Is Your Email Marketing Platform Whitelisting Your Emails . . . or Making it Your Responsibility?

Email marketing can only be as good as its deliverability.  Whitelisting is a process of verifying with ISP’s, organizations, and individuals that your emails are valid communications to keep them out of SPAM folders and easily visible for your recipients. However, some email marketing platforms handle whitelisting deliverability where others place that responsibility on the digital marketers running the email campaign. It’s important to evaluate where the whitelisting responsibility falls so that your email marketing delivery rates remain high.

The first obvious step in avoiding SPAM folders is to truly run a permission based email campaign with valuable content that honors unsubscribes and filters out bouncing or inactive email addresses.  It’s impossible to be whitelisted if your recipients don’t want or don’t value the communications that you are sending. If permission-based campaign criteria aren’t being met, then it’s only a matter of time until your deliverability suffers.

Assuming you are running a responsible campaign, the question of whether your email marketing platform handles whitelisting for you or not comes down to a technical question: Are emails being sent from their servers or from yours? Platforms that send from their own servers almost always have a team dedicated to monitoring and improving delivery rates.  In fact, they have to because if their deliverability is not high they don’t have a product to sell. Platforms that integrate or embed on your website are probably using your server to send email.  In that case, it’s likely that they are not doing any whitelisting activity to maintain your deliverability other than processes to ensure CAN-SPAM law compliance.

When selecting an email marketing platform, technical questions like which server is sending the email are often way down the list of criteria or not present on it at all.  Platforms tend to focus more on contact management or message templating features rather than the nuts and bolts.  However, this is a technical element that digital marketers need to address and understand. 

How would a digital marketer know how a platform handles email deliverability?  The simple answer is to ask before migrating to a platform.  Unfortunately, email marketing platforms that don’t offer whitelisting sometimes give unclear or misleading answers to the question.   So here is a couple flags to watch for that might suggest you will be responsible for doing your own email whitelisting:

  • Registrar updates – Any requests from the platform to update your website’s registrar settings is a strong indication that your server will be processing the email sends.
  • Email Installation – Any software or significant email client (like outlook) changes often signifies that the platform will link to your email client which will then process emails though your server.

So, if the platform you want to use requires setup like this it’s a strong indicator that you will need to be executing your own whitelisting activities.  Does that mean it’s best to avoid these platforms? Not necessarily.

Typically it’s more robust platforms that integrate with your site that will use your email server as well.  They aren’t setting it up this way to make digital marketers life more difficult but rather to consolidate their marketing automation that is integrating with databases, websites, and/or email services. While maintaining whitelisting activities will take time and effort, the automation tools that become available can more than offset the added effort.

Our next post will cover whitelisting activities that digital marketers can execute if their email marketing platform does not do it for them.  Whether the platform handles it or not, it’s important to have a clear understanding of where the responsibility lies to ensure that your deliverability rates remain high.

Image Courtesy of FrameAngel. / freedigitalphotos.net

Is Your Marketing Automation Too Complex?

Who doesn’t love the sound of “automation”?  Often the exhilaration for marketing automation is rooted in marketing professionals that are spread thin, subconsciously hearing an implication of getting something for nothing.  Unfortunately there is a cost to everything.  The obvious cost of automation is the investment of time, money, and/or energy to establish the automated processes.  However, there is also a risk in automation becoming too aggressive and causing as many problems as it solves because the workflows for the automation are simply too complex.

The more complex a machine is, the more likely it is to break down.  Automation is no different. Complexity typically comes in the form of:

  1. The number of platforms – The more tools you add in your workflow, dictates that each platform has to hand off the process to the next in the chain.  Every one of these touch points is a common culprit of automation break down.
  2. How long the chain of events is in the workflow – The more consecutive steps added in your automation process means that a longer string of actions has to run trouble free to complete the process. The longer the chain of events the higher the probability of a failure.
  3. Time to complete the process – Time based steps run the risk of throwing the automation out of sync which almost assuredly will create errors.

Minimizing the impact of all these potential problems is to simplify your workflows.

  1. Many platforms have a unique feature or benefit but if it’s not saving significant time or effort, it’s typically best to remove non-critical platforms from the automation process.
  2. Segmenting workflows into modular components often makes the automation more reliable and always makes diagnosing problems easier. It has the added benefit of letting you reuse a piece of your automation in other processes, if applicable.
  3. Time kills reliability.  Technology will experience a break down if given enough time.  Don’t let your automation timelines become too lengthy.  Again modularizing a process into multiple workflows is often helpful if a delay or time based trigger is necessary.

Automation is often looked at as an ideal solution for executing sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.  However, backtracking and remedying complex automation problems can quickly undermine the time saved from implementing the automation in the first place.  Simplifying and modularizing your marketing automation is typically advisable even if it requires a minor manual process.

Are All Businesses Technology Companies?

It’s becoming increasingly common for people to say that their business is a digital or technology company regardless of the industry, product, or service they offer.  To be honest, this statement often rings hollow when reviewing their digital capabilities. There’s many companies, big and small, claiming to be “technology companies” that aren’t particularly adept with technology. Undeniably technology is becoming more and more prevalent but it’s important that digital marketing stays focused on the content or services that drives value for clients.

Many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches are following this trend of categorizing themselves by how their content is delivered rather than by the content they offer. Even if you have a sophisticated interactive webinar training series or best-in-class online learning platform, the material being delivered via those digital channels is what drives the value, not the channels themselves. 

It’s fine to highlight digital benefits or technical conveniences, but those things are not going to increase engagement on their own. The best technology tends to be platforms and processes that go unnoticed.  That’s the ideal scenario where clients and prospects enjoy the benefits of your technical delivery without thinking or struggling with it.  If you are using technology as a diffentiator, focus on how it delivers your valuable content seamlessly rather than the technology itself.  Your digital systems won’t mind being an unsung hero.

Image Courtesy of gleonhard / flickr.com

Troubleshooting WordPress for Unexpected Technical Problems

Nothing disrupts the productivity of a day like an unexpected technical problem.  It can derail your whole agenda and reset the day to troubleshooting.  When technical issues arise it’s important to limit your frustration and stay calm.  Mysterious technical problems are almost always the result of something changing so doing some systematic detective work can save a lot of time in uncovering the problem.

We experienced an issue several weeks ago where our pages randomly started loading slowly and, more often than not, they timed out. The issue was even odder in that it did not affect the blog.  Both the blog and the webpages were served from the same instance of WordPress on the same host. 

Here are the steps we took to isolate and resolve the issue.

  • Review Plugins – Plugins are a common culprit for WordPress sites misbehaving.  Plugins are frequently updated and every update does have the potential to cause problems. Since the issue was only present on the pages, we suspected it might be a plugin that was only active on that content type.  We deactivated all the plugins but found that it made no difference in the load time performance. Plugins had no affect so we reactivated them.
  • Site Templates – Our second idea was that the site temple might be causing the issue.  Our template has several customizations and we had recently upgraded our version of WordPress.  Could our customization be causing a conflict with the new version of WordPress?  We activated a new stock template and found that the performance issues were still in place. No luck there, so we restored our template.
  • Host Changes – Fearing that there might be a compatibility issue between our host service and the new version of WordPress, we contacted the host.  After talking through the issue and getting some ideas from one of their engineers, we realized that the problem was a conflict with the version of PHP that the host was running and the updated version of WordPress.  Thankfully the host was aware of the conflict and already taking steps to resolve it.
  • Downgrade versions – Our last step, that we thankfully didn’t need to take given the hosts time frame, was to downgrade to a previous version of WordPress.  It’s important to follow a process when downgrading to make sure that your data is available for restoration in case the downgrade malfunctions.

The example is specific to WordPress but the process is the same in most troubleshooting situations.  Identify possible changes and systematically deactivate them, check for resolution, and reactivate them if the problem persists.  Then move on to the next potential problem. 

It’s also best to try resolutions starting with the simplest first.  Spending a lot of time enacting a complicated fix only to find that the solution was much simpler is an aggravating moment we’d all like to avoid.

Technical problems will arise but if you logically list out changes and systematically test what might have caused the problem, you will find a solution in a much more reasonable amount of time than jumping to conclusions in a frantic effort to resolve the issue.

Image courtesy of  Daniel Aleksandersen / www.ctrl.blog

The Dangers of Contracting Out Digital Marketing as Gig Work

The barriers to entry in digital marketing have steadily been lowered over the years.  New tools and platforms can be a blessing to productivity in the hands of a competent professional, or a fast track to disaster for an “aspiring professional”.

Fiverr went public today and there was an interesting test conducted by a writer at Quartz.  Essentially she tested out three different writers to provide her with a short news article about Fiverr’s IPO.  At the risk of spoiling the suspense, the experiment did not go particularly well with varying issues in timeliness and quality.

Everyone loves a bargain but buying professional services for five dollars almost shouts “you get what you pay for.”

Consistency is a major factor in digital marketing success. Having a core professional or professionals that know the business and its target market is almost always the most efficient way to achieving sufficient results.

However, this is not to say there can’t be a place for gig work in your digital marketing campaign.  Any small gap in you or your marketing partners’ skill set might be bridged by a service like Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer.com, etc. But any of these small job platforms need to be approached with caution.

Here are a few tips on using these freelance platforms successfully.

  1. Don’t go low cost – Cost is what keeps these platforms afloat so they are all below typical rates for anyone in a developed country. Almost all the providers are working cheap so the higher cost providers will still be a bargain and might actually delver a useful service.
  2. Weigh the Reviews – Many of the mid or higher cost providers on the platform are able to command that rate because they’ve proven themselves over time with other clients. Learn from others experience and select providers that have a good track record.
  3. Review How Providers Bill Jobs – In an attempt to overcome the low rates, some providers offer only subsets of jobs so that you have to buy several gigs to complete the work. It becomes an unproductive game of cat and mouse as they try and nickel and dime each element of a project from you and isn’t worth the effort.
  4. Hold on to the Good Ones – If you find a provider that does quality work on a timely basis. Make sure to request work from that provider directly rather than bidding the job out again and hoping to find someone with the same level of competency.

Using these platforms can be a process of finding diamonds in the rough.  As the Quartz writer concludes it often takes more time than it’s worth to get the desired product.  But if you are diligent in finding a few of those diamonds, it can be a helpful and cost effective supplement to your digital marketing capabilities.

Digital Advertising: Know Your Goal

Paid advertising via social media or search engines can be a valuable channel for your digital marketing initiatives.  But the nature of paid adds is that it requires a defined budget and for that budget to be actively managed to optimize the return on investment.  It’s critically important to have a clearly defined goal for your paid advertising so that you can leverage your budget specifically to that purpose.

There tend to be two kinds of digital marketers when it comes to using paid advertising budgets:

  1. Those that want to spend as little as possible to meet a set target.
  2. Those that want to use a pre-defined budget to get maximum return.

Both of these strategies can lead to valuable results, but both can also be undone by a lack of focus.

Losing sight of an advertising goals seems absurd but it is surprisingly common.  A general assumption that I hear is that lack of focus on a goal can only stem from absentmindedness.  If that were the case, it would be far less common.  Unfortunately, the catalyst is often a result of incorporating new tools or external suggestions.

As an example, several of our clients attended a conference that discussed LinkedIn’s new interest targeting in their ad platform.  Every single one of them took away from the conference that they should include this new targeting tool because the speaker outlined how powerful segmented messages could be and potential results.  The assumption was that adding the interest targeting to existing ads would make them better.  More is better after all, right?

Unfortunately for several of the clients, the answer was no.  Adding the interest targeting on top of their demographic requirements shrunk the target group to such a small sample size that goals couldn’t possibly be met.  The intention was improved segmentation and targeting to get more responses but it neglected the goal of getting a certain number of people to view and fulfill the offer.

After analyzing why conversions plummeted and almost none of the digital advertising budget was used, we found the targeting change.  We then restructured the campaign into two unique campaigns, one set of ads defined by interest targeting and a second defined by demographic criteria so that the target audience remained sufficient.

Always have your goals in mind when making changes to your digital ad campaigns.  Sometimes updates that seem like improvements can run counter to you objectives.

Allow Extra Time for Downstream Marketing Channels

Setting a realistic calendar for digital marketing promotion is always a concern.  Most digital marketers have a handle on the necessary time frames for the marketing channels they own directly. However, it’s fairly common that digital marketers need to interface with partners, affiliates, or advertisers for specific campaigns but accounting for these external marketing channels’ own timeframes is often overlooked.

Wider or more intensive promotion with partners means that a more complex digital marketing plan that integrates downstream partner calendars is required.

Building a digital marketing calendar is naturally self-centric as marketers have direct control over the communication channels.  Working with partners requires a shift in attitude to be less self-centered and work within the confines of other’s promotion calendars.  There’s one simple solution for doing that, allow for additional time and give advance notice on how you hope to partner on the digital marketing initiative.

I saw a recent example with a company that wanted to launch a research survey.  The plan was to announce the survey on their digital marketing channels, make it live for a month, and then compile the results into an industry report.  People that responded to the survey got a customized report based on their self-identified demographics.

As a standalone promotion plan that makes a lot of sense.  However, the company had an extensive partner network that they also wanted to promote the survey.  The problem was that they failed to alert the partners to the initiative or provide relevant resources until the day the initiative launched.  So the partners were left with three options:

  1. Scramble to integrate the offer into their pre-existing digital marketing calendars for the immediate 30 days.
  2. Do some simple promotions as an add-on to pre-planned communications.
  3. Skip the promotion entirely.

Almost none chose the first option as there was insufficient time or because thoroughly adding the offer would disrupt their pre-planned calendar. So, at best, the offer was included in partner communications as a haphazard add-on to an email or hastily crafted social media post.

Engaging partners in your digital marketing promotion is a powerful tool that can exponentially improve your reach.  But digital marketers need to allow additional time to inform partners that will be promoting it further downstream.  Failing to do so appears as procrastination to the downstream partners.  Those digital marketers are unlikely to make procrastinator’s initiatives a priority when they weren’t consulted or forewarned about the plan.

Image courtesy of  SurasakiStock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Don’t Overbuild a Digital Marketing Application

Scoping out a new digital marketing application can be one of the most fun parts of crafting a marketing campaign.  Imagining all the leads and/or sales can lead you to a perfectly optimized call to action.  But it’s more likely to lead you to an overbuilt application that gets little use. When launching a new digital marketing application focus on achieving the basic requirements so that you can roll it out.  Then decide if further enhancements are warranted based on usage and feedback.

Let’s think through this on a simple example, a website form.  A simple option would be to use a form processor that emails the content to you.  That can be quickly launched but formatting, organization, and security might all be a concern in that method.  So are any of those truly a problem?  If so then something more robust is required.

The next step up would be a form processor that populates a database.  A report feature from the database could solve formatting concerns.  The data would be uniformly organized in a database. And sensitive data would not be delivered via unsecured email communications.  But maybe you need the data to populate into your CMS or maybe the form collects payment details and needs full encryption?

Then you might move to a more complex solution that integrates with your CMS and provides true ecommerce security.

Working from the simplest option to the most complex is often a valuable exercise because it lets you question your true requirements.  Many times trainers, consultants, or professional coaches will default to a complex option even if the features aren’t really needed.

This obviously increases time and cost to launch. Perhaps even more detrimental is it can hinder user adoption. There’s nothing worse than building what seemed to be the perfect digital marketing application only to find that users:

  • Don’t see the value in it
  • Think it’s too complex
  • Request significant modifications outside the scope of what’s been developed

Launching the simplest version of your application solves all those problems.

  • If they don’t see value in it, at least you can cut your losses and move on to something more useful without wasting significant time, money, and effort.
  • The simplest version is rarely more complex than users can handle.
  • Requests for modification are easier to undertake as time and budget have not been exhausted and the development cycle is not as mature so it can agilely shift in new directions to accommodate enhancement requests.

The best digital marketing applications tend to be an iterative process of improvement.  Rather than assuming you can develop the best version of the application on your own, develop a simple version on your own and then go through a process of evolution based on usage and feedback to craft a better version of the application than you could have initially imagined.

Should You Screen Negativity?

Preventing negativity is not necessarily the same thing as eliminating it.  We had a couple questions posed from our last article about screening out negativity.  While screening out negativity can be a viable option on your own channels, it needs to be handled objectively to ensure you aren’t disregarding valid concerns or criticism.

There are typically three ways to screen out negative content:

  • Block/Report a Comment
  • Hide content
  • Remove a user

Your options for using these screening tools varies from channel to channel.  For instance a negative review can be hidden on some platforms but needs to be reported to a moderator for removal on others. Understand the process for screening negativity on any channel before embarking to do so.  Nothing will rile up an agitated user like a notification that they are trying to be silenced.

If you are considering options for screening out negative comments or reviews, re-imagine yourself as an online forum moderator.  Just because you don’t agree or appreciate a negative response, doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate.  You want to encourage users to interact on your platform so only egregious negativity should be considered for screening. If you truly do not see any credibility or relevancy to negative responses, then taking next steps to block, hide, or remove the offending person or content is warranted.

However, the more likely scenario is that you’ll find some catalyst that drove the negative response.  In this case, it’s better to respond earnestly and helpfully.  Nothing counteracts a negative comment online as succinctly as a firm or company responding publically to inquire about the problem and strive to resolve it. Make sure your focus is on resolving a problem, not proving a point.  Starting an online argument will only serve to tarnish your reputation more.

You also have the option of redirecting people to alternate points of view.  For example, if you only have a couple Facebook reviews that don’t have a high rating, include a link on your page to your more relevant and positive Google reviews.

Screening out negativity usually comes down to a judgement call.  If online negativity is disrespectful, insulting, or inaccurate then a digital marketer might chose to remove it but should first exhaust options for responding reasonably before removal.

Image courtesy of  hywards / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Prevent Negativity from Dictating Responses

The internet is now the number one source for debating. But debating implies a productive dialogue where both parties are offering points and counterpoints to come to a mutual understanding of ideal conclusions or solutions. More often than not, internet debating is more akin to arguing and bickering to reinforce a pre-established bias. Even benign topics can quickly devolve into negative emotional arguments. Digital marketers need to be keenly aware of this dynamic to make sure that their business communications don’t spiral into a void of conflict.

When thinking about negativity online, many people’s first thought is cyberbullying.  While instances of cyberbullying have been particularly malicious, rampant attacks aren’t something that only affects children.  Online forums and social media are littered with adults launching unfounded and disrespectful assaults at one another.   

So what can digital marketers do to keep this strife away from their online channels?

Like most problems, the first step in counteracting online disputes is understanding the phenomena. Online interaction has been studied by psychologists and most people succumb, to some extent, to online disinhibition effect. I’m certainly not qualified to explain all the complexities of this dynamic but it tends to boil down to two factors, anonymity and invisibility.  Put another way, people behave badly online because they feel they are anonymous and others online are abstract “users” rather than actual people.

For digital marketers, this means that we are engaging with a group of people who have justified a relaxed moral or social code of conduct when interacting with us or others on our online channels.  Simply acknowledging this fact will grant an element of patience and reasonableness when online interactions are hostile.

After acknowledging that some contentious interaction is inevitable digital marketers can take two steps to prevent it:

Avoid the Three Inflammatory Topics: Religion, Politics, and Sports. 

For most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches, it’s not difficult to avoid these topics.  However, sometimes an analogy or story about one of these things is leveraged in an article or resource.  Keeping those references general, like a sports analogy, is typically ok.  As soon as you get into a specific opinion on any of these things, you invite online conflict.

Don’t Escalate Disagreements

It takes two to argue.  Sometimes negative comments are enraging or hurtful and it can be difficult to react calmly.  If you find your anger rising and want to “set the record straight” online, it’s best to step away for a while and then craft a response.  If a comment is particularly inflammatory, it might be best not to respond at all as it might not warrant the effort. Remember, just like clicking send on your email, once your response is online, it’s there for all to see.  Even if you remove a response, it doesn’t mean that others haven’t already duplicated or reacted to it. Make sure that your response to any negativity is coolly handling a question or accusation, not getting your emotional needs met.

Website and social media comments can devolve into destructive conflicts rather easily.  Remain aware of the dynamic and always look to prevent or diffuse such negativity as quickly and calmly as you can.

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