February 2008

How to build a positive e-mail reputation
Follow these best practices to establish and maintain good relations with your ISPs and target audience. by Chris Carder

In our recent publication, The Marketer’s Guide to Successful E-mail Delivery, one of the topics we explored is very familiar to all marketers: building strong and positive reputations. The reason: strong and positive brands continue to thrive during slow and fast economies alike.

The Guide outlines the best practices needed to establish and maintain a strong and positive e-mail reputation – a critical subset of any brand’s reputation – with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The reason is straightforward: marketers with good e-mail reputations dramatically increase the probability that their e-mails will be delivered to their target audiences’ inboxes. And, given the importance of every campaign dollar, marketers need to ensure their e-mails are delivered appropriately so as to achieve campaign goals.

However, establishing a good e-mail reputation involves more than just following best practices to ensure that ISPs will deliver your mail to your target’s inbox. E-mail reputation, just like brand reputation, is also largely defined by your target audiences.

Building and sustaining the right e-mail reputation requires understanding what your recipients are looking for in their e-mail – both consciously and unconsciously – and how that relates to your brand’s identity.

To help strengthen your e-mail reputation, we have identified key areas or “levers” that you can control to ensure your brand is optimized.

Create positive recipient associations
Two overall qualities which will help your online brand create positive recipient associations are consistency and relevance. Brand consistency serves as a valuable point of reference for e-mail recipients. It allows recipients— clients, prospects, the media, suppliers or channel partners — to easily recognize you. Consistent and well-executed correspondence over a period of time engenders recipient trust for you and your brand.

Another quality which e-mail recipients have increasingly demanded from their e-relationships – particularly their e-mail messages – is relevant design and content. E-mail provides many opportunities for marketers to present recipients with a consistent brand identity and relevant content, particularly in: the body of the e-mail; the timing of the e-mail; the e-mail “envelope information;” and the e-mail source.

E-mail body
Marketers know how essential it is to ensure corporate identity standards are applied to the logos, fonts and colour schemes in their e-mails. These elements can often be easily and cost-effectively addressed with customized e-mail templates. Other elements in the body of the e-mail which demand special attention to ensure consistency and relevance in (and across) each posting include:

• content – Tone and vocabulary
  graphics – Selection of specific graphics and graphic themes
• structure/layout – Selection and placement of key informational components
• hyperlinks – Destination (e.g. landing page) and roll-over should provide your corporate name for easier recognition.

E-mail timing
Many factors influence when marketers send e-mails, such as their ability to generate relevant content, capacity to send quickly and accurately, previous campaign metrics, etc. When you add in the requirement to reinforce branding with consistent and relevant timing to the process, the complexity of determining the best time to send an e-mail increases dramatically.

At a minimum, marketers need to ensure consistency and relevance in:

• frequency – How often recipients receive relevant messages
• delivery time – The time of the day, week or month that messages are delivered

E-mail envelope
An e-mail’s “envelope information” is the perfect space in which to introduce corporate names, brands and images that are easily and consistently recognized, yet the envelope is the most neglected element of an e-mail message.

Marketers should ensure the consistency and clarity of: the sending address, subject line and e-mail header. (The e-mail header is the area that precedes the body and contains coded details indicating the sender, recipient, subject, sending time-stamp, receiving time-stamps and computer path traveled.)

E-mail senders — partners/sponsors
E-mail marketing provides wonderful opportunities to work with strategic/channel partners and sponsors to defray costs, provide added value and penetrate new markets. Partners often have competing corporate identity standards that need to be harmonized and consistently applied before embarking on a campaign. Similarly, channel partners will have their own practices around all of the preceding branding elements.

Plan and monitor these elements along with the best practices outlined in The Marketer’s Guide to Successful E-mail Delivery and you will be well on your way to establishing a strong e-mail reputation with your ISPs and an e-mail reputation based on consistency and relevance with your target audiences. To obtain your copy of the guide, please visit www.thindata.com.

Chris Carder is president of e-mail service provider ThinData, a Transcontinental company and a leading authority and supplier of e-mail marketing technology, strategy and creative services. He can be reached at president@thindata.com.