Here’s a question to pose to anyone who still thinks social media will bring about the death of email. If that statement were true, then why are social media companies increasingly focused on improving their email deliverability?

The answer of course is that email is essential for the growth and profitability of social networks. In fact, social media companies are becoming some of the largest volume senders in the email universe, with hundreds of millions of messages being sent to their members each day. These emails include everything from status updates, friend/follower requests, wall postings, updates on tagged photos and invitations to join the network. It’s no wonder that ensuring those messages reach their members’ inboxes is crucial to the success of a social media company’s business.

However, social networks often have a higher mountain to climb when it comes to improving their inbox placement rates. Why? Because some of their practices—especially involving growing their member bases—drive a higher than average number of complaints when compared to other email marketers. Complaints negatively impact on sending reputation (the primary metric used by ISPs when determining how to route commercial email), and as a result, deliverability suffers.

What practices am I referring to? One in particular: allowing users/members to import their entire address books and then sending email invitations to those addresses to join the social network. These invitation emails often result in high volumes of complaints and can also increase the number of unknown users and spam trap addresses the social networking company is mailing to. This in turn damages their sending reputation, which lowers their chances of reaching the inbox.  Complaints and list quality in particular have a huge impact on whether a sender’s email gets routed to the junk/bulk/spam folder or goes missing all together.

So what’s a social networker to do? First, it’s important to regularly monitor inbox placement across the various ISPs and track complaints using feedback loops. Second, social networkers need to stop the risky practice of allowing users to import their address books. Finally, they need to undertake a renewed focus on the subscriber/member experience. How? Here are few ideas:

1. Create a user-friendly preference centre. Allow members to easily access it. Let them choose the types of email communications they want to receive, such as only friend updates, notifications, or wall postings. Promote the preference centre everywhere, including in the footer of every email, the welcome message, the website, the unsubscribe landing page and the member’s profile/account page. Encourage members to use it to customise the types of messages they are receiving and the frequency they are being sent.
2. Clearly communicate the privacy policy. Rather than using a lot of legal terminology, explain in simple and easy to understand terms how the member’s personal information will and won’t be used. Explain how this information can be made public or kept private and how it will be shared with other members. Learn a lesson from Facebook’s recent privacy issues, now being aggressively addressed in Germany.
3. Set the proper expectations. During the account creation/joining stage, explain what members can expect from the email program. Outline its benefits and clearly describe the program’s content and frequency. Provide links to examples of the emails being sent. The more information that is provided at this early stage, the better informed and prepared members will be for the emails to come.

Want more information? Learn how Return Path helped Friends Reunited improve their inbox delivery by over 25%. Read the case study here.

March 2010: Legal firm Osborne Clarke reports on a verdict in Germany in which the CEO of a travel company was personally responsible to ensure that each individual on a database of email addresses had explicitly given his prior consent to receiving marketing emails. Osborne Clarke reports that this new legal assessment will lead to changes in the scope of personal liability. The case coincides with the EU Commission’s plans to strengthen enforcement of EU email laws. (read more – requires free registration)

Yesterday I attended the Privacy session at the Email Insider Summit in Florida.

One of the key points that I took away from this presentation was an offshoot of a point raised by Return Path’s Tom Bartel. Now we all know that in order to comply with legislation we need to publish our Privacy Policy and state within this policy what we will be doing with the data we collect and Best Practise advocates that that we link to the policy at the point of subscription. All well and good. But who actually reads the Privacy Policy?

The answer…very few. So, on one hand this is good right? Because it allows us to put the typical 3rd party rental disclaimer in easily and no one’s the wiser right? Well…I guess so…but what kind of list are you growing? Is it a good quality list full of addresses which want to receive offers from 3rd parties?..or is it a list which is full of addresses who are not aware that they will be receiving 3rd party offers and are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button as soon as they recieve an offer? If it is the latter, what value is this?

If your aim is to grow a good quality list then you need to be transparent and let your subscriber know what they’re signing up for at the point of subcription..easily and obviously. So, if your aim is to share the data with 3rd parties, then ask them to opt-in to receive them, which means offering an empty checkbox with a clear and obvious option for them to select rather than a pre-ticked checkbox with some confusing text. This then will give you a better quality, more valuable database.

And if you’re not going to share the data with 3rd parties -then proclaim it! Again- be transparent!! Have a disclaimer alongside of the form which states clearly that you will not be sharing the data with 3rd parties…This in turn will reassure the subscriber and very likely increase your subscriptions.

I was asked an interesting question this week in an interview for an Australian Publication, Marketing Magazine. They asked: "In your opinion, has the tightening of laws and regulations around email marketing been beneficial or detrimental to the industry? Why?"

Hmmm…where to begin? I believe it has been totally beneficial – but not for the reasons you may suspect. The actual problem of spam isn’t caused by legitimate marketers and as such the real spam issue can’t be resolved by tightening legislation. A recent consumer survey was conducted by Q Interactive, which revealed that consumers’ definition of spam varies greatly with that of legislation…it seems to have evolved from being ‘unsolicited’ to ‘unwanted’ emails. That said however, I believe legislation serves another purpose – which is to force marketers to continually look at their email marketing practices and find ways to improve so that their efforts are not only not unsolicited but are actually wanted.

Consumers are becoming less tolerant of irrelevant offers – not just in email marketing but in all areas of direct marketing. As a marketing medium, email is brilliant and allows you to segment and target so that you are able to send relevant emails. Without legislation, marketers could very well still be sending untargeted, irrelevant offers and therefore not be achieving the excellent ROI that email campaigns achieve today. The e-consultancy/Adestra’s Email Marketing Census 2008 reveals that email is rated as the second best channel for ROI after SEO. Therefore I believe the introduction of legislation has refined email marketing and helped to make it the successful marketing channel it is today.

Kath Pay, Managing Director, Ezemail