Discipline in E-mail Deliverability and Testing

Success in the e-mail business is directly proportional to the amount of discipline you have in your personal life. I have found that most “Type-A” personalities in the e-mail game adopt an attitude of trying to send as much e-mail as they can without regard to the longevity of their deliverability percentage from their mail servers.

E-mailing takes discipline. You must test your subject lines with different e-mail clients before hitting the send button. You must also check your landing pages in all the major browsers before sending the creative.

Increasingly, my e-mail cronies and I are having a really hard time getting deliverability on any html graphic. Text seems to be much easier to get in delivery but once again the name of the game is testing. Running a seeded test to every major Internet service provider is also critical.

Mailing to Yahoo and Gmail are different processes completely. Test and test and test until you get the results you want with your seed list.

Be Patient

The best mailers mail slowly and deliberately—sending batches of 50,000 e-mails at a time. Scouring the server logs and flying under the radar while getting excellent deliverability. It’s hard to explain the subtlety of the personality traits found in successful e-mailers. They seem to not understand the intensity of the job at hand. They will never sacrifice their testing phase for clients who demand you send their offer right away. They don’t care. They have patience and understand that the entire success of your e-mail campaign lies in the preparation of that campaign. Making sure that the subject line meets proper specifications for spam filter deliverability is a very easy step to skip.

Finally, deliverability and conversion seem to never be discussed in the same sentence, yet seem to be the most important two digits in your mail delivery report. You must always track the conversion of your account with the client to see the success (or failure) of your efforts. Who cares if your campaign gets 85% deliverability if nobody ever takes action from your landing pages?

The e-mail business is about asking people to take action. So how are you going to reach them? It’s unbelievable to me how many people brag about “great” campaigns where they got incredible delivery to the in-box yet they lose the account because the client sees zero activity from the e-mail efforts.

Always remember, you have 1.5 seconds to either capture or lose someone’s attention when your landing page appears on the page. This point refers back to your level of patience. Who is responsible for making sure the conversion rate of your creative is up to par? This is critical for the long term success of your campaign.

In conclusion, it’s better to take your time for e-mail success. Test every phase in different e-mail clients and make sure that when you press send, your creative is going to appear the way you want it. Taking these extra steps will insure your core business will keep coming back and refer new business to you in the future.

David Blair is CEO and Allison Doyle Eichler is executive vice president of GreatMedia.