If email marketing is your game, one of the most important and basic goals of your organization is successful delivery.  If people aren't getting your emails, the marketing is worthless.  We've talked about blacklisting and how to get removed from a blacklist should you mistakenly end up on one.  But blacklists are just one of any number of barriers to delivery that could crop up and hamper even the best email marketing campaign.

Bounces of other kinds account for the majority of undelivered email:  closed accounts, inboxes that are full, and ISP bounces can all leave your message unseen.

MarketingSherpa has a story about how one company that relies on email for its very likelihood was able to increase delivery of their email messages to an astounding 95%+.  The company, Dice.com, sends millions of email alerts to prospective job seekers looking for employment in the technology industries.  With a delivery rate of almost 90%, the company had a decent system in place by most company's standards.  But with the volume of email that Dice was sending, even 5% would mean tens of thousands of potential customers.

So the company set out to implement a new tracking system from Message Systems that it hoped would increase successful delivery of its email by 5%.  By streamlining and organizing its email setup, Message Systems gave Dice tracking and analytics data that the company had never had before.  The effort had a two-fold effect:

• It gave Dice employees more free time to check delivery tracking and bounces
• With that increased time for investigation, Dice is able to quickly respond to and resolve bouncing issues as the occur

The result?  Dice beat it's goal by one percent and has increased delivery by 6%.  That's 30,000 customers!  The new system also sends email much faster.  A company representative told MarketingSherpa that an alert that once took 6 hours to deliver across the network now completes in less than one hour.  Better performance and better efficiency from the same package.

If you're handling your own email delivery… are you tracking it?  Are you responding to bounce and other delivery issues?  If someone else handles your email, are they doing those things?