The problems associated with email deliverability are a significant hindrance to the conduct of internet commerce via email. That may be as succinct a statement of the obstacles we face when trying to build an online marketing presence as we use as a primary or even a component of your internet marketing plan any form of email marketing. Even the best designed and written marketing plan that depends on reaching your customers via standard email communications faces the problem of spam filters and other hindrances to email communications resulting in disruptions to your email deliverability.
So before you design an elaborate methodology to battle the email deliverability issue, maybe its best to drop back and look at exactly what you are looking for email marketing to do for you and evaluate whether the investment is worth the outcome. The basic reasons we utilize email marketing are these….
- To generate enthusiasm for online promotions.
- To make product announcements and build customer awareness of new products and services.
- To generate interest in special promotions designed to stimulate sales.
- To evangelize new customers and build our online marketing program.
- To maintain open communications with our customers.
- To solicit feedback from the customer base.
- To encourage referrals.
- To repair relationships after service calls or returns and to rebuild customer confidence.
- For mass mailings to create a new wave of sales and to grow your online market niche.
These are probably just a few of the ways you might use an internet marketing program via email if it ran smoothly. But if you are facing email deliverability problems, every one of these objectives can be frustrated and you could actually lose customers and see a decline in business simply because the email system is so bogged down with spam and spam filters put in place to battle the problem.
These are all valid reasons for any kind of customer communications. And under the previous model of how the internet operates only a few years ago, internet citizens looked to email as one of the primary touch points for communications from friends, business associates and online merchants.
Having established that under the assumption that email is the most efficient method for sustaining contact with existing customers and building new customer relationships, then making an effort to get email deliverability under control makes a lot of sense. There are two levels of email relationships here to take into account and the effectiveness of a war on the email deliverability problem differs for the two types of customer relationships.
When using emails for relationships with existing customers with whom you enjoy an ongoing relationship of trust, the investment you might make to clear away any email deliverability problems makes a lot of sense. But you also have resources in an existing trust relationship with a customer that take a lot of the tedium of fighting email deliverability out of the formula.
An existing customer can add you to their preferred contacts list so the email spam filters will automatically allow your emails to flow through to the customer. You can ask for feedback on a regular basis to assure deliverability is working and to test that your communications are getting through. In a relationship of trust with your existing niche, keeping email deliverability active is not as much of a problem.
However when using email to gather new customer contacts particularly through mass mailings, you face an uphill battle to open the doors of email deliverability with dozens if ISPs and to learn up to date email deliverability "tricks of the trade" so your email doesn’t get discarded with hundred of other mass mailings which qualify as spam. And in that mass mailing solicitation already had a low percentage of return on investment before the email deliverability problem came up, the investment in solving the deliverability problem for mass mailing emails may just not be worth the effort.