Why Email Marketing Counts To Avoid The Penalty Bounce!

Twitter ye not – a late 2011 study found that over half of all UK companies still depend on email marketing as their chief communication channel. Undoubtedly, the survival of email as an universal standard even in the age of social media networking sites, is as much to do with it being present and used on smartphone or tablet.

Therefore, ‘spamming’ email practice still has the capacity to harm brand identity when there is a high bounce back from mass mailouts!

Many eCommerce site owners rely on sending out regular email marketing newsletters as part of their overall online marketing campaigns. But these businesses should be aware or at least be reminded that many ISP networks and anti-spam systems usually have auto-blocking mechanisms in place. ISP standards view a high number of invalid recipients (bad email addresses) as a directory harvest attack, which will incur financial penalties or the account is soon shut down!

Obviously, the ISP is unable to tell if a high bounce back is due to deliberate malicious use or invalid email addresses, full mailboxes, etc, because data patterns display extremely similar characteristics.

It’s staggering to think after all this time, and despite all the advice and information that can be gathered online and hopefully, from any professional web marketing agency, some businesses still behave like spammers by conducting their marketing strategies with a traditional ‘spraygun’ mindset.

Repeated attempts to email the same inactive / non-existent / dead account is another key way some ISPs assess for spamming, and the number of times an offending IP address continues to target invalid recipients is automatically counted.

In today’s multichannel age, niche market targeting with relevant content is a finely tuned and socially-minded activity. At the very least, a company’s own client database should be kept up to date and carefully segmented into specific behaviour / historical response and interest categories, each requiring their own individualised content.

Collected visitor data lies at the very heart of the web, and the emergence of search and social marketing means user behaviours on different channels at different times has raised the complexity of the game. Audience engagement and customer conversion are entwined in a new reciprocal relationship.

It simply does not make realistic sense any more for site owners to believe that an automated software spray gun approach will still yield a sufficient number of replies to justify the activity. Email marketing today relies on building a compliant platform to effectively manage subscriber status, content and delivery.

While it can be argued that there will always be the type of prospects ‘out there’, which supports the continuation of the spammers ‘business’ model, most eCommerce should now be aware that their site content, credibility and authority is now more important to ranking, reputation and ultimately, customer conversion.