Avoid the Email Marketing Fail Whale!
Recent news that methods of filtering and delivering e-mail by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, based on engagement behaviour aimed to keep ahead of the spammers, is yet another sign that genuine email marketing campaigns are going to have to sharpen up their act or always fail to get through.
The new engagement metrics used by Microsoft Hotmail will now filter messages based on how actively a subscriber interacts with messages from specific senders, and is essentially the latest method, driven by the mailbox provider’s ongoing battle to reduce the endless numbers of false positives, an important factor in KPI analytics.
This in turn will focus demand on producing a higher level of relevancy and message personalisation, always a key issue in maintaining perceived genuine brand identity from the e-mail sender, and avoiding clicks on the ‘report spam’ button!
The changes are intended to reduce ‘false positives’, i.e. authentic messages, which should go to the ‘inbox’ but instead, are blocked or sent to the ‘junk email’ folder. This means that if a Hotmail user has interacted positively with messages from a particular source, Hotmail will deliver that message to a user’s inbox.
Potentially, the changes are good news for bonafide online marketing campaigns, enabling valuable, informative subscriber messages to be given inbox priority, as with Google’s Gmail ‘star’ message button.
Mailbox providers strictly define ‘subscriber engagement’ by metrics to record messages which are deleted without being read, or read then deleted and frequency of receiving and reading a sender’s message and if replied to. The focus is on subscriber activity in their inbox, and Hotmail has started to use the word ‘active user’ to avoid confusion with the term ‘engaged user’.
The social media principle of niche targeted ‘pull’ marketing continues to permeate and transform the increasingly obsolete, monthly mass email out to the company database or scattergun spraying of ‘bought’ leads. Businesses must really get to grips with today’s concepts of seeing and responding positively to subscriber behaviour by segmenting and reaching out by messaging according to individual need.
The now unwelcome and irrelevant ‘push’ emails are being forcefully filtered away from the inbox and this means eCommerce businesses will need to urgently address their marketing strategies by improving relevancy or never, ever make it to inbox priority.