Web Site Marketing

Email Marketing: Permission & Deliverability

The goal of email marketing is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the lowest cost. Cool Blue’s email solution is designed as a permission-based marketing tool. That means clients and prospects have granted their explicit permission to receive your email communications, and therefore are more likely to respond to your campaigns.

Why Permission Marketing?

  • Results — Email marketing is most effective when your message is anticipated, personal, and relevant. Sending unsolicited email reduces deliverability and ROI.
  • Reputation — Inappropriate use of email generates customer complaints and will damage your reputation and brand.
  • Legal Environment — Permission email marketing is no longer voluntary. Recently enacted California legislation and other pending bills make “direct consent” the law and permit large fines for marketers not following permission practices.

Deliverability

Cool Blue maximizes our clients’ deliverability through the following product features, industry relationships, and innovative programs:

  1. Content Detective - Content Detective ensures that emails are not erroneously labeled as spam due to content filtering. This feature mirrors logic used by spam filtering software, such as SpamAssassin, to identify words, phrases, and patterns likely to trigger filters and then recommends a resolution to each identified problem.
  2. List Detective - List Detective scans email addresses during upload, filtering for addresses that indicate a list is not permission-based. Client lists are scanned for known unsolicited addresses, planted addresses, and addresses that don’t belong to an individual, such as nospam@, postmaster@, or abuse@.
  3. ISP & Industry partnerships - Our strict permission marketing practices have yielded “whitelist” relationships with key ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo, ensuring our clients’ email reaches its intended audience. As active members in NAI Email Service Provider’s Coalition and Email Deliverability Summit, we work with legislators and key industry members to fight spam while protecting legitimate uses of email.

    We leverage our industry partnerships to develop proprietary deliverability solutions for our clients like those illustrated below:
    • AOL “Report Spam” Automated Unsubscribe
      Working directly with AOL’s Anti-Spam Operations, we developed an automated complaint feedback loop and unsubscribe mechanism. AOL users clicking the “Report Spam” button are instantly unsubscribed from your ExactTarget account.
    • Whitepaper: “AOL 9.0: Why Marketers Must Adapt Now”
      To prepare our clients for the newest version of AOL, we created a whitepaper that helps marketers optimize results when sending to AOL 9.0 users. This document is available to our clients upon request.
  4. Deliverability Report Card - Our Deliverability Report Card service provides weekly reports to clients exceeding industry thresholds for undeliverable emails and spam complaints.

    Clients receiving more than a single Report Card take part in our Deliverability Improvement Plan. Through this program we work closely with clients to improve their list hygiene and opt-in practices—helping them maximize delivery rates and overall email effectiveness.