Rafi Siddique

Email Delivery Vs Email Deliverability in Marketing Automation

Are you aware of the fact that only 79% of the total commercial emails are delivered securely in the inbox?

Surprised? Okay, so you can calm down as we are also aware of the word spam where the rest of our commercial emails land off.

In various marketing automation tools, email marketing is one of its important aspects that help in increasing the credibility of your brand and provide a remarkable growth in your revenue and sales. But for a successful email marketing delivery and deliverability are the essential parts to take care of. I know there may be a lot of things running in your head.

Here, as a marketing professional I am going to help you to dig deeper and generate an understanding of email delivery and deliverability and also help you with some suggestions to improve them both. Let me demystify these concepts by first defining them:

Email delivery

When the receiving server successfully receives the email it is said to be email delivery. It mainly depends on whether or not your email is accepted by the receiver. This is a process before the inbox and the spam folder distinction. Does your message be physically accepted at the other end? Does the receiver’s domain or delivery address exist? Does the receiver have blocked your IP address?

Email deliverability

When a person successfully receives the email in his inbox it is said to be email deliverability. So it is the process once if your email is accepted where it will end up. Will it be the receiver’s inbox? Spam folder? Or will it end up in the unimportant email section?

Focus on the technical aspects

If we are talking about the technical stuff this is all related to the sender’s reputation. Both for delivery and deliverability, the IP address and domain reputation plays an important role to enhance the sender’s reputation. There are a variety of external blacklists and whitelist based on which the score of your IP address is compared to other IP addresses. And if you have a declining reputation of your IP then it will put a direct impact on your email deliverability.

To create a good image of your IP address it is required to work hard on your emails that are sent to your customers. You can reflect on the following things:

  • Choose the right platform that is Email Service Provider (ESP) as for a marketer ESP is the medium for sending messages on their behalf
  • It is good to have your dedicated IP instead of working in a shared IP pool of the particular ESP as there are chances of the IP pool reputation to be affected by the dubious users
  • Get email authentication for the email sender’s true identity. It helps you to differ your brand from the spammers and provides you a decent reputation in the market.
  • Consider your email file size as there are various deliverability issues related to the file size and can fail to get your email through multiple spam filters.

Earn your place in the inbox 

The email world is a competitive sector where with the increasing email traffic and rigorous filtering techniques used by the inbox providers it is quite essential to win a place in the inbox of your productive customers. The key to it is to provide relevant and engaging content to the interested audience.

If you are successful in building a place in the inbox of your customers then it becomes easy to maintain a long term relationship with them. This is what I prioritize for my client in my marketing automation techniques to maintain healthy subscribers through strong delivery and deliverability.

Play smart with unique strategies 

Good marketing makes the company look smart, great marketing makes the customer feel smart.”Joe Chernov

This was one of the quotes that inspired me to make my clients have successful email marketing through engagement and conversion with their customers. Consider the following points:

  • Engagement boosting and email cleaning should be prioritized to improve the database quality and decrease the bounce rate of your emails.
  • Have transparent and appropriate communication with your customers to make them feel trusted towards your company.
  • You should make an unsubscribing option easily available to hammer spam complaints. Low complaint rates help you increase your email deliverability.
  • Let your subscribers have the preference to choose what they like to receive from your end which is the best thing to build a good reputation in the mind of your customers about your brand.
  • Monitor the activities and engagement level of your subscribers to know what their needs are and try to make future improvements in your emails.
  • Keep the email more personalized by using the names of the customers to make them feel interested for reading the content of your email.

Remember, successful deliverability leads to successful email marketing. Don’t rush the process, good things take time. Begin with the basics, be sure about the ESP, IPs, and authentication are strong enough to get a successful delivery and deliverability. Get your email templates revised properly so that you are not missing any minute details affecting your reputation among your customers.

Don’t hesitate to take the help of the professionals so that you get your email marketing done productively.

IP Warming Process in Marketing Automation

If you need to put some real money in your pockets emails are at your rescue. So what’s behind an email? Yes, you are right an “IP address” that is responsible for the routing of your data over the internet. For implementing a good automation strategy you need to be very crucial at each step where having a dedicated IP address is something you need to be concerned about.

An IP address is something by which your email server is identified by the other email servers. Therefore, at the time of taking into action your email marketing campaign and getting connected to your customers try to consider the IP warming process to extend the reach to your customers.

IP warming

Let me make it intelligible for you, the process of IP warming is a practice of slowly increasing the number of emails sent from a dedicated IP address as per a determined schedule. As a result of this, your IP address will be identified as a genuine email sender and also establish a healthy relationship with ISPs (Internet Service Provider).

When a new dedicated IP is added to your account you require warming it up. There is also a need to warm up your IP if you have not used it for sending emails for more than 30 days.

Why warm-up is essential?

You must be sending your emails from somewhere no matter which email platform you are using your IP address needs a good reputation to have the best email deliverability results.

Building a good reputation of your IP address is important because it helps in avoiding your emails to appear like spam. With better email quality and engaging content, you can get your email IP addresses to be noticed by an IP warm-up.

You can easily gain a reputation for your IP address by first using marketing automation for sending emails and then gradually warm up through which in every day you can spend hundreds and even thousands of emails. Warm-up is the most convenient way to have effective email marketing as it can help in reaching your emails into the subscriber’s inbox.

The warming-up process

If you are planning to begin with the IP warming process you need to know the following 3 steps:

  • Get your contact sources divided according to their engagement 

This is the initial step for marketers where they can deliver messages to their most engaging customers. This step is recommended so that you get your deliverability score increased by delivering messages to a good number of winning customers. You can get fast relies on your messages that is the engaging customers are more likely to open your emails and have an interaction. Here, we can relate the engaging customers as warm customers and the less engaging ones as the cold customers.

With the help of the contacts opt-in date and lead sources, you can find which contacts are warm and cold in your database. Make sure that you have the right information in the database to get your contacts sorted correctly.

Reviewing the contact sources

The next step is that the contact source(s) should be reviewed to find if any domain contains more than 5000 contacts. You may find a contact source with more than 5K contacts but the work doesn’t end here and needs additional throttling at the end that is while sending the final email. If your contact sources are divided through engagement, the queries resulted needs to be reviewed and if applicable needs to be divided.

To run this step successfully make note of all the domains exceeding 5000 contacts while also note that all the other contacts should be handled in a different query so that those contacts are not left in the final step. You should know how the noted domain should be handled and just remember in the first 24 hours do not send emails to more than 5000 contacts.

  • A send schedule should be planned and established 

This is the final step in IP warming where the quantity of the emails and when it should be sent should be decided. Based on the data stored in your sending list at the time of send the total number of mailing should be throttled.

As mentioned before on the first day the mailing list should not be exceeded by 5000 recipients while you can double the count in each domain in the next send. So for any domain, your send can be 5k on the first day and 10k on the second day and so on. Also, if there are less than 5000 recipients in any of your contact sources than there is no requirement of applying any throttling.

On the other side if you have not divided your domain and there are 5k contacts in each of the domains than throttling is needed. With a send schedule while warming your IP helps you to reach all your contacts.

You need to follow some good email practices to send engaging content in your email along with easy options to opt-out or having suitable call-to-action processes. Such practices will keep your IP address away from spam and build a good reputation for your emails in the market so that warming up your IP address becomes successful.

Hopefully, you have got a small jest of what is IP warming but do you still doubt about using it? Don’t worry I will help you out with all my efforts. As a founder and a skilled marketer, I have given the best strategies to my clients. With my years of experience, I can make warming up an IP address far easier than you must have imagined. Let the reach of your business to your customers increase by using the right warm-up technique.

Making Decision, Which Marketing Automation Tool is Best Suited for Your Organization

Well, running an organization is not easy. At every step, you need to have correct strategies and when it comes to marketing automation you need to be sure to have productive results.

Do you need marketing automation?

Your marketing activities can be automated naturally through marketing automation. But for the best automation tools, you must be in bewilderment thinking about which features should be used? What are the best options available for your industry? Will it be worth investing in certain automation tools?

There are so many options that can confuse the business owners and make it difficult to make a decision. After all, you must be searching for the elements that are the must-have for your business to succeed. Trust me; spending time in searching among the abundant choices is always confusing until you have someone to explain the benefits and the requirement of a platform that can work best for your business.

In my career as a founder and marketer, I have experienced situations when organizations have faced difficulties in choosing the correct automation tools. And if you are also one of them pointing towards successful marketing then I must say this blog is much helpful. I will explain you some of the important factors to consider while deciding on the most suitable marketing automation tools.

  • The business characteristics

You business characteristics play an important role in deciding the automation tools for example the company size where the amount of data that needs to be processed in the system is determined based on the number of clients.

Also, if you are using a particular CRM platform then your marketing automation tool should impeccably integrate with it. In some businesses, you need only digital communication while in others there may be a requirement of offline methods. Think about how your customers like to communicate with you and choose an automation tool according to your customer’s comfort.

Surely, as a service provider, I can understand investing in marketing automation tools is a big factor in terms of time and money that is why knowing your business characteristic is important to choose a set of well-suited automation tool.

  • The ease of use  

What people value the most as a marketer or business owner is the ease of using a platform. A user-friendly interface keeps it simple to manage the system while on the other side a complicated tool makes it difficult to take all the different benefits offered by the automation tools. I believe in developing the automation tools should have the simplicity of use while their possibilities of enriching your business should remain the same.

  • The personalization 

The marketing automation system produces behavioral profiles and personalizes communication with different customer groups through recording and analyzing customer data. With such informational backup, it becomes easy to provide better customer support and technical services.

If you have the right automation tool for personalization your revenue can increase seamlessly along with the growth. But remember your automation platform should have the following features:

  • Communication channel 

The possibility of more personalized messages increases with higher support to various communication channels. You can use the most applicable channels by dividing your communication between particular groups.

  • The analytical tool

If you have the real-time analytics provided by the automation tool there can be immediate segmentation of the customers and based on the relevant information, they can receive the best-suited messages.

  • The increasing technologies 

There has been a great advancement in the marketing automation tools with technologies artificial intelligence and machine learning. It can benefit a company by increasing the analytic capabilities of the system and providing results that can be much time-consuming and unachievable through human work.

  • Custom reports capability

Custom Reports helps you to realize key insights into your business by watching data over a selected period of your time to ascertain what’s trending. Create custom reports from that data to realize a deeper understanding of how your sales and marketing processes are impacting your business.

  • The success matrix

A business needs to know its success matrix to improve its various services. Therefore, a marketing automation tool should be able to track and measure your ROI (return on investment). If you have an increase in the revenue you should with no doubt know which marketing parameter gave you the most effective result and which one paid you the least outcome. A good automated tool can provide you with a customizable dashboard and give flexible reports of your success matrix.

Marketing automation can give you positive outcomes by reaching more prospects, generating qualified leads, accelerating campaigns, and displaying a return on sales and marketing investments.

Some of your doubts may be cleared while there must be some questions which you are still wondering to find the solution. If you need help in improving or implementing marketing automation tools, I have answers to all your questions? Let me make it simple for you by helping you solve all your difficulties with effective marketing automation tools and strategies that are preeminently suitable for your business.

why marketing automation will not fit your organization

Why Marketing Automation will not Fit Your Organization?

Ever seen those funny fail videos on YouTube. If you haven’t then you must cuz they are hilarious. The videos basically feature people who think of doing something grand but end up failing in their quest and their failure becomes a source of laughter for others.

Marketing automation exactly like these funny fail YouTube videos. People recognized marketing automation as the next big thing that not only simplifies operations but boosts future prospects. Managers and CMOs usually like to implement these automation techniques for a grand result in lead generation. Yet there are many cases when marketing automation falls short of delivering the expected results.

1. Organisational Objectives

It is the vision of a person that guides them throughout life and an organisation is similar to a person. Organisations build a strategic plan to achieve a desired objective. Each and every member of an organisation has to dedicate their efforts in order to make a new design successful. Marketing automation needs a combined effort on the part of the organisation to boost results. The marketing and the sales team have to collaborate on this new design together to achieve success.

Still there is a lot to consider. Employees are afraid that machines are taking over human jobs. One day they might be helping in making marketing automation a success and the other that they might be out of their job.

With plenty of information about leads, the sales team should have it pretty easy to bring in new customers. Right? No, the most important thing to realize here is that most of the leads that are generated are weak and often end in a cold call. Furthermore, it is important for the organisation to have a leader who believes in the efficacy of this new system and takes appropriate measures to implement it smoothly with the old system.

2. Defining success

To walk the walk, you must first set a goal and have a vision on how you can accomplish it. A comprehensive plan needs to be built in order to guide the organisation through the transition from old school to the new school. Marketing automation must have The whole process needs to be defined by the whole organisation. The process of generating leads and moving down the marketing funnel. Without a destination, the most talented pilot with the best aircraft would only be able to wander in the sky. The organisation should build a series of steps that it will follow in order to meet its future objectives of implementing marketing automation.

3. Does Marketing Automation fit the organization landscape

In a boxing match, implementing a roundhouse kick will only get one disqualified. It is necessary to check the time and place that we do try to implement things in. Same is true for organization and marketing automation. There needs to be a set platform at your organisation to integrate marketing automation.

You need to figure out weather:

●      Is it the right time to implement marketing automation?

●      Does my organisation house individuals who find it easy to use?

If the answer to both these questions is “Yes” then you should implement marketing automation but if not then you better forget about it. There is a growing trend of blaming the tool to curtain the real problem, i.e., the incompatibility of the organisation with the new system. It is important to lift the cloud of doubt and be perfectly sure that ‘the time is here, the time is now.’

4. Experts… smeckperts

A Bugatti Veyron Supersport V2 driven by a noob does not guarantee success in a race as much as an accident. It is important for a organization to have a few experts that have an intensive knowledge of marketing automation.

These experts will not only implement the marketing automation system but also help other employees in understanding the quirks of this new system. The analytical thinking combined with years of experience in understanding data structures will augment the chances for a successful and smooth implementation of marketing automation by these experts. Without proper guidance, the most planned of objectives are doomed to fail.

How to leverage marketing automation in your favour?

●      Get expert help for successful implementation

●      Check the status of organisation and employees and how adaptable the organisation will be as a whole with this new system.

●      Build a comprehensive plan for smooth implementation

Marketing automation has become essential in many sectors today. To bring in harmony in operations and a congruence between sales and marketing team, many companies have been implementing this new system. Though, Organization should take necessary steps before implementation or face serious consequences.

A Fool with A Tool is Still a Fool

A Fool With A Tool is Still A Fool

As I wrote in my earlier articles about the Power of Marketing Automation and The Role of Marketing Automation in B2B Industry, how important it is for today’s Marketing World. I was watching the Spiderman movie and I still remember the dialogue of Peter Parker (Actor):
Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I’m Spider-man.

In marketing automation, Peter Parker’s statement is very true, If the organization will use all the features of Marketing automation then they’ll be benefited, but if they’ll fail to use their full power, it’ll become a curse for that organization. We see it over an over again in many organizations where people expect a new Marketing automation tool to work its magic (and probably put its money worth at work) so when results are low on expectations, they blame the tool instead of the people, the skills, the process, the organizational set up, or all of the above. This approach would only lead to undertake different tools which set to fail again. People think, it’s just like Juice machine that if you squeeze the fruit from one side, and you will get sweet juice from another side. But they forget that any Marketing automation tool you implement in your organization should enable or enhance a business process. Unfortunately, many people mistakenly believe that the Marketing automation tool itself is the solution, when in reality, Marketing automation tool is at best 20 percent of the value equation the other 80 percent is based on the human factor. Marketing automation needs constant care and awareness for it to work effectively. Too many companies skip on these details and think they can let their automation do all the work which is not exactly the best way of accomplishing your goals. Marketing automation works as a supplement to your sales strategy, allowing you to strategize the path ahead. It’s not meant as something you can set and forget. But lots of organizations invest in marketing automation thinking they’ll be able to flip a switch and watch the money flow in. And it’s just not going to happen that way.

Marketing automation does not solve the problem of understanding the buying and selling process,it only magnifies it. There are a lot of things that marketing automation cannot do for you and you need to consider that:
• It can’t think for you
• It can’t develop strategies
• It doesn’t know your customer
• It can’t create content for you
• It is not an analytical brain
• If you don’t get the results you are looking for, it won’t tell you what to do next.

So, before implementing any marketing automation tool in any organization (Either B2B or B2C), we need to take care of the below items:

• Is your data clean enough?
• Is your sales and marketing process properly aligned ?
• Do you have a Team with right knowledge to use the tool to its fullest?
• Do you keep up to date of all new marketing strategies and tactics?
• Do you fully understand your buyer’s cycle?
• Do you have the right content to feed prospects?

After implementation of Marketing automation in any organization, Most of the marketers will list goals such as “more leads,” “better leads,” and “better reporting” and expect this within three to six months of implementation. Many organizations often overlook the results of their implementation in less than six months. The immediate value of Marketing Automation if implemented correctly is by revising the process.

In the first few months of implementation of Marketing automation, marketers should take the process and the Marketing Automation team already in place and streamline it by using Marketing automation technology. It is a great time to re-align sales and marketing on lead management, the definition of a qualified lead and how that plays into scoring and the different touch points along the lead success and their success paths. This time you can also identify holes in the content pipeline and make sure there is a plan to fill them.

Now we can say that Marketing automation tool is not the exact solution to get easy success of any organization. Yes, it’s an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the all-encompassing solution so many people believe it to be. If you just focus on the Marketing Automation tool, you may end up the fool. But if you focus on the business, the Marketing Automation tool and the people within the organization using the tool, you’ll be the leader who not only uses Marketing Automation effectively, but who also sees great gains in productivity and profits.

GDPR and Marketing Automation

GDPR and Marketing Automation

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), was launched recently in the European union and is meant to protect the data of all citizens. This new rule will govern the way in which organizations collect and use data from individuals. This law has been implemented in order to safeguard user’s data. The law was defined in 2016 but implemented recently due to the incidents like Cambridge Analytica.

Most businesses and organizations, especially outside the EU and EEA, haven’t truly grasped the whole law and some are even totally unaware of this new law. If your website relies on data from users and you want to operate in EEA, then you must comply with the GDPR.

Marketing Automation and GDPR

Now, you’d be confused as to how to get started and how to implement everything regarding this new law.

Well it’s quite easy. You can use marketing automation to take care of compliance with GDPR.

If your business relies on data, then marketing automation can help with the following:

●     Generating Better Leads

●     Reducing Cold Calls

●     Engaging Audience with curated content

●     Measuring the Return on Investment

●     Collecting marketing and customer data for further analysis

●     GDPR compliance

All of these benefits of marketing automation will help you in dealing with the most important aspect of GDPR, i.e., TRUST. Ingredients of building trust with your customers, subscribers and prospects falls down to three basic criteria:

●     Creating content that they care about

●     Creating value for them

●     Making them feel safe while they use your services

Let’s look at some of the problems related to collecting and using user data and how automation can provide an elegant solution.

Problem of large Databases

In marketing, we’re all too familiar with the idea of creating data dumps. We collect all the information about a particular visitor / subscriber / customer, even the data that isn’t relevant. This is going to change with GDPR. Now companies will be allowed to only collect data that is relevant to the provided services. So, for example, you’ll not be able to collect a person’s religious or political affiliation and information about their family background while operating a loan service.

How Marketing Automation solves this problem?

With marketing automation, you can record the data submitted by the user and set preferences according to which this data is stored. You can check compliance of collected information with certain automation tools and delete all the redundant data that you don’t need.

Customer’s Consent

No one ever reads the terms and conditions. Right?

Well, now companies are required to inform users specifically about the way in which collected data will be used. Apart from this, restrictions have been set on how this data can be used.

Also, all your users must have the option to quit using your services anytime they want to.

How Marketing Automation solves this problem?

Marketing automation enables you to automatically show each user what type of data is collected regarding them and how that data will be used. Also, they’ll have the option to opt out of this if you configure the tool properly. Most automation tools now provide such functionality through which you can record the preferences of users.

Proof

Also, getting permission is one thing, proving that you got the permission is another. With automation tool, whenever a user opts in and allows you to collect and use data, the proof for the same is stored automatically.

Standard Security

Many small and medium sized companies regularly failed to secure data of users as they viewed security as a redundant expense. Now security has to be of prime importance. Certain guidelines have been set in place by GDPR with which all companies collecting user’s data must company.

How Marketing Automation solves this problem?

You automation tool can scan the database and find various loops through which the database can be penetrated. This will enable you to know about almost all of the things you need to secure.

Most important of all…Building Trust

With the collected data, automation tools can associate preferences of users with their contact details. This will enable you to automatically provide each user with content that they care about. Hence by providing value to them, you’ll be able to gain their trust.