Brands with even small amounts of popularity get mentioned online on a daily basis. And what is said about these brands can have a huge impact on how well their communication is received, even down to the simplest form, email.
So how do you prevent a “bad word” from completely tanking your email marketing efforts? By using brand monitoring!
💡 Read Creating a Marketing Strategy that Works: Benefits, Steps, Tools
In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the process of brand monitoring and its close connection to the deliverability of a powerful form of direct marketing.
If you’re curious to learn more, keep on reading!
What is Brand Monitoring, and How Does it Affect Email Deliverability?
Brand monitoring is a method of tracking your company’s reputation. It’s like having ears everywhere, listening to what people are saying about your brand on websites, social media (e.g., Instagram comments), forums, and more.
But brand monitoring helps with more than just watching your company’s image. It can also make sure emails get to recipients. How does it do that? Think of brand monitoring as an attentive friend who alerts you if people are complaining online that you said something that seems wrong or spammy in your emails.
Without a friend like that, chances are high that your emails won’t be received well and, in the worst-case scenario, might get sent to the dreaded spam folder.
So, when a company uses brand monitoring to help email deliverability, it creates a strong strategy that helps ensure messages are delivered and seen. Pretty cool, right?
The Ways Brand Monitoring Can Help Boost Email Deliverability
The fact that brand monitoring has a direct impact on email deliverability is evident from what we said thus far in the article. Still, knowing exactly how this impact is created is crucial to using the process of tracking different channels to identify where your brand is mentioned (brand monitoring) to increase your chances of delivering emails to subscribers’ inboxes. Let’s examine this a bit closer.
You have an idea if email service providers (ESPs) or internet service providers (ISPs) might see you as suspicious
While conducting brand monitoring, you will undoubtedly be aware of any negative feedback or concerns. These can range from minor issues, like blurry images, to major ones, such as triggering spam filters with your emails. This indicates how ESPs or ISPs view your email practices, affecting your sender score.
You can tailor content according to your audience and make it more relevant
Nobody will give you a more accurate answer on what the preferences of your audience are than the audience itself. The easiest way to obtain information from them, besides conducting surveys, is by monitoring the brand mentions and feedback they provide.
This approach offers valuable insights:
- Understand the email types your audience prefers.
- Determine the appropriate tone to use.
- Assess if your sending time and frequency suit them.
- Identify factors that encourage email opens and reading.
- Prevent emails from being marked as spam.
- Retain subscribers on your email list.
You can segment your audience better
Through brand monitoring, as we mentioned in the previous section, you can gain insight into audience preferences, but along with that, you can also get to know audience behaviors. With this information available to you, segmenting your audience will become an easier task and one that you do more effectively.
Remember, regardless if you’ve built your email subscriber list just through sign-ups or you used the help of email lookup tools, segmenting it well is not a step you can skip!
You can prevent security breaches and threats from taking a huge toll
Social media is the first place customers/users go to report security breaches and threats that occurred. With constant brand monitoring, you might be aware of these incidents even sooner than the people on your security team and thus prevent malicious actors from ruining your email deliverability. They can do this by spamming your email list recipients, getting your sender domain or IP backlisted, and so on.
You can maintain constant improvement
While you might have an email strategy that works great at the moment and email deliverability that doesn’t raise any issues, your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and concerns will change over time, and it’s your responsibility to adapt to the same. With that said, make sure you use brand monitoring as an iterative feedback loop, helping you refine your email strategy and maintain high email deliverability.
Benefits of Great Email Deliverability
Okay, so we’ve covered how brand monitoring can help you achieve better email deliverability. But, since brand monitoring is not a one-time quick task, it comes as no surprise that some of you reading this might be thinking, “Why should I even bother to improve my email deliverability?” Well, there are plenty of benefits, such as:
Having a great audience reach
High email deliverability is a foolproof way of knowing that your messages are reaching the intended recipients instead of hitting the spam folder. And the wider the reach of a message, the stronger its potential impact.
Improving open rates and engagement
High email deliverability equals having your emails land in recipients’ main inboxes. Emails with prominent placement are likely to achieve higher open, read, and engagement rates. These outcomes align with the primary objectives of any email marketing campaign you send.
Enjoying a reputation for being trustworthy
By not being a sender whose messages end up being marked as spam, you and your brand will be seen as more trustworthy. This, paired with delivering valuable and relevant content, could, in turn, result in more traffic, conversions, and better relationships with customers.
Maximizing email marketing ROI
Each email that is sent by you or your team does require spending resources but also has the potential of earning an ROI of $36 for each $1 spent. Taking that into consideration, it’s in your best interest to achieve high email deliverability so recipients end up seeing and reading your messages.
Minimizing wasted effort and resources
Unless they’re looking for a lost email recovery password email, chances are people aren’t reading their spam email. So, if your email deliverability is low and your emails never see the main inbox, all the effort and resources you spent on crafting content, designing the email, testing, and doing other time-consuming tasks is simply going to waste.
Adhering to email-sending rules and regulations
To achieve high email deliverability, being compliant with GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and so on is a must. So, essentially, those who aim for high deliverability will automatically shield themselves from penalties associated with non-compliant emails and unsolicited sending.
Being seen as a “good sender”
ESPs and ISPs use high email deliverability to distinguish reputable senders from malicious ones. Strong deliverability indicates adherence to best practices and active engagement with the email subscriber list. Your sender reputation score, assigned by ESPs and ISPs, hinges on email deliverability. This score dictates inbox or spam placement for your emails.
Wrapping Things Up
Before reading this article, you most likely knew that brand monitoring could help you gain valuable audience feedback. This feedback shapes aspects like your development roadmap, product strategy, and more. Now, you know how brand monitoring ensures the email communication ends up in front of your users and customers.
So, if you haven’t already, put some focus on boosting your email deliverability through brand monitoring activities. Trust us; the end result will be worth it!
Liza Pylypenko – Marketing And Public Relations Specialist at mailtrap.io. For the past several years, I’ve navigated the PR and marketing directions with a keen expertise in email infrastructure and product marketing. This journey has equipped me with strategic knowledge and inspired me to document my learnings to help foster business growth. My mission is to offer readers a comprehensive view into the intersection of performance-focused email marketing and the world of optimized email communication.
