Ah, the 90s....90210, grunge and dynamic content websites came of age. Email became an awesome way to communicate to well, everyone, easily and economically. By the end of the decade, we had even weaned ourselves from printing out emails to save and started to trust servers. While we were still naive about the cloud, we were headed towards it by the mass adoption and love of our Crackberrys. What a time! What massive advances we made as a workforce, as an organization, as a professional!

It’s back to school time! Do you know what else? It’s also the time of year that ISPs will begin to make their inbox algorithms more restrictive in anticipation for increasing email volume for the holidays.

Now we at HighRoad understand that in the association space, you aren’t out there marketing products that Auntie Jeannie may enjoy as a holiday gift. We do know from the aggregated statistics from all of our association partners/clients that there could be a dip in deliverability if back to school time means your association starts to ramp up email volume at the same time ISPs are making it more difficult to reach inboxes.

So what if your Membership campaigns require you to ramp up your volume to drive Membership goals at the same time ISPs are getting more restrictive? It means during this time, you must mind your P’s and Q’s and:

• Send emails to known good/valid email addresses. If you are not sure if the emails are valid and if it’s been longer than 6-months that you’ve sent an email to the address, we highly suggest using an Email Validation Service. Sending to older email address will mean you will have a higher bounce rate or worse yet, sending to a recycled spam trap.

Ashburn, VA

I just read David Nour's article on the FD&H curse which he wrote in response to his work within the insurance industry. I can summarize the entire article and extrapolate all principles to apply to the association industry by stating that FD&H stands for Fat, Dumb and Happy and is Nour's way of explaining this board/C-level phenomenon of rejecting growth. His article cites insurance execs who push back on anything new and embrace everything that's been by using some favorites found within the association world including:

• We tried that 5/10/15 (pick a year) years ago and it didn't work
• No one's asked for that
• We didn't invent it, so it can't be worth it/accurate/true
• I don't personally do/need/want that so no one else does

Wouldn’t we all like to look like rock star email marketers getting north of 50% open rates, staying off of blacklists and getting almost 100% inbox rates? We all want things, but amazing email metrics are only possible by being strategic and having stellar content. There is no magic wand or easy button. So how does one become more strategic with their email marketing campaigns?

Follow the HighRoad Recipe for eMail Marketing Success:

-Authentication to optimize inbox delivery (DKIM/Sender ID/DMARC)
-Survey your constituents to see what content they value and could take it or leave it
-Segmentation & dynamic content delivery
-Analyze email consuming behaviors, AB Test deployments and do more of what works
-Suppress non-engaged from daily deployments (Non-openers within 180 days)
-Suppress non-engaged before the holidays (September – Mid January non-openers within 90-days)
-Motivate engaged subscribers to share your emails on the top 5 social platforms using Social Share
-AND implement a Permission Campaign 1-2 times per year (July & March)

Are you still not convinced that the cost is justified to reformat existing templates to be mobile friendly and use Responsive HTML design? I'm sure you've heard the buzz about the growth in mobile email consumption in every webinar you have attended or whitepaper you have downloaded.

B2B marketers have been especially slow to move to Responsive design because most B2B email recipients typically have been Outlook users, but that is quickly changing.

Did you know that using the Custom Search feature inside your HighRoad Campaign eMail account can tell you how many subscribers are consuming your emails on their mobile device?

Navigate to Subscribers>Search>Custom Search.

Click on Behavior/Activity on the left under Search Fields.

Drag the Subscribers by Mobile Activity to the yellow search criteria bar and select one of the available options in the drop down menu.