Summary
Aligning email deliverability and compliance with sales and revenue objectives is a common challenge for many businesses. Often, there’s a disconnect between immediate revenue generation (especially from potentially sketchy clients) and the long-term health of your email program. The key lies in framing deliverability and compliance not as obstacles, but as essential components that contribute to sustainable revenue and brand reputation.
Key findings
- Ecosystem tolerance: Inbox providers dictate how aggressively a sender can operate. Ignoring their guidelines inevitably leads to consequences, impacting all email campaigns.
- Cost of non-compliance: Spamming practices (or associating with spammers) can cost a company significant time and money in terms of support, reputation repair, and lost opportunities due to email blocklistings.
- Incentive alignment: The conflict often stems from sales incentives prioritizing short-term gains over long-term customer value and email health. Implementing structures like chargebacks for lost clients due to compliance issues can help.
- Top-level support: Genuine support from executive leadership is crucial to embed deliverability and compliance into the company's core DNA and open dialogue with sales teams.
Key considerations
- Risk management framework: Approach compliance as a risk management strategy, quantifying the potential financial and reputational damage of non-compliance to offset immediate revenue gains from problematic clients.
- Internal education: Develop comprehensive training programs that explain the impact of compliance on the entire business, not just email operations. This should extend to sales, marketing, and even finance teams.
- Proactive vetting: Establish clear client qualification criteria to identify and reject problematic leads upfront, preventing future deliverability issues and associated costs.
- Cross-departmental collaboration: Foster alliances with marketing, IT, and sales managers who have a longer-term view than individual salespeople focused on monthly quotas. They can be powerful advocates for sound email practices.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often find themselves caught between aggressive sales targets and the realities of email deliverability. They recognize the importance of strong sender reputation but also feel the pressure to drive conversions and revenue. Their insights highlight the need for data-driven arguments and collaborative solutions to bridge this gap.
Key opinions
- Deliverability vs. Sales: It is common for deliverability goals to conflict with marketing and sales objectives, especially concerning aggressive sending tactics. The email ecosystem itself sets the limits on what can be tolerated.
- Financial impact: Problematic sending behavior, or onboarding 'sketchy' clients, can lead to significant financial costs. These costs stem from the time and money spent supporting bad actors, protecting other customers, and managing blocks by major inbox providers (like Oath or Microsoft).
- Data as a tool: Marketers struggle to find hard data to support arguments against risky sending practices when sales focus on measurable short-term revenue.
- Proactive identification: Sales and onboarding teams are on the front lines and can be valuable resources for identifying potentially problematic senders early on, allowing for intervention or education.
Key considerations
- Build relationships: Cultivate strong relationships with sales leadership. This helps in framing deliverability as a strategic asset rather than a limiting factor.
- Quantify consequences: Illustrate the financial impact of poor deliverability, such as lost revenue and opportunities due to emails not reaching the inbox. This helps justify compliance measures.
- Integrate compliance: Make compliance an integral part of employee onboarding and ongoing corporate culture. Regular training reinforces its importance and impacts all departments.
- Provide clarity: Clearly differentiate between deliverability (helping emails reach the inbox) and compliance (enforcing rules to protect brand and network). Compliance acts to stop harmful practices, ensuring the long-term viability of email programs. You can read more about email deliverability best practices in Klaviyo's guide.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests that marketers often face a significant disconnect between what they are trying to achieve with email campaigns and the short-term revenue goals of the company. This creates challenges when trying to prioritize long-term email health over immediate sales pressures. The core issue is how to effectively communicate the long-term benefits of email deliverability and compliance when the conversation often shifts quickly to immediate cash flow and quotas. This makes it hard to argue against onboarding potentially problematic clients who promise quick revenue.
Marketer view
An email marketer from Highspot.com suggests that sales and marketing alignment is fundamental for unified organizational operation. This alignment involves shared communication, strategy, and goals between the two departments. Achieving this alignment ensures that both teams work towards common objectives, leading to improved efficiency and better overall company performance.
What the experts say
Experts in email deliverability and compliance provide strategic insights into navigating the tension between short-term sales goals and long-term email health. They emphasize the importance of leadership buy-in, proactive measures, and a clear understanding of the 'why' behind compliance to drive sustainable revenue growth.
Key opinions
- Selling the benefits: Aligning deliverability and compliance with sales is fundamentally a selling problem, where the benefits of avoiding problems must be clearly articulated.
- Executive support: Support from top-level management is paramount to opening dialogue with sales teams and ensuring that compliance is not seen as a hindrance but as a foundational element of the business.
- Chargeback systems: A common solution to align incentives is implementing a chargeback system, where sales commission is lost if a customer churns within a defined period due to compliance issues.
- Culture of compliance: Effective alignment requires a company-wide mindset towards compliance, integrating it into onboarding and ongoing training, and making it part of the corporate culture.
Key considerations
- Understand pain points: Identify the specific goals and pain points of sales and other departments. For sales, this is often the loss of a big sale due to compliance intervention.
- Long-term view: Focus on the long-term customer lifetime value rather than short-term cash flow. Educate sales on how problematic clients hurt overall company health and ultimately their own future earnings.
- Strategic alliances: Seek out allies in other departments, such as marketing managers or IT managers, who also have a vested interest in the company's long-term stability and reputation. This is especially true for email deliverability and sender reputation.
- Empower sales: Instead of only imposing rules, provide sales with tools and arguments that transform client vetting into a leverage for sales. Good salespersons appreciate the opportunity to sell to high-quality, long-term customers, which also benefits overall email deliverability.
Expert view
Email expert from Email Geeks indicates that aligning deliverability, compliance, and sales is largely a selling problem. This involves effectively communicating the benefits of robust deliverability practices and preventing potential problems before they arise. Critical to this process is strong support from the highest levels of management; securing this executive buy-in might be the initial, most important sales job for a deliverability professional.
Expert view
Email expert from Spamresource.com observes that maintaining a positive sender reputation is crucial for deliverability. A strong reputation ensures that emails reach the inbox consistently, directly impacting the success of marketing and sales campaigns. Conversely, a poor reputation can lead to emails being blocked or sent to the spam folder, undermining any sales efforts.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and industry best practices consistently underscore the importance of robust sender policies and proactive client management. These resources highlight that sustainable email programs are built on adherence to established guidelines and a clear understanding of the evolving email ecosystem. Compliance isn't a suggestion, but a necessity for long-term success.
Key findings
- Evolving standards: The email landscape is dynamic, with ISPs constantly updating their filtering algorithms and requirements. Documentation reflects these changes, providing guidelines for senders to adapt.
- Authentication basics: Proper implementation of email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is consistently emphasized as foundational for deliverability and trust.
- Content and reputation: Documentation often links email content, engagement metrics, and sender reputation as critical factors influencing inbox placement. High complaint rates or low engagement signals can harm reputation.
- Client vetting: For email service providers (ESPs) and businesses sending on behalf of others, client vetting and clear acceptable use policies are crucial for protecting shared infrastructure and overall deliverability. The M3AAWG document from 2011 is still relevant in its core principles, even if being revamped.
Key considerations
- Proactive monitoring: Regularly monitor email deliverability metrics and blocklist status. This allows for early detection and mitigation of potential issues before they escalate and impact revenue.
- Compliance policies: Develop clear internal compliance policies that align with industry best practices and legal requirements (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR). These policies should be communicated and enforced across all departments involved in email sending.
- Subscriber management: Maintain healthy subscriber lists by regularly cleaning inactive addresses and promptly honoring unsubscribe requests. This directly impacts engagement and reduces spam complaints, benefiting deliverability.
- Industry resources: Utilize and reference reputable industry documentation, such as the M3AAWG documents for senders and ESPs, to guide internal policy development and training. These documents provide a solid foundation for robust email programs.
Technical article
Industry documentation from Salesforce states that the main objectives of good email deliverability are to reach the inbox by minimizing spam flags, reducing bounce rates, and effectively managing complaints. These are foundational for any successful email program. Adhering to these principles ensures that marketing and sales emails have the best chance of being seen by recipients, directly impacting conversion rates and revenue.
Technical article
Industry documentation from Ian Brodie outlines how to build a powerful email marketing strategy using proven goal-setting frameworks. This includes optimizing for opens, clicks, and conversions. The focus is on strategic planning that ensures email efforts are effective and contribute tangibly to overall business objectives, linking directly to revenue generation.
Related resources
15 resources
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