184: Email deliverability for paid e-newsletters

If it’s important that your subscribers get your emails, here are some things you should be watching.

Many publishers sell paid e-newsletter subscriptions, and many others rely on their free e-newsletters for their business strategy in one way or another. All subscription publishers know that renewals depend on engagement. That means that these publishers should be tracking the health of their distribution lists to ensure their subscribers are getting their issues.

How do you do that?

I’ll get to that in a moment. First I want to mention that email deliverability is a big topic that involves a lot of technical details. You should make sure you’re using a reliable email service provider, that they have things configured correctly, that they have a deliverability team to monitor your sends, and that you’re following email best practices.

What I’m going to discuss today are the specific issues that you’ll need to address if you have a paid e-newsletter, or if for some other reason it’s very important that you ensure your subscribers are getting their emails.

It starts with the sign-up, or registration. You have to ensure you’re starting this relationship with a valid email address. The simplest way to do that is (1) verify the structure of the email in form itself – e.g., use javascript to ensure it’s something @ something dot something, and (2) use a double opt-in. That’s where a new email address isn’t officially added to the list until you send a test email and the person verifies receipt.

Those two steps will get you off to a good start with a fairly clean list.

However, if you use double opt-in, remember that some people don’t verify their emails, so you should have a marketing automation journey for those people.

Even with double opt-in, it might also be a good idea to ask for a secondary email address in case problems develop with the first one. Just because an email address is valid and deliverable today doesn’t mean it will be in 6 months, and if all you have is a bad email address, you’re stuck.

Some of you marketers are thinking, “this is too much. Making the sign-up process more complicated suppresses response!” That’s very true. So do the double opt-in and ask for the secondary email address after you already have the order – and explain that you’re doing all this for their benefit, to make sure they get their issues. But don’t clutter up the order form with that stuff.

If you have a subscription publication, people are coming on and off the list all the time, and you have to generate a distribution list for each issue – either from your fulfillment system, or from your email service provider.

If the list is generated from your fulfillment system, there can be a disconnect between what your fulfillment system thinks is active and what your ESP thinks is active. For example, if someone clicks an unsubscribe link on one of your emails that might update your ESP but not your fulfillment system. Keep an eye on that.

Once an issue has been sent, your ESP should have data on undeliverables, opens, clicks, and so on.

Now comes the difficult part – sorting through the delivery reports.

First let’s tackle undeliverables. An undeliverable means your email is not getting through at all. It’s expired, or there’s a typo in it, or something like that.

If there’s an obvious typo, fix it and resend the issue to the new address. Otherwise, you might have to reach out to the subscriber to get an update. That’s the virtue of having a secondary email address – or some other way to contact the subscriber. Maybe you can text them, call them, or even send them a letter. How far you go will be determined by how much you want to invest in keeping a current subscriber.

There are also services that can update bad emails for you. A simple example is when a company changes the structure of their emails – say from first initial last name @ company.com to first name dot last name @ company.com. While companies usually forward emails in such cases, sometimes they only forward for a limited period of time. An update service can automate the process of cleaning up bad addresses.

So we’ve done all that and we still have undeliverable emails, or emails that are never being opened. What do you do?

Before I get to that, I have to mention that open rates aren’t very valuable any more. I’ll do a show on that later this week.

To decide how far you want to go in hunting down undeliverable messages, you have to assign some value to keeping that connection alive. If you’re trying to deliver a $500 paid e-newsletter, you’d better take reasonable measures to make sure the e-newsletters are being delivered. If it’s a free, ad-supported email, you might make far less aggressive attempts to fix problems.

I can’t cover every nook and cranny of this issue in my short podcast, but I hope I’ve outlined it well enough that you have a good idea about how to make this work for your e-newsletters. But if you’d like to chat about it, give me a call.