The three tenents of email marketing campaign success:
- List
- Offer
- Creative
The list tells everything you need to know to start sending engaging emails. Many email marketers make the mistake of constantly sending out mass emails without fully cleaning the list. Email marketers will follow the standard practice of removing or flagging unsubscribes, but they will still leave bounces in the list which inflates the size of the list and does nothing to promote your message.
The two types of bounces that must be removed are:
- Hard bounces
- Soft Bounces
Simply put, a hard bounce is any
message sent to an invalid, closed or nonexistent e-mail account. The message never makes it to the reciepient so there is no reason to have it in your list. A soft bounce, on the other hand, is any message
that could not be delivered due to a temporary error such as a connection being down, a full inbox or a filter that may prevented the email from getting through.
Full cleaning of your list is important, but pause for a moment and consider your audience. It might be prudent to turn those soft bounces into opt-in customers. They may want to receive your email, but not know that you have been trying to send messages to them. Send them a postcard asking for them to return it with their correct email information, or call and direct them to the opt-in form on your website.
Your opt-in form is also how you will grow your email marketing list. Propagate a link to it on each page of your website, and be sure to capture the email address, name and an area of interest. The area of interest makes it possible for your to segment and better target your email marketing campaign. By segmenting, you can tailor offers to groups most likely to act.
|
