How do you correct (or prevent) email deliverability issues?

By Noelle Robillard on May 4th, 2020 in Product and Technology

Email is only one of many powerful digital channels at your disposal when it comes to connecting with consumers. Regardless of which of these channels you decide to use to reach those consumers, you also have to decide how to measure the effectiveness of your new digital tools.

We’ve discussed email deliverability and what it means to collections, but once you have the proper email infrastructure in place, your team’s focus should shift toward both measuring the impact of those email efforts and understanding what declining performance can mean to your collections process. Here are a few things to keep in mind so that you can minimize the impact of deliverability issues and optimize your contact rates.

Build a baseline

The first step in effectively correcting email deliverability problems is to start with a baseline that you can compare to. Measuring the impact of issues on your digital collections strategy requires your team to establish what “normal” looks like for your business. Some engagement-related metrics that matter most to email-based digital debt collection typically include:

Open rates
Click rates
Conversion rates

For email marketers, conversion rates signal when users take a desired action after engaging with marketing material. These actions often involve making a purchase or signing up for a product demo. In collections, conversion rates are measured by a combination of email engagement metrics and the more traditional liquidation rates. The desired action your collections team is looking for is a promise to pay or a completed payment.

With a baseline set for your digital performance, you can compare your average conversion rate to any fluctuations you see in your deliverability. Tracking this data over time then helps you to clearly measure how your deliverability rates impact collections and how specific deliverability issues (send volume, send time, content, etc.) impact your bottom line.

Identify and monitor engagement with deliverability

Email deliverability rates directly reflect whether or not you are reaching consumers’ inboxes, but your engagement shows you whether or not your consumers are taking action. Tracking deliverability in tandem with engagement metrics can provide insight into what changes need to be made to accommodate potentially shrinking inboxing rates. Here are two important correlations to keep an eye on.

Stable open rates and decreased deliverability

If you notice a decline in deliverability, but consistent open rates, there is a strong chance that your email list is out of date or a newly imported list contains incorrect contact information for your consumers. Consumers in your system that are listed correctly are continuing to engage at the same rate, but you have a higher number of bounces or failed sends.

Email validation is an important step in limiting the chances of a situation like this happening as this process confirms whether or not email addresses are legitimate. Large lists may contain small typos or transpositions that would turn an otherwise valid email address into a useless string of characters.

Decreased open rates and decreased deliverability

In the event that there is a decrease in both open rates and deliverability, it is likely that your send domains (the part of an email address after the @ sign) are being blocked or blacklisted. Fewer recipients are actually receiving your emails and even fewer are opening them.

There are a number of steps an organization can take to prevent this downtrend including using multiple domains and carefully scaling an email strategy before attempting to reach thousands of consumers. Attempting to remedy these issues after they have happened may prove to be too late.

Recognize the scope of an issue

Sending collections emails at scale can mean trying to reach thousands of consumers per day. It’s difficult to imagine a process of that scale without some sent emails not bouncing or simply being ignored.

TrueAccord successfully delivered millions of emails. Want to learn how we do it? Check-in with our team today.

As we mentioned earlier, a massive downturn in deliverability can lead to email domains being blacklisted which means those messages will be relegated to spam folders across ISPs (internet service providers). TrueAccord’s in-house Head of Email Operations, Raja Datta, has some extra advice (which was also contributed to a segment for Kickbox) for those looking to prevent these issues from causing further damage.

Attempting to recover your domain authority (proving to ISPs like Google or Yahoo that you aren’t a spammer) at that stage is remarkably difficult, but if you recognize a downtrend in click-rates, you can make relatively minor changes to the content of an email (phrasing on a call to action, different subject lines, etc.) to improve engagement.

The scale of your deliverability issue will dictate how urgently you have to respond to it and how many resources must be put toward its resolution. Tracking these potential problems early and often can lead to intercepting them before your email strategy is significantly weakened and send domains are entirely blacklisted; update your subject line now and avoid getting blocked later.

Getting to the root of deliverability issues will ensure your email strategy is sustainable for years to come. As right-party contact rates continue to fall and digital channels take priority over phone calls, starting to track your email performance now and understanding how to measure your digital strategy’s success will get your team ahead of the collections curve.

Does this all seem a bit daunting? We get it. Talk to our team today to see how we can help perfect your digital collections strategy.

What is email deliverability and why does it matter to collections?

By Noelle Robillard on April 16th, 2020 in Product and Technology

Without the ability to successfully deliver your collection emails to a consumer’s inbox, email cannot be a successful collection method for your agency. Email deliverability is the measure of the ability to successfully deliver an email to a user’s inbox. It is perhaps the most relevant KPI in an email-first digital collection strategy. Several factors can influence whether or not your emails even reach people including spam filters, sending times and volume, and even the content of the message itself.

Want to learn more about building a scalable email strategy? Check out these tips from our team of deliverability experts!

A high deliverability rate then means that you are creating the right content, sharing it at the right time, and engaging your consumers. By measuring engagement through clicks, you can combine these statistics with an online payment portal to create an easily-tracked customer journey to payment without ever picking up the phone.

Pivoting to tracking deliverability rates, clicks, online payment totals, and payment plans created creates a full digital ecosystem of KPIs with better engagement than traditional call-to-collect models. Here are a few tips for making email an effective part of your collections strategy.

Borrow email metrics from marketing experts

Our own email deliverability experts have years of experience working in the digital marketing space. KPIs like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates aren’t just for marketing teams working on generating leads, they can offer insight into the effectiveness of your collections efforts and help you understand whether or not you’re actually reaching your consumers.

Tracking deliverability rates, clicks, online payment totals, and payment plans created creates a full digital ecosystem of KPIs with better engagement than traditional call-to-collect models. This is a lot of data to keep track of, and digital debt collection tools can provide some assistance in tracking digital and other tracking performance data.

Emails also don’t depend on urgency in the same way that phone calls do. Customers appreciate the convenience of managing their finances on their own time (25% of our customers access their accounts outside of the call hours designated of 8am-9pm by the TCPA). Analyzing open rates for different send times provides a deeper understanding of when your consumers like to be reached.

Email marketing metrics not only accomplish the same goals as more traditional call-based KPIs, but you also have an even clearer vision of your collections performance.

Authenticate and build domain reputation

Email authentication allows ISPs (Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc.) to properly identify an email’s sender. Any time an email is sent to and reaches a consumer, you are representing your company’s brand and reputation with that email. The actual process of email authentication requires the implementation of several authentication standards:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

This allows the owner of a domain to determine which servers their emails are sent from.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DKIM is an encryption system that allows the email sender to claim responsibility for a message. That encrypted information can then be verified by the ISP.

Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)

This standard (and policy-making organization) further expands on these and adds linkage to the author (“From:”) domain name to improve and monitor the protection of the domain from fraudulent email. The DMARC organization continues to update policies related to domain security.

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)

BIMI helps users to identify brands based on images included alongside their emails. Consider them an email preview profile picture to help users immediately recognize the email’s sender.*

*In order to integrate BIMI, you must have the other three standards mentioned here established first.

Interested in learning more about these standards? The Validity blog has a great series on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for you to read here!

An authenticated domain helps to boost your domain reputation. If your send domain (the part of an email address after the @ sign) has a poor reputation, it is more likely to be relegated to a user’s spam inbox. Taking the proper steps to build authentication standards can secure your reputation against a massive hurdle that you’ll encounter otherwise.

Validate and increase RPC rates

Email validation is the process of ensuring that the emails you are sending to are valid and deliverable. Where authentication focuses on establishing your own email domains, validation verifies whether or not the consumer email addresses that you have on file are valid emails.

Sending an email to a non-existent email address will cause the email to bounce; you will receive a notice that the email could not successfully be delivered. A high bounce rate from emailing too many invalid users will be perceived by ISPs as poor list management—a common practice of batch email scammers—and your sender reputation will be damaged and your deliverability will drop.

In the digital collections world, sending to valid email addresses is also directly related to your right party contact rate. By validating your email lists, you can quickly identify which of your consumers have valid contact information in your system. With this information on hand, you can directly reach out to those that do, build your domain reputation, and learn which of your customers you’ll have to reach out to for updated information.

Not every traditional debt collection agency is using email extensively, but it is an invaluable tool in the age of digital communication. Understanding the technical aspects of email deliverability and the challenges that come with properly scaling your digital communications will help you overcome contact hurdles that are more challenging now than ever before.

Are you ready to build a future-proofed digital collections strategy? Get in touch with our team to learn what we can do to help.

3 essential digital channels for collections

By Noelle Robillard on February 13th, 2020 in Industry Insights

The debt collection industry is in the midst of rapid change. With the decline of the effectiveness of phone calls and upcoming legislation from the CFPB that includes limiting call volume, it’s more important than ever that your company’s collections strategy diversifies and introduces a digital, multi-channel approach to communicating with consumers.

Determining what digital channels work the best for your collection strategy isn’t an overnight decision, and using them effectively is another hurdle entirely. When reviewing potential communication channels, you have to consider how you want to use them, how you plan to scale them, and what the investment will be for doing those things properly.

Email

According to the State of Collection 2019, email is the most commonly used digital channel used to communicate with consumers in debt (beating SMS text messaging by 45%). Its frequency of use, however, does not mean that it is necessarily being used effectively. Sending manual emails haphazardly can lead to mixed results at best.

Trying to send emails at the scale required of a dedicated agency, however, is even more difficult, and poor email management can lead to low deliverability rates, poor domain authority (you may end up relegated to spam folders), and can even end up getting your company’s sending domains blacklisted from reaching any of your consumers. Figure 1, below, shows Debt Collector A’s email sending volume.

Sending hundreds of thousands of emails per month can seem like an effective strategy at face value, but when deliverability is taken into consideration, that appearance changes.

Figure 2, below, mirrors the bar graph in Figure 1 and represents the percentage of the emails sent from Debt Collector A that are delivered to an inbox vs. those that are filtered into a spam folder.

A 2019 email client market share study by Litmus shows just how valuable it can be to understand how to work with individual email service providers that all come with their own unique challenges and filters to protect their users. Gmail, for example, maintains 28% of email users, but only 1% of Debt Collector A’s emails are reaching Gmail users.

Cost

Emails can be an effective strategy, but doing so effectively at scale requires extensive infrastructure. That infrastructure includes five major things, including bringing on email experts to work with email service providers, detailed performance tracking, and creating valuable content for your consumers to engage with. Simple email may not cost much, but building a powerful email-driven strategy from the ground up won’t be cheap or easy.

Emails can serve as the foundation of an omni-channel digital strategy, but creating an ecosystem for consumers to engage at their convenience requires more than one tool.

SMS text messaging

Smartphones abound, and when Americans are sending roughly 26 billion text messages every day, it’s easy to see the potential in the texting as a collections communication channel. Millennials spend 3X more time texting than calling or emailing, and they hold an average of $4,712 in consumer debt (not to mention mounting student debt) which makes them prime targets for daunting debt collectors hounding them about a balance. This can be intimidating and turn consumers further away from wanting to work with you.

SMS allows for fast, direct contact with consumers that are on the move, don’t have time for a phone call, and may have breezed past an email or two. By creating a flexible system with multiple touch-points across different channels, you can create an organic system of contacting consumers rather that gives them the power to contact your team when and where they want.

Key uses for SMS:

Payment notifications
1. Following up with customers to confirm a payment can help to reassure them that their next step toward financial freedom is done and increases transparency between your business and consumers.
Payment reminders
1. Even consumers on a payment plan might forget once in a while. A ping with a text message can be just enough of a nudge to remind them to log in and make their scheduled payment.
Providing instant access to their account
1. By providing a one-click option for a consumer to make their payment, you can make taking the next step easy! Pairing this option with a simple online payment portal gives consumers the opportunity for a full self-service experience.
Tracking your performance
1. As is the case with other digital channels, tracking your data and performance is easier than ever with texting. You can A/B test messaging and get consistent results for improving engagement.

When you’re considering what to include directly as part of the content of a text message, keep in mind that people expect texts to be short! Length aside, make sure to avoid:

Sensitive information (e.g., account balances, credit card information, etc).
Misleading information
Threatening consumers
Harassing consumers

Text messages have a 209% higher response rate than phone, email, or Facebook, and part of the reason for that is that they are digestible and often feel informal and friendly. On the flip side, misleading, threatening, and harassing texts not only deter engagement and damage your brand, they are also illegal.

Plus, the CFPB’s proposed rules will give consumers the ability to opt out of text messaging, and your texting numbers can still be blocked manually. Be selective with the messages you send and consider the consumer experience.

Getting started with texting using certain software companies can be as cheap as pennies per message. Full-scale agencies like TrueAccord also make use of SMS tools as part of a broader collections strategy alongside other digital tools.

Direct drop voicemail

Direct drop voicemails (also known as ringless voicemail drops) are a unique channel that can help supplement a digital communication strategy but can’t do much on their own. Rather than an agent calling a consumer directly, a voicemail is delivered to the recipient’s inbox without their phone ringing (hence the name).

The consumer still receives a message from a pre-recorded voice that can relay much of the same information that they would have gotten from an agent, but they do not feel the urgent response pressure associated with a phone call. Much like text messages, direct drop voicemails can be used sparingly as a touch point to remind consumers of upcoming payments or ask them to check an email or call an agent back.

From a cost perspective, direct voicemail offerings can range from a few cents to a few tenths of a cent depending on the provider, and many companies will charge based on successful drops rather than a flat charge for the volume sent which can avoid costs incurred for out of date or incorrect phone numbers.

Both direct drop voicemails and text messages are legally classified as phone calls by the TCPA as the law applies to “placing a call or text to a consumer using the consumer’s mobile number.” Be careful with when and how you decide to use either channel in your collections strategy!

As consumer preferences and collections law continue to evolve, we should expect to see rapid growth in both existing digital channels as well as the emergence of others! Effectively integrating these tools into your strategy together can create a much larger impact than any one channel in isolation, and teams that build these systems today will be the future leaders of the industry very soon.

5 tips for building scalable email infrastructure

By Noelle Robillard on February 6th, 2020 in Product and Technology

Using email as a channel for consumer communication seems like a simple way to dive into the digital revolution, but internet service providers (ISPs) actively develop tools to combat spam and abuse.

You may have the best intentions, but these service providers want to help consumers feel like they are protected which means blacklisting and filtering out junk mail. Unfortunately, emails sent by the untrained email sender can veer dangerously close to junk.

This can make breaking into emailing consumers difficult, but it makes sending emails by the thousands (and millions) impossible without building email infrastructure that is sustainable and scalable. Establishing that infrastructure begins with recognizing the challenges you might face and then considering how to best confront them.

Why scaling email infrastructure is difficult

Email communication is heavily regulated by automated filters and systems in a way that more manual forms of communication aren’t. Cell service providers, for example, do not have nearly as much control over the volume or quality of calls that their customers receive.

ISPs have dedicated engineers that design algorithms to keep their users happy, engaged, and protected from malicious senders, and an inbox packed with spam mail makes for a poor user experience. These algorithms are not perfect, and when they are designed, they lean on the side of being more restrictive than less which can lead to some misunderstanding. They may accidentally filter out an email from a legitimate sender that, according to their understanding of what is deemed safe, seems suspicious.

To make matters more complicated, each ISP has unique criteria that serve as the basis of their filtering rules. An email that is flagged as spam by Google could land safely in a Yahoo Mail inbox and vice versa. These rules are also constantly changing and updating to fight back against more advanced scammers making it impossible to create a one-and-done solution to properly sending emails at a massive scale.

Here are just a few things that spam filters analyze that you’ll need to consider:

Content: What do your emails say? Do you have any suspicious attachments or links?
Design: How do your emails look?
Sending time: Did your email arrive at 4pm or 4am?
Sending volume: How many of these emails did you send out at once?
Sending frequency: How often are you trying to email people?
Consumer engagement: Is anyone actually opening/clicking your emails?

Working to get all of these answers (and more) right is essential or you might find your email domain permanently blacklisted from one or all of the ISPs that you’re sending to. So what can you do to build a scalable infrastructure and work within these restraints?

How to successfully send email at scale

As we mentioned above, there isn’t necessarily a single, perfect solution for overcoming the innumerable hurdles to large-scale emailing. It takes dedicated and focused strategy to improve your long term inbox placement rates. Here are a few tips that our team keeps in mind as we continue to grow.

Create valuable content

The first step to making sure your emails are well-received by both users and ISP filters alike is creating the right content. Well-designed UX and carefully curated text are important, but it’s equally important that you steer clear of some phrases and keywords and trigger red flags.

Here’s a list of some spam trigger words that you might want to avoid!

Having a dedicated content team gives you the flexibility to create more personalized and more human messages that have a better chance at reaching your intended audience!

Talk to experts

We know we’ve been thorough, but fully understanding the challenges of sending email at scale isn’t something we can teach you in a few hundred words. TrueAccord has a full team of email deliverability experts on staff that can provide industry specific knowledge and know the ins-and-outs of different ISPs’ requirements.

They also regularly audit our deliverability rates so that we can iterate on our processes and improve and help segment our domains and IP addresses as we grow.

Segment domains and IP addresses

Thankfully, our email experts can help explain what that last bit means. Segmenting your domains simply means building different domains that you can email consumers from. For example, some of your emails may come from emails@companyA.com and others may come from emails@help.companyA.com. The same goes for segmenting IP addresses; you may send some of your emails from your main office and others from your satellite office.

This process can help to limit the risk to your brand’s reputation with ISPs as you are less likely to take a big hit if only one of your many email addresses makes a mistake (e.g. bouncing frequently, receiving a lot of spam complaints, having many of its emails remain unopened).

This process is intricate and methodical. Creating ten new domains can’t solve deliverability problems because brand new domains also lack authority. If an ISP’s filters see that a brand new email address is sending out 100,000 emails, it’s likely that it’ll be swept to the side. Which brings us to our next point!

Take it slow

Scaling your program too quickly is heavily penalized even among senders with high engagements. Many well-established companies that want to build a large scale email strategy with their existing customer base make this mistake, and sometimes there isn’t a way to fix it. Placing strict limits on email volume growth can help ensure that ISPs don’t flag your domain.

Track your data

Set your benchmarks, track your performance, and make changes as you go. Data is the life blood of a scalable email program. As you’ve seen, there’s a lot to keep track of, and if any segments of your strategy spring a leak, the ship might sink.

By frequently and carefully monitoring performance—from open and click rates to inboxing rates to bounce rates—you can maintain a full view of your email strategy and make improvements as you build.

No one has the power to flip a switch and send millions of emails per month without risk, but if you build slowly, you can lay the foundation for a successful email strategy. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below!

TrueAccord sends 40x more emails and has up to 70% higher inboxing rates than other collection agencies. Chat with our team today to learn more about what that means for you!

Tag: email