From record-breaking sales to huge increases in open rates, our work really does speak for itself. Check out our case studies to see just how effective full-service email marketing has been for our client’s businesses.
Not every email will reach its intended destination. Sometimes it does, but it turns out that the destination ended up being a spam trapYour messages can get blocked, tossed into the spam folder, ignored entirely, or even reclaimed by an ISP so they can know who hasn’t cleaned their list in years (a telltale sign, to them, of a spammer) If somebody went from top fan to hater or even worse – someone who doesn’t care anymore at all, you’re going to want to know why and what to do about it. Deliverability tracking is the solution. Ignoring these signs is the easiest way to blow up your email program.
There’s a lot to learn just from reading a deliverability report: hard bounces, soft bounces, unsubscribes, spam ratings. And this is all just what you see in your ESP, before we even begin talking about the back-end and all the fun that’s to be had with DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and the like. Along with the total counts for each of these, rates come heavily into play as well. Both tell a story.
Let’s think about bounce rates first - did you know that there are multiple types of bounce? Soft bounces are when there’s a temporary inbox issue at play, while hard bounces are telling of a permanent delivery issue. Soft bounces frequently resolve themselves, whereas hard bounces are…..hard…..to deal with, and likely the result of a dead address. Be especially careful with hard bounces, as these accounts are most likely to be reclaimed as a honeypot for ISPs, and you’ll end up on blacklists all around the globe.
Unsubscribes - these are simple: a contact doesn’t feel that your content is relevant to them, and has no interest in receiving more. This is telling of poor segmentation or incorrect email focus.
Spam ratings are the worst - it’s akin to when your grade school teacher put a funny-shaped hat on your head and made you sit in the corner for the rest of the session. The more spam ratings you get, the further away from a proper email program you are. Your contacts are heavily unengaged, see no value in the message you sent, and worst of all - they actively don’t want to hear from you again, and think that nobody else should either. Ouch…
Want to hear about our dad-joke services package instead of our full-service email marketing packages? Yeah, we didn’t think so. We only send that to the 2 people that we know won’t unsubscribe from that (thanks mom!).
Imagine the same with your audience - if they are interested in one product of yours but not the other, or one service opposed to another, you’re only doing yourself a disservice by sending irrelevant messages to them. Using segmentation - whether it’s put together with hard or soft data - is a big leap in the right direction for keeping your emails as relevant as possible, and your unsubs/spam ratings as low as can be.
How someone reacts to your email will help influence how you send emails in the future. You want to hit the ‘sweet spot’ when it comes to how often you send out your content, and that’s where listening to the data becomes so incredibly important. We’ll help you adjust your campaign depending on how often you reach out to your subscribers while factoring in their level of engagement to help you achieve that sweet spot.
Being a trustworthy sender is key to improving deliverability. We want to make sure you’re on the whitelist or the ‘good’ list of approved senders. You don’t want to end up on any blacklist because if you do, you’ll have a heck of a hard time finding your way back into the inbox. To make it even more difficult, there are blacklists out there that do and don’t impact your overall inboxing scores for the biggest inbox providers, and they all play by different rules. By doing what’s right, though, you won’t land on any.
No, we don’t mean spending $2.5m on that lush villa with the Olympic-size pool. Like with many things in life, you’re sometimes associated with the people you spend time around. Similarly, an ISP will look at the IP pool you’re sending from and if it’s full of businesses with shady agendas that are spamming ‘subscribers’ more than bad ads on a free Spotify account, or send to bought lists, you’re going to automatically start out with a bad reputation.
Don’t worry, this isn’t as complicated as it sounds, and you won’t have to bake pies and go door-to-door to find out who’s around you (although we won’t say no to getting one of those in the mail if you’re in the mood for cooking). You’ll simply need to make sure that you choose a top ESP and as much as possible ensure that you get a dedicated sending IP.
If you see a spike in your spam rates, you’re miles past the right exit, and you’ve got to figure out what the cause is ASAP. Is it a certain domain that’s giving you issues? Maybe certain email addresses or one of your lists has become a dreaded honeypot, maybe your deliverability settings went awry when your dev decided to adjust something without asking you, maybe Mercury is just in retrograde (this last one isn’t usually it). If you know why your emails are ending up in the spam folder, you can prevent it from happening in the future. Your ROI will depend on how efficient you are with your resources, and as you know, ending up in the spam folder is a no-go.
Sometimes you think you’re sending an email to a proper email address but it turns out to be a spam trap. Sometimes only a handful of people will mark your content as spam, yet the whole mailbox provider will end up blocking you. You can’t afford to take that spam mark lightly because it can mean doom for your entire email marketing program, that’s why you need to know who’s giving it to you, why, and how to resolve it immediately.
From record-breaking sales to huge increases in open rates, our work really does speak for itself. Check out our case studies to see just how effective full-service email marketing has been for our client’s businesses.
Sometimes, you might see really strange metrics on a campaign that you sent out, and don’t know where to begin. Deliverability Performance Tracking can help identify underlying issues which may be undermining your campaign. That way, you don’t have to send funked-up emails time and time again, to 30% of your total audience, and wonder why nothing good is coming from it. As it follows, you can maintain your brand identity by spotting any mistakes before your entire subscriber list sees it and it’s too late.
Google judges you. Yahoo judges you. All the ISPs judge you as if you’re walking by their home in a hoodie at night time, but they’re happy to let you in, after they interrogate you and get an answer they’re looking for. Your email address gets a rating from them all, and that rating can determine whether your campaign is successful or not. Since you’re looking for credibility, you should strive to maintain a good reputation. This means proper DKIM, SPF, and DMARC settings to ensure that you pass the legitimacy test, time and time again.
A lot of the time, poor deliverability results from the recipient’s system failing to recognize the sender of the email. With your right to send from your server verified and your identity confirmed, your chances of getting better deliverability rates will increase.
To make sure that you’re in good shape when Google, Yahoo, and their pals are all interrogating you, your friendly neighborhood email marketing agency will be there to have your back, and make sure that your record is clean, so they finally let you deliver your message.
Once you get a picture of which emails work better than others based on how well they’re received; you can transform your content into something that drives contacts to the website time and time again. No cap.. You can balance all the elements in your message so that no single one comes out too strong or too weak. Your content will be Goldilocks-approved, my friends. Your content needs to add value to your subscribers lives, you need responsive emails, and your layout can’t keep changing all the time. Deliverability tracking will help you get to know your subscribers better, giving you insight on how to best give a personalized and pleasant user experience.
The power of the subject line cannot be understated. As you play around with different ones, you get to find out which lines work best for your emails. You might end up discovering what you thought were good keywords are in fact spammy terms and are part of the reason why you landed in the spam box to begin with. Your experiment may even soon show that your use of capital letters is just too ‘Nigerian prince-y’ and therefore spammy as well.
We can’t wait to show you how massively important deliverability performance tracking is and just how much your program can grow, revenue-wise, if you’re hitting 100% inboxing. Best thing about us here at CodeFeranada? We’re ESP-agnostic, so whether you’re looking for a fix-up in your Sailthru account, a Klaviyo expert or you’re a bit of a masochist and are looking for a Salesforce agency, we’re still your best resource.Your campaign will never be the same again once you know what actually happens to the emails after you send them off.
