Have you thought about what might be the real reason behind your poor email delivery? Many marketers blame the email platform they are using.
In most cases, it is not a flaw with your platform, but a flaw with how you follow best email marketing practices. One of the most overlooked areas is a poor quality email list.
What Hurts Your Email Delivery?
Not maintaining your data quality will compromise your deliverability. Situations that hurt your sending reputation are hard bounced emails, spam complaints, hitting traps, and your subscriber engagement rate. Start by finding out where your reputation currently stands. You can plug in your mailing IP address or domain at senderscore.org to review your score.
Hard bounces are typically a result of email addresses you have on your list that either do not exist or once existed but have now been closed. The best example of this situation would be email addresses that have been typed incorrectly.
Over time, good data goes bad. For example, consider an employee who was once with a company and then left. The email account would have been good while the employee was with the company, but is no longer valid after he quit. In the long run, too many bad addresses hurt your email delivery.
Spam complaints and traps are even more harmful to your sender score because the users in your list are not interested in hearing from you. A spam complaint is whenever the users mark your email communication as spam and send you to their junk folders. You might not know when people mark your messages as spam with their mail providers, but you can setup a feedback loop (FBL) to identify these users and unsubscribe them from your list.
A trap is likely the biggest problem you will face when you are email marketing. Traps are designed to catch spammers and shut them down. Even if you are not spamming and are following best practices, it is still possible to get spam traps on your email list, especially if you are affiliate marketing. Hitting traps will lower your score and cause you to get blacklisted.
Review Your Engagement Rate
If you are reading this right now, I’m sure you are facing some struggles with your email marketing. Is your email engagement rate depressing? That is probably a result of having too many unengaged users on your list.
If your list is full of inactive subscribers, again, your reputation will be degraded. The idea behind email marketing is to have a list of users who are wanting to receive your emails. The more the users open and click, the more it shows the ISPs that they like your brand and that your brand is trusted. I would recommend going through your list on a quarterly basis and unsubscribing users who have not engaged in any of your past three months’ worth of email communications.
Poor Data Collection
Now that we have discussed what hurts your reputation and why your engagement rates are important, let’s discuss your data collection methods. Collecting good data is key to having a better-engaged list.
Organic Lead Collection – If you are collecting organic leads on your website in real time, it’s likely that your biggest problem will be typos that later lead to hard bounces.
Affiliate Marketing – If you are driving leads to your landing pages via affiliate marketing, then you should be careful because a lot of fraud occurs in the affiliate space. When you are incentivizing marketers to get you leads, there is a risk they are sending you email addresses that are bogus or email addresses of users who never came in contact with your site.
Using Data Lists – When you work with data brokers, you can have the problem of the list being cold and likely old. When you send data to a list you’ve acquired, the engagement rates will be very low as users are not familiar with your brand. Many data suppliers do not cleanse their data. So it’s likely that a high percentage of it will lead to invalids and hard bounces.
The Dos and Don’ts to Improve Data Quality
- Do collect data organically through your website.
- Do implement real-time email verification to eliminate invalid addresses.
- Do clean up your entire database on a quarterly basis.
- Do remove unengaged users from your list.
- Do be cautious when working with affiliates.
- Do setup FBLs to unsubscribe spam complaints immediately.
- Don’t work with data suppliers.
- Don’t allow every lead into your database.
- Don’t keep emailing complainers.
- Don’t forget to add verifications.
Takeaways
To get good email delivery, treat your list like gold and take care of it. Think of it this way: airport employees don’t let you board your plane unless you clear security. Don’t let any lead through your entry point until it passes validation. Too many rotten email IDs will destroy your list.
Latest posts by Krista Barrack (see all)
- Your Email List Can Be Destructive to Email Delivery - March 10, 2017
Hi Krista,
This article is highly Appreciatable . Email delivery is depend upon Email list. If you get more Email list your traffic will generate. It helps the website.
Thanks for sharing some exceptionally helpful information Krista!
It’s easy to fall into the set it and forget it mindset, with regards to your
email marketing campaigns.
And to so, after being exposed to your excellent suggestions, tips and strategies,
is merely setting ourselves up for some unpleasant outcomes.
Thanks for the wake up call!
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Interesting take. I have found that the general (ie wrong) approach that most people take when emailing is getting MORE aggressive and salesy as time goes by.
If someone doesn’t buy within say 7-21 days, they probably aren’t going to. So sending harder and harder emails more and more often to try and bludgeon them into submission is likely to have totally the opposite effect.
We are increasingly hard wired to try and keep people happy these days. Chasing after someone (via email) because they complained is just a waste of energy. They aren’t interested. Let them go…
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Hi Jonathan,
Yes it is true if you become too aggressive you will lose subscribers, but you also have to make sure your brand is top of mind. Everything is about setting expectations with your customer when they subscribe. Have a content calendar of how many times per week you will send an email and stick with that unless you have a special event going on. Consistency is essential.
I have also read about cases where small business owners have seen people unsubscribe from their list, and they have sent them a personal follow up message to learn about WHY they unsubscribed. This could be a great idea for you if you want to retain clients and make improvements so that you don’t lose other quality subscribers.
Thanks for the tips Krista! I was wondering, what should we do to inactive subscribers? should we remove them instead?
Hello Emmerey Rose,
I would recommend you do a re-engagement campaign. I would also suggest you make it a plain text email for better deliverability. Salvage the email addresses you get opens and clicks on and remove the ones with no activity from your list. When you remove inactive subscribers the next time you send off an email campaign you will see a higher open rate which will also be better for your sender score.
Thanks a lot for the reply Krista. But wouldn’t it a waste to delete the contacts? Isn’t there a way that we can convert them to be active ones?
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1. Your emails might not be getting to them, they might be stuck in the SPAM folder, so they are not going to see these messages and will continue to be inactive. This is why I am suggesting you do a plain text email as your re-engagement campaign.
2. Inactive users can turn into potential traps down the road, and they are hurting your engagement rate. If you send out a re-engagement campaign specifically to the users who have not opened any of the last 10 emails you sent and still get no response on the re-engagement campaign there is no point keeping them on your list.
3. Keep in mind many ESPs charge you per number of subscribers you have on your list, so essentially keeping inactive email IDs is costing you.
Hi Emmerey Rose,
First try to re-activate them, but then if that doesn’t work you should delete them because otherwise you’re paying for them to be on your list.
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Email list is a great source for traffic generation but i am trying to get more email subscribers list. how i can increase any suggestion??
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I was able to choose engaging content based on going with the engagement rate. It is a crucial parameter that has to be monitored for realistic growth. Thank you!
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thanks for this greatful article what about the email delivery i can use many technique for this approach
or use some tools to make it easy
i got it now
you are right.
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