Guy Hanson, Director, Response Consulting, Return Path looks back the Olympic email marketing campaign and discusses why it is a great example of email best practice.
The summer of sport is one we will not be quick to forget. The Olympic bug spread far and wide. People were either talking about it, watching it on the TV, or if they were lucky, attending one of the many sporting events. We can safely say that The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) did a fantastic job of engaging the nation, but can the same be said for its email campaign? While Return Path didn’t work directly with LOCOG, using our email intelligence analysis tools, we looked back at the Olympic campaign to gauge its effectiveness and determine its role in helping to keep the event in the spotlight.
There are two key factors that are critical to the success of an email marketing campaign: a sender’s reputation and positive subscriber engagement. Both influencers are dependent on one another. Marketers need a good reputation in order to satisfy the ISPs and reach their subscribers’ inboxes. At the same time, once a brand’s message has arrived at the inbox, it must be interacted with positively otherwise sender reputation will suffer. The findings explicitly show that LOCOG was well informed around email marketing best practices and had its subscribers and the ISPs at the forefront of its campaign strategy.
A warm IP address for a hot campaign
Before executing the Olympic email programme, LOCOG ensured it was fully prepared for what was to be one of the biggest email campaigns of the year by warming up its IP address. In an attempt to prevent spam, ISPs treat new IP addresses with caution. As a result, a brand new IP address is highly susceptible to mail limitations and blocking. Until a sender’s reputation is established, a new IP address will be kept on a tight leash in the virtual landscape. Because spam is associated with high-volume short-term spikes LOCOG sent out emails at a low rate during the early days of its campaign to show the ISPs it wasn’t a spammer. This took the form of awareness building campaigns such as “Not Long to go Now!” as well as the daily emails to support the Olympic torch relay. Operating in this way enabled the IP to establish a positive sending history and a good sending reputation over time. As a result, LOCOG increased its chances of successful deliverability at the most critical sending times of the campaign – just before and during the Olympic Games. Sourcing email addresses from reliable sources, monitoring how ISPs are responding to your mail and signing up for feedback loops to reduce complaints will help to warm up a new IP address.
Subscribers need to be warmed up too. LOCOG knew that the campaign was going to attract a phenomenal subscriber base so it signed up its programme members months before the event, even though broadcast activity fully kicked off four to six weeks before the start of the Games. By setting expectations with its subscribers during the sign up process, LOCOG reduced the likelihood of complaints and built a solid foundation for positive interaction. Giving your subscribers preference options around email frequency and content means that there are no unwanted surprises for subscribers and messages are better aligned to the interests of the individual.
First place for subscriber engagement
Demonstrating positive subscriber engagement has always been important. However, with the advent of smart inboxes there is now more emphasis than ever before on engagement. It’s a simple formula. The more subscribers that positively interact with your messages, the better your reputation will be, and in turn, more of your messages will be delivered to the inbox and the higher up in the inbox messages will be positioned.
As the Olympics drew nearer and the hype began to build, LOCOG ramped up its sending activity. Initially, this generated a number of complaints, causing an initial dip in LOCOG’s sender score. However, the situation quickly stabilised because of the high “this is not spam” rates the campaign received which act as a great indication of positive engagement.
Our data shows that people’s enthusiasm for the games was reflected in the way they interacted with LOCOG’s email programme. On average, over 40% of the panel subscribers read and forwarded LOCOG‘s messages, with near 100% read rates being achieved for some key message types. These positive engagement metrics were reflective of the evolving public interest in the Games. The public response to the Olympics significantly strengthened LOCOG’s reputation and in turn, the email campaign helped to intensify the buzz around the games.
Additionally, because LOCOG acquired its subscribers’ preferences during the sign up process, they received emails about the sporting events they were interested in, which further enhanced the engagement levels.
A gold medal Sender Score performance
LOCOG’s campaign maintained an outstanding Sender Score of close to 100 – well above the UK average of 87 (as per Return Path’s recently published Email Intelligence report). Having a good Sender Score is vital to deliverability success as this number provides a barometer of where your emails are likely to end up. Another recent study Return Path conducted showed that Sender Scores between 60 and 89 saw delivery rates of only 68%. Typically, Sender Scores below 60 are rejected at the gateway and mid-range scores between 60-79 still have some of their email rejected. It is only at the highest levels (80-100) that email is accepted by the ISPs. With a score as high as LOCOG’s, almost all of its email reached the inbox.
Complaints and poor list hygiene cause the greatest impact to a Sender Score. The practices carried out by LOCOG in the warm up process combined with the positive subscriber interaction signals significantly bumped up LOCOG’s Sender Score. On top of this, LOCOG would have possessed a healthy and clean subscriber database. Acquiring subscriber data from reliable sources and performing routine list cleaning to get rid of potential spam traps or unknown users is essential to your reputation. Marketers should proceed with caution when considering using lead generation or e-append services, as it’s easy to end up with a non-permissioned list that can cause problems for your overall email deliverability.
The first step to improving a Sender Score is finding out what it is. This will help markers to identify and address any deliverability issues. Marketers can register with senderscore.org for free to gain access to detailed reports and visibility into these metrics.
LOCOG’s email campaign stands as an excellent example of best practice for email marketers. In total, LOCOG had an email base of around four million subscribers and sent approximately 83 million emails. By effectively warming up the new IP address, and then successfully harnessing positive subscriber engagement, the email programme successfully overcame the primary deliverability challenges that would normally have resulted in much poorer performance by a programme of this nature. If the campaign had been a flop it would have been detrimental to the entire project. However, in this instance it was a major success and helped to support and enhance the wider Olympic marketing campaign.
By Guy Hanson
Director, Response Consulting
Return Path
http://www.returnpath.com/