Email losers

[Alexander Lau]

This is one of the most annoying, frustrating happenings that plagues our industry CRM's. I used to go through the hassle of forwarding emails to a gmail account and re-sending out from there. Still do from time to time. This reason alone is why I encourage utilizing text and of course the phone. We also use a follow-up program that sends from a different server, something I'm not a fan of but for this purpose alone, it has helped with our email communications.

There's a thread on here somewhere from Malinda @1to1News - she points to few different free services that help you determine whether or not an email server is blacklisted or not. She also provides a step by step instruction post on how to obtain the IP your CRM is using. I'll post it as soon as I find it.

Added to our taxonomy.

 

[Ben_Adler12]

A recent comment was made on another thread how Elead1one was blacklisted and they partnered with Salesforce for better email delivery https://forum.dealerrefresh.com/threads/looking-at-crm-choices.5205/page-2#post-47702

 

[Alexander Lau]

Return Path has two tools that will let you check your CRM's Sender Score (Reputation) and if the server is blacklisted or not. You just need the IP address of your mail server. To get it, just send yourself an email from your CRM to your personal email address and view the header to grab the sending IP.

To the topic at hand, most CRMs don't maintain individual mail servers for each of their clients. Typically they have a pool of email servers that all of their clients share. That means even if you are meticulous about segmenting and managing your list, other dealerships who may be more "spammy" in their email marketing efforts can negatively affect you.

That’s right, the dealer down the street who uses the same CRM as you, who repeatedly blasts their email list, can cause YOUR emails to not reach their intended recipients because you share the same mail server. Tell me that's not a little messed up?

Warning, self promotion: I blogged about why CRMs aren't that great for email marketing a while back. If anyone is interested, you can check it out here.

Apparently, Return Path specializes in telling you about your IP, which if you use a 3rd party is not really your problem. They don't (or at least they haven't in the past) show you if your SPF / DKIM / MX for a particular combo of sending domain and sending host is all good. Since most of us don't run hosts that send out millions of emails, there's little reason IMHO to be doing your own SMTP these days, it's just asking for deliverability issues if you don't watch it like a hawk.

 

[Alex Snyder]

@Alex Snyder We have a communication effectiveness report that we use. It has ....

For the record, I just want to say that I've missed you brother! Can't tell you how excited I am to reconnect with DealerRefresh now that I ain't obligated to support an employer.

 

[BrianJ]

This begs the question...is the issue the CRM, or is email the issue?
.....
These issues are not limited to auto retail, and CRM companies need to keep on the up-and-up for sure.

Ryan, you are spot on here. We've been fighting this battle for the dealerships and I can confirm that Inbox placement is far more complex than blacklists. When you look at the major Email Service Providers, (ESPs) you will find that they are leaning less on Blacklists and more on user behavior and content analytics.

How many of you rolled over this morning, picked up your phone and swiped promotional email from a Home Improvement, Electronics, Clothing or other retail organization into your deleted items? That behavior is indicative to your ESP that you are not highly engaged in those messages, and guess what over time those messages end up in your clutter or promotional folders. The more users that take the same actions the harder it will be to get your relevant message that has similar content into a users inbox.

Someone referenced a blacklisting event we (ELEAD) experienced over a year ago a few posts back, and while blacklisting is a problem and does impact deliverability, the bigger issue in today's email space is user engagement.

While there are some exceptions, as an industry we have gotten lazy:

• Salespeople are afraid of the phones, so we automated emails to make sure we are "communicating" with the customer.
• Managers of all varieties don't take the time to coordinate and target their marketing resulting in customers getting all types of marketing that isn't relevant to them.

@Alex Snyder, you put on your customer hat when you started your journey as a customer. Did you want automated email telling you why this dealership is better than the one down the street? No you had specific questions. Let's stop pretending we know what the customer "needs" to hear and let's start listening to the customer.

There is the root of all dealership deliverability problems, not the platform, not the server, not the IP ranges, not the CRM...

It's the customer!
​

if you make a habit of sending content people don't want, don't expect GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo or Apple to respect you as an email sender.

 

[Alex Snyder]

While there are some exceptions, as an industry we have gotten lazy:

• Salespeople are afraid of the phones, so we automated emails to make sure we are "communicating" with the customer.
• Managers of all varieties don't take the time to coordinate and target their marketing resulting in customers getting all types of marketing that isn't relevant to them.

Email is free. It is easy to take for granted and misuse as you well know.

@Alex Snyder, you put on your customer hat when you started your journey as a customer. Did you want automated email telling you why this dealership is better than the one down the street? No you had specific questions. Let's stop pretending we know what the customer "needs" to hear and let's start listening to the customer.

There is the root of all dealership deliverability problems, not the platform, not the server, not the IP ranges, not the CRM...

It's the customer!
​

if you make a habit of sending content people don't want, don't expect GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo or Apple to respect you as an email sender.

There is a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I think you miss a lot of points in blaming the customer. In fact, it feels like you're blaming everything that isn't the technology.... typical vendor

But people are people and neither are communicating well through email. So, I stick by my statement of forcing people to live in some sort of rules (as eLead is doing) or building better technology that is geared toward the psychological elements we're dealing with.

 

[BrianJ]

it feels like you're blaming everything that isn't the technology.... typical vendor

Thanks for the reply @Alex Snyder, I wish there was a simple technology solution to the problem here because it would be much easier than trying to change behaviors. I might be on the vendor side, (hopefully not typical) but this is a topic we've been heavily invested in over the last 12 months and I can only highlight what we are seeing. Almost every vertical is fighting the same thing right now, and that is people and ESPs have gotten protective of their inboxes.

What we have found is that you can check all the technology boxes for email, DKIM, DMarc, SPF, Feedback loops, Reputation Monitoring, etc and end user engagement is still the driving force here.

I wasn't trying to pass the buck here, I'm in the trenches with our clients fighting this battle everyday. Just hoping to arm the rest of the community with the insights we've gained over the last year.

I appreciate you bringing this topic up, because it is definitely something every store needs to be aware of, regardless of what platform they use to deliver mail.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Can I ask a question here? This maybe a dumb question and I apologize in advance if it is. Getting emails delivered to customers inboxes is pretty important. I get that! With the email marketing companies, website site providers, CRM companies, etc... Why don't they simply add a widget to the forms on the dealers site or whatever site to streamline and add the dealerships email url to the users approved senders list??? Kinda the same why a person wants to share a post to FB, they have to login and then hit "approve" or something.

Example: Before the form's submit button is active, maybe have a button like "Add To Inbox Approve Sender List". Link to which ever email service they're using (Hotmail, Gmail, yahoo, etc...) and then opens up their inbox with an email to add that dealer to their approved sender list.

Has anything like this be done before???

 

[Rick Buffkin]

This is kinda what I'm talking about. Maybe a link to log them into their email account from the form and once logged in, then a link like this in the form to actually prefill the filter for them. You can take this a few steps futher as well. Looking at the filter paramaters, you can prob POST the form param's for the filter as well. Then all the person would have to do is simply click apply filter from their inbox!

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#c...alership.com&sizeoperator=s_sl&sizeunit=s_smb

 

[malinda.terreri]

@Rick Buffkin - something to think about, if you text customers a link to see a web version of an email this can actually make your deliverability worse. The next time the customer is in their email account and see the actual email they will probably delete it, unread - because they've already read the online version. From the email provider's perspective, your emails are not getting read/clicked which they interpret as your email not having engagement which impacts your inbox deliverability.

Interesting idea on the approved sender widget.