Abstract
- Rethink your email rules. Contrary to common misconception, unsubscribing does not damage your sender reputation.
- Metrics matter. While email clicks don't impact sender reputation, engagement does and shapes the deliverability of your emails.
- Campaign clarity. It’s important to distinguish between re-engagement, re-acquisition, and re-authorization email campaigns.
The web has always been a risky place to get email marketing advice. Too many people mistakenly believe that email marketing hasn't changed much over the years, so outdated information tends to get recirculated over and over again.
We have seen an increase in factual inaccuracies in recent months and we wonder if generative AI is exacerbating this issue because law students are being trained on this outdated information, and some appear to be using generative AI to provide background information for articles.
Rather than share every inaccurate and confusing statement we’ve come across recently (and potentially reinforcing that misinformation in future training of generative AI models), we’re going to focus on the truth of how email marketing works.
Related article: 5 Biggest Changes in Email Marketing in 10 Years
Unsubscribing does not affect your sender reputation
Inbox providers like Google filter spam based on over 100 user actions, including unsubscribing.
New deliverability requirements from Google and Yahoo may be causing confusion here, as these rules include enabling unsubscribe functionality for lists (more on this later). However, part of the intent here is to isolate users who were simply using the report spam button to unsubscribe. Now, if you try to report an email as spam in Gmail, the behavior is very clear: you're asked if you want to unsubscribe or if you really want to report the email as spam.
Whether subscribers unsubscribe using the native unsubscribe link provided by list-unsubscribe or opt out using an unsubscribe link in the body of the email, unsubscriptions will not damage your sender reputation.
Related article: 7 Important Questions to Ask When Unsubscribing from Email
Clicks on your emails don't affect your sender reputation either
For most major inbox providers, subscriber engagement is the number one factor that determines whether your email makes it to the inbox, is marked as spam, or is blocked. However, most inbox providers consider tracking user clicks to be an invasion of privacy, so clicks are not typically included in the engagement calculation.
Technically, email opens don't even affect a sender's reputation, since that's a marketer's invention designed to approximate email reads being tracked in the inbox, but many people (including me) use opens and reads as synonyms, so it's accurate in spirit.
So why do I and others recommend using click-through rates as part of your engagement rate? Because clicks are a proxy for all the subscriber activity that inbox providers monitor but that we don't see. These actions include read/time spent, starred, foldered, marked as important, marked as unread, forwarded, and many other actions.
The introduction of Apple’s email privacy protections has made it harder than ever for marketers to determine whether their subscribers are engaged. While opens and clicks are the best metrics to measure email engagement, marketers should also supplement them with broader customer engagement metrics.
Re-engagement, win-back, and re-authorization campaigns are not the same thing
All three campaign types address inactivation, but they target different behaviors and use different messaging strategies. For example, re-engagement campaigns target inactive customers and encourage them to purchase using incentives and promotions. Re-engagement campaigns simply aim to drive measurable opens and clicks. And that's it.
While incentives and promotions can certainly be successful in re-engaging subscribers, preference center requests, quizzes, article links, social content, and other non-promotional content are often more effective at achieving this goal.
Re-authorization campaigns are sent when re-engagement efforts have failed. These messages ask subscribers to click to confirm if they want to receive emails from you, and if they don't, suppress future marketing emails.
As you can see, it’s important to be clear about your goals and use the right campaigns to achieve them.
Animation is not interactive
Animated GIFs and CSS animations are eye-catching but not interactive. Below is a list of interactive email elements that we use for our clients:
- HotspotsClicking will reveal additional content and a call to action in an overlay.
- Hamburger menuThis is a kind of hotspot that when clicked expands to reveal navigation links and other similar evergreen or administrative content.
- accordionExpand content blocks to reveal additional content and calls to action.
- Click to reveal hidden content (discount codes, release dates, etc.).
- CarouselClick the arrow button to browse for additional products or other content blocks.
- tabClick or move your mouse over to reveal additional content.
- toggledisplay relevant alternative versions of the content.
In addition to using CSS to achieve interactivity in emails, brands can also use AMP for emails, but the target audience size is generally too small to be worthwhile for most U.S. brands.
Related article: Marketers, don't give up on AMP for Email just yet
Cleaning up your list won’t reduce your high bounce rate
There's no need to clean up your list of hard bounced email addresses. All reputable email service providers (ESPs) automatically remove email addresses that bounce because they're unknown users, so an email address will never hard bounce more than once. Some ESPs also remove addresses that soft bounce multiple times.
Instead, a high bounce rate is an indication of poor subscriber acquisition or email collection methods. Using an email validation service can help prevent subscribers from entering email addresses that are not properly formatted or that contain invalid domains (e.g. @gnail.com instead of @gmail.com). Avoiding manual or verbal email collection methods can also reduce bounce rates, as they have very high transcription error rates.
CAN-SPAM does not require email authentication
SPF was released just six months before CAN-SPAM became law, DKIM was released much later, and DMARC wasn't introduced until almost a decade after CAN-SPAM.
CAN-SPAM is often mischaracterized as mandating what has long been accepted as best practice, but the law is currently largely ineffective and rarely enforced.
It’s actually inbox providers that have created and maintained many of what are considered fundamental email marketing techniques today, such as requiring authentication, maintaining high engagement, and minimizing hard bounces and spam complaints.
Related article: Does the anti-spam law CAN-SPAM no longer make sense?
The unsubscribe process doesn't have to be a one-click process
This misconception is rooted in a misunderstanding of Google's and Yahoo's new deliverability requirements. This is mainly due to the very confusing language they used when announcing the changes. When they said that email users should be able to unsubscribe from a sender's emails with “one click,” all they really meant was that senders would have to add a list unsubscribe header to their emails, which means that the sender's ESP would have to do this. Doing this allows Google and Yahoo to provide a native unsubscribe link that is part of their inbox interface.
Adding a list unsubscribe header does not require marketers to change the unsubscribe process accessed through an unsubscribe link in the body of the email. In fact, we strongly recommend against using a one-click unsubscribe process, as it prevents marketers from addressing the reason why a subscriber is considering unsubscribing (e.g., they want to receive emails less frequently, they want to change their email address, etc.). In fact, simply providing an option to remain subscribed on the unsubscribe page often reduces churn rates significantly.
Related article: 7 Important Questions to Ask When Unsubscribing from Email
Sure, email marketing can be complex and sometimes confusing, but make sure you get information and advice from trusted sources, especially as generative AI makes content creation more accessible.
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