Friday, December 05, 2008

There are no quick fixes to inbox delivery!

I recently went to Madrid to speak about Sender Score Certifed at an event held by Cabestan and had this very nice conversation with someone looking for a quick fix to solve their deliverability issues. He told me that they were unable to solve their problems in particulary with Hotmail. I decided to dive a bit deeper in their issue and asked several questions to see if I could be of any help. The outcome after only ten minutes was that they were not signed up to Hotmail's JMR, they took out Hard Bounces after 2 or even 3 times, they did not have a double-optin in place, they sometimes added email adresses from unknown sources and the list just went on and on. I told him that they should start working on each point and that it is not that strange they have deliverability problems. His answer was "yes, I know, but don't you have a quickfix for this now?". The answer to that is "no there is not!". If you want your email to be received as a "wanted" email than you must work on your reputation as a sender. Why spent valuable time and money on creating your emailing campaigns and then neglect the most important thing which is getting your emails delivered to your customers. We all know that success and a profitable ROI highly depends on customer retention and loyalty so if you want to go in the emailing business you are in it for the long run! There should be no short term solution for a long term email marketing strategy.