Avoiding Fingerprinting by Changing Your Socks

How often do you change your socks? How often do you wash your jeans? What does this have to do with email marketing? More than you would think, Grasshopper.

When clothes get old and stinky – it’s time to change or wash them! The same holds true for email campaigns. Understanding when email creatives become worn or stale and correctly reacting to the condition is the basis for AdStation’s success with email advertising.

Spam filters look at a long list of criteria to decide whether to junk your email. And oftentimes, even innocent email marketers who send only permission-based emails to people who opted in, like the spare change in your dryer, get caught in the filters. Is it fair? Of course not. But understanding why spam filters do what they do, and how to avoid them, enables intelligent mailers to avoid being taken to the cleaners.

One of the key ways to avoid this filtering is “change.” Change your fingerprint: layout, html, subject lines, and body copy. The longer your email campaign runs, the more likely it is to get a bad fingerprint. Too many campaigns with bad fingerprints will get your reputation tarnished and get you blocked even further – even on your very best campaigns.

Many advertisers change out their creative and coding on a random basis, some occasionally, and some never! They just run a campaign into the ground and then plug in a new one. Most advertisers don’t have the resources to change things regularly so they will run campaigns till their inevitable fatigue and failure.

The excellent email marketing team is unique in that the team performance experts that rigorously run A/B and MultiVariate tests through our unique testing framework. These tests are then analyzed by the Data Analytics group and provide results based on confidence levels and statistical significance. This allows the Ad Performance team to quickly see what combinations of fingerprinted items do better or worse, for what time frames, for what categories, and of course – for what demographics.

Having a whole team dedicated to Ad Performance means we change components of your email more often than anyone in the industry – your socks will glow with whiteness, your jeans won’t smell like stale potato chips, and your campaigns will reach the inboxes of the very people you sent them to.

Just don’t forget the fabric softener.