caught in the spam trap’ is not simply a minor inconvenience of a mass mail-out tactic and to be expected by those possessed of a traditional ‘push’ marketing mindset.

A good reputation score is, undoubtedly, the single most important factor for getting an email message into the inbox and it’s imperative to look to items such as checking email addresses for unknown users or are no longer in active use, previous email messages marked as spam by recipients, and avoiding being caught in spam traps set by service providers.

Almost inevitably, social networking sites now attract the highest number of unknown users. With Google rating social signals as part of web authority, site ranking may ultimately be affected.

An email fail could cost more than an instant sale …