Email platforms & lemons

Email platforms & lemons

Is your email platform fit for purpose?

On the surface it might look great - but turn it over and maybe it's a different story.

The lemon analogy is a reference to all those businesses who have more or less completed their migration from postal mail to email for the delivery of their bills, statements and other critical advices.

They have banked the significant benefits including postage savings, faster and more efficient delivery, a growing digital relationship, and the potential for bi-directional interaction. ?

Sounds impressive!

But turn the lemon over

It is a different story when you look a bit closer. The postal service had a great track record when it came to delivering the mail. Unfortunately, this is not the case with most of the large international email service providers, who average around 90% deliverability. If you are using a campaign solution like Salesforce, it might be in the mid 80% range.

So, what happens to the 10% + of the emails that don’t get delivered?

We have spoken to a range of big billers, financial service providers, Insurers and Government Agencies about this. The first response is usually “I didn’t know we had a problem, aren’t all email services the same?”

  • Some just ignore the issue, as it is the customer’s problem if they do not pay their bill, renew their policy, or re-sign for their benefit.
  • Others have a loop back to the contact center, which is an expensive process and what if their email contact information was correct in the first place. You can look very silly.
  • But most just live with a default back to postal mail, which is both slow and expensive. It also undoes all the benefits of getting the customers online in the first place!

But what if someone could guarantee that 99% of your emails would get delivered?

You see, not all email service providers are alike. ???????????????????????????????????????

Our insight / client empathy sessions have revealed that most businesses did not know there was a problem in the first place. If they did, they certainly did not know that there was an alternative, like the locally hosted C9 Transact service with a deliverability guarantee of 99% and an audited rate of 99.5%.

In summary

Campaign tools are great for campaigns, but it is deliverability, together with local hosting and support that should be the top priorities for those involved in transactional and other forms of essential email sending. ????????????????????

Don’t get stuck with a lemon!

To find out more about Cumulo9’s C9 Transact service, jump onto our website or simply reach out to me, at the address below.

?David Allen?? /???? [email protected]

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*Hard bounces (wrong email addresses) are excluded from all deliverability references.

C9Transact is now a trusted supplier on the DIA Marketplace

David Allen

Enabling best practice in Customer Communication Management (CCM)

3 个月

Agree that the true costs of dealing with undelivered emails are hidden within the business. But they are very real!

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Steve Keegan

It's not what we sell or how we sell, but why we sell.

3 个月

David, great post.?Re the cost of a non-delivered email, $2.50 I agree with Mark comment that this is understating the actual cost and impact of non-delivery. To use the old analogy, this is the tip of the iceberg - the hard costs that are easily identified.?Even then, the $2.50 probably does not consider the entire direct cost and effort for remediation.?For example, a customer call (inbound or outbound) conservatively speaking would be around the $5.00 mark, so there is potentially $7.50 already. Then when you consider all the below the line costs, Compliance, Cash flow, Customer Experience to name a few, the actual cost would be far greater.?Whatever the cost, one thing is for certain - that the cost of remediation far exceeds the cost of sending the emails in the 1st place.?For every 1,000 emails sent, you are looking at $50 to send and around $750 to address the non-delivery - 15 x times the sending cost.?And if I understand what you are saying, most of this cost is simply wasted as there is nothing wrong with the customer's email address in the 1st place.??

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David Allen

Enabling best practice in Customer Communication Management (CCM)

3 个月

Our Marketing Team are estimating that it now costs on average over $2.50 for redirected emails to be sent via the postal service. In part because many of them are sent at the full DLE (Medium) rate which is now $2.30 per letter from 01 July 2024. But regardless there are lots of other associated costs to divert to postal delivery!

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