Do you track how your email messages are received? You should. I got an email from Vocus.com today and thought this was well worth sharing. Vocus is a marketing company, so who better to take marketing advice from!? I haven’t been posting pictures on this blog lately, but I wanted you to see exactly what was in the email.

Vocus Marketing Cloud Email – Utilize Safe Senders List – 3 Steps to Ensure Emails are Delivered to Your Inbox

The subject line was: “Utilize Safe Sender Lists – 3 Steps to Ensure Emails are Delivered to Your Inbox.” How great is that! Of all the email lists I subscribe to (or have in the past – and believe me, it’s a lot!), most have a short message at the bottom to “add to your contacts” – however, none have ever sent a specific, dedicated email with the same message. It is also important to note that I have only recently been subscribed to the Vocus email list for about a month (about when I viewed a webinar on their site).

So let’s break this down:
– The marketers over at Vocus send a dedicated email with the purpose of asking their subscribers to add them to their safe senders list – and the links take you to a page that give you specific instructions to configure ANY possible email client.
– They ask their subscribers to add them to their safe senders list after only a few emails and no more than a month in to their email relationship.

How might we as sport administrators learn from this example? Perhaps we might not do exactly as they do, however we can learn from what others are doing. I challenge you to look critically at your email open/read data and consider whether or not this is worth doing if your email marketing is important.

Go Forth!