Despite enormous efforts on the part of marketers, email deliverability rates have halted after the first half of 2011, coming in at 81%, according to a study released on September 20th by Return Path. 

Although reasons for this are numerous and often situational, a certain amount of blame in this case can be placed on “priority inbox”. This lovely little tool, created last year by Google, essentially puts a brain within your email account. It sees and records every action and configures message placement accordingly. So what we’re seeing are high reported delivery rates that don’t necessarily reflect the number of messages actually delivered. Technically the provider may have accepted it, but it doesn’t mean it’s landed in the customers’ inbox.

Really Dumb Moves By B2B Marketers

The B2B marketers who didn’t learn their lessons with traditional email marketing systems are making the same mistakes with marketing automation.  “Dripping out text messages to purchased lists from marketing automation systems will yield the same sub-par results” says Michael Weisel, Chief Technical Officer of Gold Lasso.  As a veteran in the email deliverability space, Michael thinks investing more money in better technology will have no effect on email deliverability and conversion rates for the long run.  By purchasing lists, B2B marketing executives are attempting to justify their latest technology purchases quickly.  This tactic often results in dire consequences that no business can afford such as email blocking, loss of software licensing and the squandering of a marketing budget.

Gold Lasso's RegReady put together a quick presentation to educate website publishers about form monetization.  In addition, the presentation shows how website publishers join and benefit from Gold Lasso's RegReady co-registration network. The presentation highlights the differences between traditional co-registration and RegReady's methodologies that provide advertisers an ethical and responsible way to grow their email lists.

Click here to check it out:

Proper form monetization and co-registration practices.

Gold Lasso’s RegReady is a fast growing co-registration network – serving hundreds of websites and processing hundreds of thousands of co-registrations. RegReady’s co-registration network serves both publishers and advertisers.

The forward-to-a-Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by e-mail service providers to incorporate viral marketing tools into their applications. Because 100% of the most commonly used e-mail clients have a forward e-mail feature, people use that instead. The only thing we e-mail service providers can do to save face is to hope that the feature reminds people to use their forward button.

A recent survey to online market­ers by the Email Experience Council asked, “What is your most successful list-building tactic?” Only 6% chose “Viral: empowering subscribers to share my e-mails via forward-to-a-friend,” 9% chose “Acquisition: growing by renting lists,” and 84% chose “Organic: capital­izing on sign-up opportunities across all of my channels.”

These statistics prove that the forward-to-a-friend process is inad­equate, and a more formalized referral program is needed for success. A good program is automated, timely and usually starts where the original opt-in process ends. Once a Web site user has gone through the motions of opt­ing in, it is a perfect opportunity to ask for a referral. Ask the referrer not only for an e-mail address, but also a full name. When soliciting the referee to opt-in, always personalize the message and, most importantly, reference the referrer — this gives you instant cred­ibility and will produce a much higher conversion rate.