As we’ve discussed often, a sent email is not necessarily a received email. In fact, an estimated 20 percent of all emails sent in North America never even reach the inbox. This is a truly unfortunate waste of all the time and resources that you’ve spent crafting engaging and relevant messages! In fact, you know your customers would actually benefit from your messages, if they were able to actually see them. Ultimately, reputation is king in […]

One of your best email deliverability tools isn’t an email delivery tool at all. It’s the ability to email people at the right time with the right message. How does that improve email deliverability? When you consistently tell people what they want to hear when they want to hear it, your emails are welcomed, not ignored or reported as spam…both of which can work against your reputation and cause email delivery problems. For advice on how […]

Marketo has created something we’ve been wanting to do: a scannable, simple email deliverability checklist that fits on one piece of paper. Email deliverability problems are infinite. Creating a checklist to counter them was an email deliverability service we’ve been wanting to offer as an email marketing vendor. But it was a daunting task. Where do you start when there’s so much to say? Not for Marketo, however. They boiled down the basics for you with […]

For email marketers, a preference center might seem like something extra. You know, a nice-to-have but not a have-to-have kind of thing. But a recent article in MarketingSherpa about Fedex’s preference center demonstrates that it can be an integral part of your entire email marketing program…and even one of your must-have email deliverability tools. Fedex was able to increase both their deliverability rate and their click-through rate by strategically utilizing and incrementally improving their preference center. […]

In the email service provider (ESP) space, it has become very difficult for email marketers to discern hard facts about ESP capabilities from the ocean of competing marketing claims…especially now that ESPs are adding social media integration and marketing automation type features. What was already confusing is now even more so. And it’s not as if one or two ESPs shine as the standouts, because every organization has different needs…so every organization is going to have […]

Gretchen Scheiman has a great post in a recent issue of Email Insider on the difference between your email newsletter program and your email nurture program…or at least what should be the differences. Before you disregard this email marketing blog as irrelevant to you, ask yourself: “Is my email deliverability rate as high as it could possibly be?” If the answer is no, take a quick look at this email marketing blog post. Knowing the difference […]

The other day after getting the mail I mumbled something about “list hygiene” in front of my 12-year-old. She asked, “What’s list hygiene?” I was holding a piece of junk mail that should never have shown up in our mailbox. Now I can’t remember why, but it was a classic example of a mailing list being woefully out of date and a business wasting time, money and paper on a bad address when they didn’t need […]

Is opt in one of your email deliverability tools? It should be! As Jeanne Jennings points out, opt in is simply smart business. In a blog post titled “Opt In vs. Opt Out: It’s a Business Decision,” Jeanne makes a strong business case for opt in, strong enough that we at ClickMail say it’s time to add opt in to your list of email deliverability tools. Opt out is the way out, but “there is a […]

As we’ve said in this blog so many times: Improving your email deliverability best practices—and therefore improving your deliverability rates—even a half a percentage point can improve your email marketing ROI. That’s why we spend so much time as an email deliverability consultant teaching clients how to do things just a little bit better. As a friend of mine likes to say, if you improve by just 1% every day, in 100 days, you’ll be 100% […]