Many Mail Monitor users have a large percentage of customers located in the UK that use .co.uk domain email. Even if .co.uk addresses don’t make up the bulk of your list, tracking a wider range of delivery rates can certainly help as your list grows. Many of our clients have been asking for additional UK domain coverage and we’re pleased to add Hotmail.co.uk and Yahoo.co.uk effective immediately.

On your Mail Monitor account setup page you’ll see the additional seed addresses listed and available for download. Once added to your current distribution list, you’ll start seeing the .co.uk domain reporting data right away.

In total, Mail Monitor now tracks 10 of the most common email domains that make up the vast majority of email lists:

They are Gmail, Yahoo, Aol, Hotmail, Apple, Comcast, Road Runner, Cox, Hotmail.co.uk, and Yahoo.co.uk

Testing and confirming delivery to these common domains is essential for every business that uses email as a communication tool (essentially everyone).

Every marketer and business owner is interested in knowing if their marketing messages are reaching their target audience. Did it make it to the Inbox? Get caught in a spam filter? Get filtered out before even making it that far? Knowing where the message lands is the essential metric to measure email deliverability, but it doesn’t fully measure delivery effectiveness.

Knowing when the email reaches the target audience is also important. Product launches, promotional campaigns, feature enhancements, and fix releases all require time sensitive delivery to a target audience. Just recently we had a client that ran a short promotional sale and sent out multiple emails announcing it. The problem was that a major email service provider – one that involved nearly 10% of their distribution list, deferred their email campaign by 24 hours due to some email content issues. Only a portion of the company’s target audience received the limited time promotion and the effectiveness of the promotion was hurt badly. Customers that received the email late were confused and frustrated.

Each email provider handles delivery differently, but holding and deferring bulk email delivery is one method we have seen often. From the data we have collected, Yahoo appears to use this method the most often.

This is one of the reasons we feel duration tracking is critical and something we have included in every level of the Mail Monitor suite of email deliverability tools. Below is a screenshot showing the data provided.

The duration report breaks down the length of time between the first and last email received by email provider and email campaign.

Next time you evaluate your email deliverabilty, don’t forget to check delivery duration.

Zozi.com features daily local deals to their customers. Since their daily deals are delivered via email each day, high email deliverability rates are particularly critical to their success.

Zozi was recently used in a case study by the email marketing research company, MarketingSherpa.com. They also happen to be a long time Mail Monitor customer.

There are some great email marketing tips and take aways from the case study. You can read all about it here:

http://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/email-marketing/email-deliverability-test-link-to-third-party-sites/

In part 1, some of the accuracy problems with tracking open rates were discussed. Furthermore, while open rates measure trackable opens across entire email campaigns, seed tracking offers specific metrics by email provider. This allows easy identification of where and what delivery issues are occurring. This is yet once more reason why a seed based tracking solution is an essential tool for every email marketer.

Having measurable results from specific email providers and knowing how each is handling a campaign (inbox, bulk/spam, or completely filtered out) is essential and the most effective way to increase email open rates.

Email open rate for marketing campaigns is usually the first metric a business will look at to measure the effectiveness of their email marketing strategy.

What is open rate?

Number of Emails Opened / Number of Emails Sent
=
Email Open Rate

How is the open rate measured?

Email Marketing Service Providers add to each email a reference to a small image that resides on a tracking server. Every time a marketing email is opened by a customer, the image is referenced and the tracking server logs what email was opened.

Are open rates accurate?

In a word…no. Opinions on how inaccurate open tracking is vary. Now that most email providers and applications load emails by default without images open rates are becoming less and less accurate.

How to increase open rate

The best first step to increase email open rate is to increase the rate that your marketing emails are delivered to your customer’s inbox. The only way to accurately track email deliverability is by using a seed account based email deliverability service.

What is seed based tracking?

Seed based tracking services like Mail Monitor have dozens of real email accounts with various email service providers that are checked for delivery of your marketing emails. By knowing how much of your email is really delivered, you’ll find out quickly if you have a problem that is affecting your email open rate.

In the next part I’ll discuss how to interpret deliverabiltiy reporting and what to do next that will increase email open rates.

I asked a recent client who had collected a distribution list of close to 400,000 contacts to calculate what the top 10 email service providers their customers used. The results are below:

If you are working with a Fortune 500 company that has unlimited funds and huge IT staffs, it makes sense that you will need to know what your deliverability rate is to the vast number is small email service providers. It also may make sense for you to to spend a few thousand dollars a month and sign a long term contract with our competitor, Return Path, to optimize your deliverability rate.

However, if you are a small to medium sized business, you are undoubtedly familiar with the 80 / 20 Rule: roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Focus on the areas of high impact.

That’s the reason Mail Monitor focuses on reporting for the highest impact email service providers rather than the hundreds in use. By accurately knowing your deliverability rates to Gmail, Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, you can focus on the 20% of the work that has the biggest impact of email marketing effectiveness.

Several Months ago I was asked to take some video of a family event. I dug in the closet, pulled out the case, camera, charger, and cords. I took my footage only to find out afterwards that the operating system upgrade I had installed did not have a compatible driver for my camera so the footage was stuck on the camera.

Sometimes I hate software.

Since then I got a Flip camera. Despite having less than half the features of my previous camera it, it actually accomplishes the task of shooting and editing video. It has almost no features but is intuitive, consistent, and does what it promises without a hassle.

It’s not that I can’t learn to use a full featured camera, it’s that I’ve got more important things to focus on. When I need video it has to be easy and intuitive or I won’t bother.

A similar philosophy is what I had in mind while building Mail Monitor.
Small to medium size businesses with busy staff can’t be bothered with learning new software with a steep learning curve.

10 minute setup
Major ISP tracking only
Spam Filter evaluation
Suggestions for improvement

To track and increase deliverability of marketing email campaigns, that’s all that is needed. Simple like the Flip.