Ham not Spam

Email is known as the "workhorse" of Direct Marketing beacuse of its wide usage across all demographics, ease of implementation and good ROI. It has also become a victim of its own success as it is cheap and easy to flood consumers inboxes with irrelevant messages.

Everyone talks about seducing consumers with timely, relevant messaging, but have a look at your own inbox and see if you feel loved. 

So how can you make sure your communications are seen as Ham and not Spam? 

Technical (the easy bit)

Deliverability is still a major challenge, especially for verticals like gambling and healthcare which create false positives for spam. Brands need to develop best practise templates which show the ISPs they are credible and playing by the rules. While good quality ESPs proactively manage the relationship with ISPs and list holders, brands should monitor their campaign delivery rates and investigate sudden changes.

Relevance (the harder bit)
Brands need to demonstrate the value of their emails to get permission to communicate and maintain relevance with their email base. Consumers classify unwanted email they have signed up for as Spam. It’s easy to flag an item as junk from an email client and this action feeds back into filtering applications, making each of your future emails harder to deliver.

Consumers value service messaging which gives confirmation, dispatch and delivery notifications when they order products and this is a good place to start a relationship. The initial motivation for allowing brands to communicate expires quickly and you need to provide new value to keep consumers engaged.

In summary, make sure you've got the technical stuff under control and start thinking about how to maintain relevance on an ongoing basis.