Are You Sending Smart Email or Graymail?

Dealers are historically known for marketing to everyone in their database—the idea being that the more consumers you market to, the more likely you are to get conversions.

This has never been true, and dealers need to be smarter about their marketing efforts.

So, what is Graymail?

As HubSpot explained:

“Graymail is email that contacts have opted in to receive, but never open or click. Spam filters can identify and filter out emails that your recipients aren’t opening or clicking. This increases the likelihood that future emails will end up in the junk folder or spam filter. By continuing to send email to contacts who don’t open or click, you’re lowering your sender score overall.”

Similarly, if you have a Gmail address, you may have noticed that every so often a message pops up asking if you want to unsubscribe from something because you haven’t opened or clicked on anything from that sender in a long time.

One solution for avoiding these deliverability traps is to create a sunset policy specific to your business to determine who should be removed from communications and when—i.e., after a certain number of nonresponses. While this is a great idea in principle and necessary in today’s landscape, it can also be cumbersome to undertake on your own, especially with limited staff.

What you need is a tool that can predict a consumer’s propensity to engage and prevent you from overcommunicating and creating even more graymail.

This is done by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine how frequently to send communications to each consumer. Excluding certain consumers does not mean permanently excluding them or removing any valid consumer records from your database. Those customers and prospects are simply being “rested.”

You may at first still be wary of this method because it means fewer sends, but it also results in more overall engaged consumers and more linked sales and service transactions.

By reducing our volume of email sends by 42% from March to April of this year, utilizing propensity to engage predictive models, Outsell saw an increase of 47% in Unique Opens.

Data across industries has shown this to be the best answer to reduce spam complaints and increase Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) by upwards of 90%, thwarting deliverability issues and keeping currently unengaged consumers from becoming unreachable in the future.

Learn more about Outsell’s Virtual Customer Engagement platform here.