How Much of Your E-Delivery Arrives?
Just because something was sent, doesn’t mean that it is always delivered as expected.
What is the deliverability of your essential customer communications?
We recently saw an Uber Eats driver in Melbourne caught taking a chip from a customer’s delivery. This example uncovered that this situation wasn’t unique and that just because something is sent, doesn’t mean that it is all always delivered.
This got me thinking about businesses sending their invoices and statements to customers simple “expecting” it to arrive because it was sent…but this isn’t always the case!
What’s the deliverability rate for your essential customer communications?
I was recently reading through the 2018 Deliverability Benchmark report published by Return Path.
I know I know, this is something that is probably already bedtime reading for you…right?
But if the title (let alone the content) doesn’t tickle your fancy enough to dig deeper, this report gives an analysis of Worldwide Inbox Placement Rates for the 12 months July 2017 to June 2018.
Again, I know, not too sexy, but these numbers are extremely important to understand when dealing with the electronic delivery of your essential communications to your customers, such as your bills, statements, invoices, policy documents, etc.
In this report, Return Path tells us that Australia actually has one of the highest deliverability rates in the world at 89%. We share this with a number of countries such as Russia, Canada and the UK, our regional neighbours Singapore and New Zealand hit 90%, and for reference, the USA comes in at 83%.
When someone is looking to run a marketing campaign, then deliverability in the 80% to 90% band is about normal and expected, but when you are sending essential customer communications that HAVE TO arrive, anything less than 100% is a problem.
E-delivery is not new news but the way that many organisations have implemented their e-delivery has caused major issues around deliverability (i.e. the end customer actually receiving what they were sent).
If you send 100,000 customer communications by email, but only 90% get delivered, that’s 10,000 communications that you have to roll back into your production workflow, most likely to be printed and mailed.
Let’s say that costs you $1 in postage, plus another (even conservatively) 20 to 50 cents per item for the production.
That’s an extra $12,000+ of hard cost (maybe twice that or more depending on the communication type and the hours of staff that are needed). And that’s not including the cost of the extra time of the customer not having the communication to action (e.g. pay their bill!).
The variety of methods used in implementing digital replacements for print & mail have caused various levels of uptake. This is something I have covered previously in my article The Biggest Challenge for Moving to e-Delivery in Australia but regardless of the method in getting the document to the customer EVERY organisation NEEDS 100% deliverability.
Just like sending a printed document in an envelope, it MUST arrive.
How close are you getting to 100% for your e-delivery?
How is it impacting your profitability?
Let’s say you are a financial services, utility, government, or other business using a marketing engine-based solution to deliver your essential customer communications by email. You spend nearly $10K every month to ensure that you get the best deliverability possible (staff and technology costs) and are still only just hitting 90% deliverability. Once you determine these communications haven’t been delivered, you then spend another $10K+ every month in additional staff and production costs to produce these undelivered emails via a different method (plus on average 3 days delay in getting communications to nearly 10% of your customers).
Changing to an appropriate e-delivery solution with over 99% deliverability out of the box, you are now saving most of this $20K+ every month with savings nearing $250K per year.
What would weeks of man hours and $250,000 extra per year do for your bottom line?
We can help you with your goal of reaching 100% deliverability and at the same time save you significant time and money.
So, if you are yet to pull the trigger on your e-delivery project, or have implemented an e-delivery solution and sick and tired of it not having acceptable deliverability, let’s arrange a time to discuss your specific environment and needs and determine the best way we can help.
*Thanks to Eddie McGuire and the team at Melbourne’s own Triple M’s Hot Breakfast for breaking the Uber Eats story and for the image above.
