No matter how talented the driver, any motor sports team knows you need to keep the vehicle in top shape if you want to win. That means constantly being on the lookout for signs of anything not working at top efficiency. Even the most seasoned driver would not be able to cross the finish line if one of the tires blew out because it wasn’t inflated properly. Likewise, the most brilliant, innovative Marketo initiative is doomed to fail if you don’t keep up with the everyday maintenance of monitoring your email deliverability statistics.
Keeping Up with the Basics
Email deliverability is one of those things that can be easily overlooked until the situation is already well out of hand. It can be very tempting to just keep getting emails set up and sent out. A driver just wants to be out there driving. However, a successful driver knows they need to check in with their pit crew. Rather than reaching a point of no return or taking drastic measures at an inflection point, you would be better off checking in on a regular basis. As the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
You should monitor the email deliverability of both your overall instance and each individual program. Obviously each program is a part of the overall health, but taking the time to examine them individually allows you to better track when something unexpected or unusual might have occurred. For instance, if you see an unusually sharp decrease in the percentage of emails successfully delivered in one of your programs, you can start to examine other events around that time that may have affected your deliverability. Did you purchase a bad list from a data vendor? Maybe your IP has been flagged by a reputation entity like SpamCop. Having regular behavior markers will make identifying the proverbial needle in the haystack much easier.
You and your team have spent a lot of time working on content to send out to your potential customers. Then you spent more time deciding what specific subsection of your audience would be the most likely to respond to each piece of that content. How sure are you that you were making accurate assumptions? As your deliverability statistics trend downward, uncertainty surrounding your other metrics goes up. If your messages end up in a spam folder, the audience you spent all that effort selecting will shrink in ways you will not be able to predict.
The Leadous Approach
Leadous and our team of experts work hard to keep abreast of email marketing trends industry-wide. We can help you make sure you know what others in similar lines of business are seeing. Using Marketo’s reporting suite, we can show you how to set up automated reporting that can deliver key metrics straight to your inbox on your desired schedule. Just like with the data metrics, Leadous also stays up to date with design trends. We can examine the emails you have sent in the past in order to help you identify any components within them that are more or less likely to affect being classified as spam.
In our standard audit, we really like to take the engine apart to see where we can help you make improvements. If you and your team are great drivers, but need a better pit crew, Leadous can come in to act as your mechanics. If you are trying to build up your in-house crew into an elite team, we can help train your people on best practices. Even if you have a great pit crew, it never hurts to bring an outside set of eyes to recognize problems that have become normalized.
We will take a look at your overall database examining several key metrics. We will also make sure your Marketo instance is using all the available security authentication protocols for your emails and Marketo-hosted landing pages. We will also closely examine 3-5 emails either at your specific request or a few that we identify as potentially significant. We look at the specific deliverability and success metrics in detail. We also will take a look at the contents of each email making suggestions for improvements.
Reach out to see what Leadous’ team of experts can do to improve your organization’s email deliverability statistics.