Email Marketing: Engagement Metrics And Email Deliverability in China

It’s been a while since email services provided by Google, Microsoft and others started affecting email sender’s deliverability by looking at recipient’s activity. Depending on your recipient’s interaction with your emails, the email deliverability in China can be improved or impaired.

It all starts with reputation. Is your domain reputation good? Do you use a good email list? Does your email template have good content? Do you have a successful subject line and sender name? Do you send your email campaigns from a good Email Service Provider (ESP) like Mailigen? If yes, then most of your emails will be delivered, not bounced, and email deliverability in China will be good.

At the end it’s all about engagement or how your recipients interact with your emails, improving or impairing your reputation. If you use purchased or rented lists or lists that are not compliant with Can-Spam act of 2013 or other guidelines, like Bulk Sender guideline by Google, then your campaign recipients will impair your reputation and next time your delivery and deliverability rates will be lower.

Engagement metrics, that improve your email deliverability in China

1. Opens. Good open rate gives a signal that your emails are expected and wanted. If your average campaign Open rate drops below 7%, you should:
   •  Send more email campaigns to recipients who opened your emails, using Mailigen segments activity-based filter (e.g. if you have 4% OR, send twice as many mails to last 3 month opens).
     
     
   • Send re-activation email campaigns for last 5 month zero opens (before you send re-activation campaign, make sure that the subject line, sender name and content in template are engage-able and with good deliverability).
   • Try to send campaigns for smaller segments, like one campaign for women and another for men.
   • Use Mailigen Time Match function to send emails based on subscriber’s time zone.
2. This is not spam (TINS). If your reputation dropped and some emails started to fall in the junk, improve your email deliverability in China by convincing your Chinese recipients to mark your messages as not spam. It can be a difficult task to ask for TINS, but there are ways to do it:
   • If you have a good relationship with your subscribers, ask them, e.g. through email or phone, to check your campaigns and mark them as not spam if they appear somewhere in the junk.
   • Send a welcome message with attractive content, asking to mark your emails as not spam and important.
3. Reply. When your recipients reply to your emails, it improves your deliverability score. But keep in mind:
   • You should avoid sending email campaigns with noreply@ email addresses.
   • You should send email campaigns from an email that is active and being read.
   • If a subscriber replies to your email with a sentence like “unsubscribe me from your newsletter”, it may affect your deliverability score. Make sure that your unsubscribe link is easily visible.
4. Mark as important. You have probably seen icons like star & marker in Gmail.com or flag in Outlook.com. In China, popular email boxes like QQ have a similar function. When email receivers click on these icons, it improves your email deliverability score.
   
   
5. Add to address book. This was important years ago and it still is. When recipients add your email to their address book, they have whitelisted it. Whitelisted senders have a good deliverability.
6. Categorize emails. If recipients categorize your emails, it gives a signal that the emails are good and they want to receive them.
7. Email forwarding. It indicates that content you’re sending is relevant to your subscribers and your subscribers email users.

Engagement metrics, that impair your email deliverability in China

1. Abuses. If the email receiver marks your message as spam or moves it to the Spam folder, it negatively affects your deliverability score. To reduce abuse rate:
   • Make sure that Chinese email recipients received the content they wanted and subscribed for.
   • Add permission reminder merge tag above your HTML template to remind recipients how they subscribed and why they received your Chinese email campaign.
   • Add additional unsubscribe link above your HTML template content.
     Keep your abuse rate low in a range of 0.1%-0.5%, that will help to avoid suspension of your account. You can check your Abuse Complaints in campaign reports bounce statistic section.
2. Unsubscribes. Unsubscribes also impair your deliverability in situations where the email receiver didn’t use your email unsubscribe link (There is an unsubscribe link below email in Outlook or near the sender name and email address in Gmail or QQ. The recipients can also use these links to unsubscribe from your email list.).
   
   
3. Deleted unread. These are emails that were deleted without opening. To limit deleted unread emails, send email messages that are expected, relevant and delivered at the right time. Do not send too many emails. Try to figure out what kind of email content, subject line and sender name recipients would like. Try to engage subscribers presenting the goods that they like. If subscribers open your emails and stay connected, they are waiting for something great.

Aleksandrs Vilums is System Analyst & Email Compliance of Mailigen, primary email marketing provider.