Topica's Blog

Part 1: How Spam Filters Work

Part 2: What is my External Reputation?

This is Part 3: Improving Open Rates, Minimizing Bounces

In my previous posts this week I spoke about spam filters and what they look for in regards to deciding whether or not to let your mailings go through to the inbox. Some of these items were pretty straight forward and very quick to do (e.g. send matching TEXT along with your HTML) while others were more complicated and need to be implemented on a technical level (properly publishing SPF records). However, let’s assume for the moment that all your sending practices are in compliance and your email has passed through the spam filters and landed in the inbox. Now what?

As you will see, what happens once your email is delivered can actually be just as important as getting it delivered. The exact reaction your email generates is important to your business and your sending reputation. If you get opens and clicks which lead traffic to your website and perhaps some sales or conversions, that’s a good thing. If you generate complaints and bouncebacks… Well that’s a bad thing, a very bad thing.

A bounce means your message was not delivered. This falls into two broad categories. A hard bounce is a permanent failed delivery and means the message will never be delivered. A high level of hard bounces is not a good thing in the eyes of an ISP and any email address that hard bounces should be removed from your mailing list. A soft bounce means the message can’t be delivered right now. This could mean that the mailbox of the recipient was full or that their mail server was just not working at that time. How you handle email addresses that soft bounce is also important. You do not want to continue emailing an address that always bounces- eventually you’ll want to remove the address from your list as well, typically after a few bounced campaigns.

So, how can we effectively minimize the bad metrics and maximize the good ones? Well most of the effort should be in the work you do upfront when you collect the email address. My personal number one recommendation is to provide a clear sign up form informing the subscriber that they will be receiving a welcome email shortly with more details about your newsletter. Let’s take a look at how this simple practice will lead to lower bounce rates, higher open rates and fewer complaints.

If you mis-capture an email address because of a sloppy entry on the subscribers part, you will get a bad email that will most likely bounce. Asking people to confirm their email addresses is a way around this, but entering two email addresses can sometimes be a pain and in all honesty, I personally just copy and paste my initial entry into the second one. If, on the other hand I capture the email once and inform them that a welcome message is coming, they will quickly figure it if they gave you the right email address or not. Here we’ve effectively reduced our bounce rate.

Ok so you have a welcome email but what do you put in it? Just a thank you? NO! You want to set expectations up front about how you’ll be mailing them. Something along the lines of:

Hi and thank you for joining my mailing list. I hope you will enjoy my weekly newsletter on cats in heat. I will be sending from this email address so please add me to your address book or safe-senders list in order to insure optimal delivery.

The emphasis was done to highlight what I meant by setting expectations. You want them to know how often you’ll be mailing and from what address and name. That way, when they see you in their inbox, they’re recognize you and are more likely to open your campaign. Not having one of these is probably the biggest preventable mistake I see amongst even experienced senders. Not only does this lead to greater open rates, but it can reduce complaint rates drastically as well. Here’s how.

Imagine you sign up for a monthly newsletter and do not receive any sort of welcome email. You go on browsing and two weeks letter, a message pops into your inbox that you don’t quite recognize. In the case that you do open it, are you likely to remember you signed up for it? Our attention span and memories are short on the web. (Do you remember the websites you went on yesterday?) so something like this may seem like intrusive SPAM and you would be more than happy to hit the complain or report as spam button in your email. Tear.

A simple welcome auto-responder will go far. By confirming the email address, establishing familiarity and following up immediately, you have taken some very important first steps in having a successful email marketing program. In fact, you have done more- you have began to develop a fruitful relationship with your subscriber.

As always, follow up with your own personal experiences or feedback in the comments. Also, please feel free to sign up for the conclusion in our Deliverability Webinar tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

Andrei

Filed under: Best Practices, Deliverability Days, Do's and Don'ts, Email Marketing Tips, First Impressions, Using Autoresponders Tagged: | auto-responders, bounces, Deliverability, open rates, welcome email