Reach a Wider Audience Without Risking Your Email Reputation
Your business’s reputation is always important. But in email marketing, reputation is everything. It’s the difference between connecting with new consumers and hitting a brick inbox wall.
Companies today want to reach as many potential customers as they can at the lowest possible cost, and email marketing is a great way to do it. However, sending mass emails without taking the proper precautions is a liability—both from a reputation and a legal standpoint.
Here’s how to get in front of all the consumers you want to reach without putting your email reputation at risk.
Why Email Reputation Matters
Let’s take a step back and remind ourselves why reputation matters in the first place: deliverability.
Senders with a bad reputation are often marked as spam, relegating their emails to blocked or junk status. Senders with a good reputation are more likely to have their emails delivered directly to the recipient’s inbox, resulting in higher open and click-through rates.
Creating and maintaining a good reputation is critical to the success of your email marketing strategy. But like your personal reputation, a strong sender reputation is something that’s built over time.
So how do you do it?
Superior Data Maximizes Reach and Reputation
Criteria such as opt-outs, spam complaints and high bounce rates are evaluated by servers and affect the reputation of your email account—impacting whether or not recipients even see your email.
And while these criteria may feel outside your control, they aren’t. There are several ways you can decrease opt-outs, spam complaints, bounce rates and other strikes against your reputation with superior data.
One way is list segmentation. Splitting your list into demographics like gender, age, household income, marital status or even industry-specific interests helps you target your message and engage your audience through a more authentic customer connection.
Other ways include:
Eliminating duplicate records
Removing incomplete or outdated data
Double-verifying new subscribers
Ensuring new subscribers are mapped to appropriate data select(s)
Expelling known complainers and unsubscribes
Removing spam traps and undeliverable domains
To maximize your reach and your reputation, you’ve got to get your email in front of consumers who fit your brand. And superior data—data that is reputably sourced, hygiened, tested and responsive—can help you do it.
Read more about why superior data matters and how to get it.
Compliance Safeguards Your Brand
Any email that contains marketing information or a customer solicitation must comply with the requirements of the CAN-SPAM law. Each violation can result in a fine of up to $16,000. And when you’re sending a mass email, those fines can quickly add up!
Even if you’re using a third-party provider to send your marketing emails, you aren’t off the hook. You are legally obligated to ensure the email addresses you—or a third party acting on your behalf—use have been obtained with the proper consent.
But compliance can be complicated. We partner with LashBack—a global leader in compliance services, brand protection and marketing intelligence—to ensure email marketing compliance, provide resolution opportunities and gather key intelligence. Our goal, like yours, is absolute transparency on each of the millions of consumer emails we send each day.
The Bottom Line
Sending out mass emails is only a bad idea if you don’t have a plan in place to protect your email reputation. With the proper precautions, you can reach your target audience, improve open and click-through rates and increase the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.