communications want to receive personalised content from companies. Specifically, consumers want content and offers based on their personal online behaviour such as website and browsing activity, past purchases or in the case of pharmaceutical goods, tailored content based on their condition history.

8. Deliverability – Email delivery rates directly impact the ROI of email marketing campaigns and are fast-becoming a standard metric alongside click-through and open rates, the latter of which has become increasingly difficult to track accurately. The first hurdle is to ensure your email is accepted for delivery by your ISP. Ensure that your email service provider enjoys a good ‘reputation’ with the ISP. This is based primarily on the history of the sender IP address and the rate of legitimate vs bounce backed emails generated. More than 75% of email filtering and blocking at this level occurs on this basis. Further filtering takes place at the recipient mail server, when emails are diverted to junk or spam boxes. There are 100,000s of rules for checking the message header and body for known spam patterns both at ISP level and at the individual’s mailbox settings. Content filtering is based on keywords, number of domains and images in the email. To maximise email deliverability ensure your email strategies have to be optimised across email content, design through to dynamic pre-testing of campaigns.

Richard Wright is marketing manager for Epsilon International EMEA, the world’s biggest email marketing services company.

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14 HIT ME2 HOW YOUR BUSINESS CAN DELIVER THAT KNOCK OUT PUNCH ONLINE