The First 11 Days - Holiday Deliverability Means Being Relevant

It's the time of the year when you start thinking about how many pounds your turkey will have to be to feed all of your relatives and what kind of shenanigans will ensue when Uncle Bob has one too many highballs. However pre-occupied you may be with family and the impending feasts, there's a little voice—a scared little voice—wondering what you could possibly do to improve your overall deliverability and marketing performance.

Let's face it, times are tough, economics being what they are, we all must deliver a command performance to ensure our continued success. Your email is more important than ever in establishing a necessary dialogue with your customers that will compell them to read, click and convert.

The first thing to understand about the holiday season is that everyone under the sun is trying to deliver a command performance and will be sending their mission critical mail. According to experts (and first hand experience of just looking in my own inbox) volumes are increasing as marketers mail their holiday specials in hopes of creating the necessary hype to make Black Friday as lucrative as possible.

Does less equal more during the holidays?

That's an important question. We here at Pivotal Veracity have a unique perspective on how the market is performing. Since we work with some of the largest brands and mailers in the world, we are privvy to performance vectors that give a clear indication of what's happening in the market. The following chart chronicles the trend that the first 11 days of this holiday season, starting on November 1st, 2009, has had on industry-wide deliverability:

The chart clearly demonstrates that  overall inbox placement has exerpienced a downward trend from a high of 89% across all industries and mailers starting on November 1st to just 77% by today. As the overall inbox rate has dropped, both spam and undelivered mail (bounces/smtp rejections) have increased accordingly. If we are all in agreement that the volume of mail has increased in anticipation of the holidays, then we must assume from the numbers above that less is not more inbox and that your customers and their ISPs are reacting to the increased traffic they are experiencing.

Regroup, evaluate and adjust your strategy

It's very important to know what's really going on with your email. If you see that your delivery rates are dropping then you may be getting lost in the inbox. Set up time to check your delivery every single day and adjust accordingly. Don't blanket every single user every single day or two with an email; instead, select and target your users appropriately, If you don't email the oldest 1% of your list, you you will potentially cut down on the complaints and bounces that drag down the performance of your overall list.

Try sending on different days: We know that Tuesdays are high traffic days, but during this time of year Tuesday is the 405 Freeway with a jack-knifed big rig in either direction at 5:00pm on a Friday. The idea is that you stand out from the crowd and sometimes you may have to stand out from what you've done up to this point in order to be noticed.

Remember, the name of the game is engagement and it takes many forms. Don't try to engage every single one of your customers in the exact same way, they are all individuals and social media has made us all want a personalized conversation.

Take to heart the basic concepts of deliverability as touted by such global entities like AOL: "Send mail that users want to receive." This is the very core of engagement and the most critical principle by which you can operate to ensure success as we move into December when volumes will go up even more and the battle for your customer's dollars heats up.

 Cheers!
-Len Shneyder
Director of Partner Relations
& Industry Communications