With inbox providers waging war on spam how do you avoid ending up in the junk folder?
Major holidays have always commanded major retail promotions, however tenuous the link. Now firmly established as a seasonal tradition, Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping events of the year and saw revenues exceeding $3 billion in 2016. With online retailer revenues further boosted by Cyber Monday deals the last weekend in November is a time carved out for online bargain hunters.
What does it take to deliver email to the inbox?
Research by PriceSpy indicates that 40% of the UK population are expected to shop online on Black Friday, making us wonder just how many emails will be sent over the whole period by sales-hungry marketers. From promotions, to order confirmation, to delivery, each step in the modern purchasing process involves an email.
Success of Black Friday campaigns will rely heavily on emails making their way through to customers’ inboxes, but with almost one in five emails landing in spam folders, the problem of poor email deliverability has rocketed to the top of marketers’ priority list.
Finding your way out of the spam folder
The spam folder was invented to trap both unwanted emails and those pesky phishing attacks that aim to steal your data, money or both. And it’s the latter which is now the top cyber security concern for organizations according to LinkedIn research. However, this cyber safety-first approach is catching out those retailers who aren’t taking the steps necessary to prove they are genuine.
So with millions of emails flying around over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday period, those organizations with poor sender reputation are unlikely to find themselves in a prime position in consumers inboxes, and even worse, will find themselves low-hanging fruit for scammers (possibly even scammers selling low-hanging fruit!).
There are a number of ways to improve sender reputation but a key one is the implementation of global authentication protocols including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These protocols work together to authenticate senders’ email addresses, not only making it impossible for someone to impersonate their email domain, but also clearly telling a recipient’s inbox that you’re a real organization sending genuine emails.
What does this mean?
You avoid the dreaded spam filter! So when a consumer makes an online purchase, their email provider can be certain that the confirmation email and follow-up dispatch emails are genuinely being sent from the retailer or delivery company, and not part of a phishing attack looking to steal financial or personal information. And from the sender’s point of view, you can rest assured in the knowledge that your emails are making their way to your consumers’ inboxes to generate those all important click-throughs to your biggest Black Friday deals.