This week I continue my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.

A Quick Recap

Last week we discussed the importance of letting members of your mailing list chose to opt out, and also to periodically ask them to opt back in so that your least engaged readers will weed themselves out before they’re tempted to hit the dreaded SPAM button.

What E-Mail Monitoring Adds

Opt-in and opt-out strategies are effectively ablative.  They let you shed your least interested readers before they sound the alarm of abuse.  Basically, they are a form of damage control, and while damage control should be a vital part of your e-mail policy, what you really want to do is figure out what sort of content and display motivates your readers to seek out and share your correspondence.

Simple opt-in and opt-out procedures will not help you with this sort of tuning, but careful monitoring of your e-mail can.

There are basically three things that you want to monitor:

1. What do your e-mails look like when they are received?
2. Do your e-mails get returned as undeliverable, shunted over to the spam box, or actually delivered to the inbox?
3. Which links do your subscribers follow?

How to Monitor What Your E-Mail Will Look Like

Many design programs advertise that they come with a WYSIWYG (or “What you see is what you get”) interface that will show you how the HTML of your e-mail will render.  This may well be true, but it is not something that should be taken at face value.  Many e-mail services are not set to render graphical images and are frequently a generation or two behind the rest of the internet when it comes to recognizing new code.

If you want to see how your e-mail looks on gmail.com you should send it to a gmail account that you control before sending it out to your whole mailing list.  The same thing goes for Yahoo! Mail, or any other e-mail service that your recipients use.  If this is not a step which you wish to go through yourself, then make sure that whomever designs your e-mail does it for you.

How to Monitor E-Mail Deliverability

A good E-mail Service Provider will make deliverability reports available to you.  Constant Contact and Lyris have both made this an integral part of their standard operating procedures, but they are hardly alone.

Make it a point to look at this data regularly.

If your e-mails routinely bounce from a particular address, remove them from your mailing list, but be sure to track the source.  If the bulk of your bounces come from people using Eudora, you may be able to make adjustments to your outbound e-mails that fix the issue.

Similarly, every time you make a change in your e-mail, watch what happens to your statistics.  Does certain content result in more deliveries to SPAM folders?  If so, was there some other way you could have said the same thing?

You can also use deliverability monitoring to test out changes to your layout.  Before making a change over, split your mailing list in half, sending one half the original design and the other half the new design.  Which get’s better delivery?  Better click through rates?

Those answers should determine whether you should keep or refine your changes.

How to Monitor Click Through Rates

As with deliverability, you want to be looking for trends.

Popular links denote areas of interest.  Always a good think to know when trying to learn about your audience.

Less popular links should be compared with other sources of information.  If nobody follows the link that leads to you most popular product, then you need to try another layout or call to action.  If nobody is interested in buying the product you advertise on the other side of the link, they you should ask yourself how valuable the item or service really is.  It may make more sense to use that virtual real estate for something else.

What Do You Think?

This is our first time running a series of this length on the Gold Mine.  And while it’s not yet over, we only have one more week to go.  Is there anything that you would like us to touch upon next week?  Are there other topics that you would like to see treated in this manner?  Your replies are appreciated.

Thank you.