Email marketing, a simple tool? Yes and no!

Email marketing has quickly established itself as the preferred channel for marketers because it offers numerous advantages over traditional communication channels:

  • A message delivered almost instantly,
  • The ability to analyse behaviours and interact directly with its targets,
  • Real-time tracking and reporting to enrich one's knowledge base,
  • A reduced implementation time,
  • A very low cost price,
  • An easily quantifiable ROI, …

Very (too?) often overlooked, email marketing is a cutting-edge tool that requires the pooling of several skills to be used optimally: analysis and marketing, obviously, for framing and monitoring, but also graphic and technical skills for setting up the creative. Likewise, it seems obvious that integration and routing must be entrusted to a reliable technological partner, capable of offering advice and the only guarantee of good deliverability.

To maximise the chances of a campaign's success, its objectives should be clearly defined in advance. This step is very often overlooked, or even ignored, which leads to ill-suited creative assets or messages, poorly defined targets, and random performance. Here are some examples of questions to ask yourself before sending:

  • Is my message purely informative? In that case, the open rate will be the priority indicator to monitor.
  • Am I looking to generate traffic for my website? Optimising clicks and implementing a viral marketing approach seem appropriate.
  • Do I want to promote an offer or encourage my contacts to take a specific action? In that case, you need to focus your efforts on highlighting a call to action and the message of your hook. The campaign's ROI will be calculated by taking into account post-click actions.

For the technical part (graphic design, HTML code or other), I invite you to (re)read the following posts which detail the main pitfalls as well as many tips:

Inbox objective!

All these tips and warnings have only one goal: to maximise the rate of emails delivered to the inbox by slipping through the increasingly tight filters of major anti-spam operators.

These latter frequently update their tools, not hesitating to change rules that were thought to be established. In return, users of email campaigns must integrate these changes, often with difficulty, as they are increasingly restrictive.

The rate at which messages arrive in the inbox directly affects sending performance: an email lost in the middle of a «JUNK» or «SPAM» folder has a very low chance of being opened. Furthermore, it is highly likely to be flagged as spam by email tools, thereby increasing complaint and opt-out rates. Beyond this simple observation, future mailings will suffer from a degraded reputation. The vicious cycle of spam then begins.

GMail paving the way for conversational emailing

In the race to combat spam, Google has recently set the bar far higher than all its competitors by completely overhauling its filtering system. Let's be clear and honest, it has become very difficult today to reach the inbox of GMail accounts, even when adhering to all the best practices of email marketing.

Indeed, the Mountain View firm imposes a new approach by taking into account user behaviour to assess the reliability of a sender. To ensure that your message is delivered to the inbox of a Gmail contact when the reputation of your sending address and your domain is not yet established, it is necessary that this recipient adds you to their address book, OR that they clearly indicate (by clicking on the appropriate button) that your message is not spam (it will then be considered legitimate).

This is where we step right into the era of conversational emailing: What's the most reliable way to automatically add your sending address to your contacts' address books? Simply get them to reply to you! Foolproof! For every reply received, your address is whitelisted, thereby increasing your domain's reputation.

It's up to you to imagine the campaigns, mechanics, and messages that will turn your recipients into advocates for your reputation. It's up to us to guide and advise you to improve the quality and effectiveness of your efforts.

In conclusion…

And if, as I strongly suspect, the path opened by GMail represents one of the futures of the anti-spam fight? It's best to get into good habits now, stand out, innovate, and prepare for the future.

Spam is a scourge, and we (understanding all stakeholders in the emailing chain: from the marketer to the recipient operator, via the router and designers) must do everything we can to fight against it. Only at this price will this communication tool remain effective.

To complement this post, I invite you to read this article which describes how GMail's Junk folder works: https://smartp.com/?p=557

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