The Email Experience Council recently released a report with several eye-opening email marketing statistics that remind us how dangerous it can be ot get complacent with your email marketing.   Here you go but be prepared to be either highly motivated or completely depressed.

• Every year an average of 30 percent of the people who signed up for your e-mail marketing list will not get your e-mails because their ISP will incorrectly block them.
• 85 percent of the people on your e-mail list will stop reading your e-mails (without unsubscribing) after the third message your company sends to them (yes, company, not just your group inside the company).
• 25 percent of the people on your list who receive your e-mails and never open them will be among the top 10 percent of your best customers.
• An average of 39 percent of your current year subscribers will either unsubscribe, or stop reading/engaging with your e-mails by the end of the year.
• Over 10 percent of people who initially read your e-mail on their handheld device will file it away, intending to take action, but never doing so.
• About 15 percent of your list will read your e-mails and look to a social network like Facebook or Twitter to see if others are buzzing about the message or offer before taking action.
• Over 49 percent of people who are happy with their recent purchase from your company will open future e-mails seven times faster than those who have not made a purchase in over three months.

Don’t jump off a cliff.  Resolve to use this data as an inspiration to give renewed attention to your email marketing.  Try new approaches in segmentation, user preferences and content.  Integrate your email marketing with your social media marketing.  Test.  Refine.  Let us know what is working for you.

There are three areas to focus on when optimizing your email marketing campaigns:

• Deliverability
• Open rate
• Interaction

In upcoming posts we will discuss tactics that address all of these areas.  In this post we are focussing on one deliverability issue…the IP address from which you send.  First let’s review why this is important and how it can impact your campaign.  Then we will point you some websites you can use to see where your IP address ranks.

ISPs typically assign a rating of positive, neutral or negative to IP addresses and domains from which they receive a large volume of email. The best situation is for your IP address to be rated as positive.  This assures that there will be no spam filtering at the ISP level.  Of course this still does not tell you what happens when your email gets to its destination and encounters spam filters on the client side that have their own rules.  We’ll deal with them in another post.

A rating of neutral can oftentimes result from an ISP simply not having enought data on your domain or IP address because you do not send a large enough volume of email for it to have registered on their radar screen.  For smaller volume senders, this can be a strong argument in favor of using a quality email service provider so that you essentially “piggyback” on their reputation.

If you find that your IP address has a negative reputation this may not have to do with spam reports concerning your email marketing.  If you use an email service provider it could be that others of their clients are misusing their service and they need to do a better job of policing that.  In the meantime, you might want to switch providers.  If you send from your own domain it could mean that someone else in your organization may have sent out bulk email in a non-compliant way that resulted in spam complaints.  They may have done this unknowingly but it will impact not only your marketing emails but everything that comes from anyone in your domain.  Ick.

So what’s next?  Test you IP address using any of the tools listed below.  If you are neutral or negative, it’s time to take some steps to increase the percentage of your email that actuall reaches the mail servers of your intended recipients.

• BarracudaCentral
• Reputation Authority
• SenderBase

In our next piece we will discuss spam scoring and how you can use a knowledge of it to increase the deliverability of emails through your recipients’ filters.

And oh by the way, new stats have come out from the Pew Internet and Research Project that indicate that the percentage of people using mobile devices to access the web and email is rising rapidly.  I put a post up here. This has big implications when it comes to readability and accessibility of your html emails.  Just thought I’d sneak that little pill in there in case your hair does not hurt enough already.

Over the past number of years I have had several severe convulsions when I have heard people say “We want to send out an email blast.” A Blast? What are you trying to do? Persuade, communicate, interact or win the Battle of The Bulge? I don’t want to be blasted at. I want to be spoken to. I want to be appreciated. I want to be understood. I want to be valued. Here are some simple rules to adhere to so that you can move beyond the blast mentality and create more effective email campaigns.

• Do some simple segmentation based on recency, frequency or monetary value.  This isn’t hard.  The idea is simply to send one message to your best your best customers, another message to those who once had loyalty but have been trailing off lately, and another message to those who have been avoiding you for some time.
• How about testing some creative?  It’s amazing to me how often companies accept the mentality of “Let’s just get something out there” over the concept of “Let’s test two simple variables with a subset of our list and then run with the winner.
• What if you messaged based on the previous activity of the recipient?  If you have an email delivery system you no doubt have tracking data.  How hard is it to send one message to poeple who have not opened or clicked anything previously, another message to people who have clicked on one item, and another message to people who have clicked on another.

We are not talking about Amazon-style dynamic content here. Just a few simple steps can take your email marketing to a new level.  Stop blasting.  Start communicating.

Stephanie Miller from Return Path was one of five esteemed panelists at last week’s Buzz2009 webinar on the magic behind viral marketing. Her insights and expertise in e-mail marketing shone brightly in that discussion among social media mavens led by Twitter guru Guy Kawasaki. It makes sense, too, since e-mail is the original social networking tool.

There was lots of interest in the room and beyond in using e-mail to position companies well for firestorms of buzz, sales and cred.

As a follow-up, Stephanie was kind enough to offer three resources for e-mail success:

• Know if your e-mail reached the inbox.  Messages blocked by the spam filters do not earn a response. Period. Find out if your messages are reaching the inbox consistently by tracking your sender reputation.  Free snapshot at www.senderscore.org

• Calculate the cost of missing e-mail. About 20% of legitimate, permission-based marketing email never reaches the inbox.  Calculate the cost of this to your business with this free tool.

• Learn more about e-mail deliverability with this Deliverability 101 Whitepaper