By Elmer on May 4, 2009

When you’re sending email marketing campaigns, we obviously want all recipients to receive the message. But it rarely happens, and in most cases, we encounter bounce emails — mails that return to sender — for various reasons such as email address no longer active, mailbox full or simply misspelled email address.

Although it seems difficult to achieve 100% deliverability, such is not impossible goal to reach. For those who experience relatively high bounce rates, here are tips to help ensure that our mailing list is updated and therefore ensure high deliverability of our email messages.

1. Create a list of inactive subscribers. This approach helps identify who among our subscribers are not actively responding to our mails (those who successfully received the message but did not open or click it). Are they not interested in our messages or found them uninteresting or irrelevant? Once we have a list of these email addresses, we can run a

2. Run a program to verify these inactive subscribers to re-opt, and as one would click on the re-opt button, we are certain that this recipient is still interested to receive our mail. Otherwise, they’ll try to find the unsubscribe button as soon as possible. We should allow easy unsubscribe, not only because it is mandated by the CAN-SPAM act, but also because it’s pretty useless maintaining email addresses in the mailing list that are not our target audience.

3. Monitor open rates. New subscribers are the most active, according to studies made by Lyris and MarketingSherpa. After 3 months, open rates begin to drop, and while this is affected by multiple factors, this phenomenon should be monitored and addressed accordingly, before these subscribers fall under the inactive list. There are may ways to reignite interest in EDM campaigns:

a. Surveys and Polls - Know what subscribers think by asking for their response, feedback and suggestions on past and future email messages.

b. Know What They Want - Know their preferences, what topics they want to receive, email formats (HTML / plain text), or even change their contact email addresses. For an employee who left a job, and wants to continue to receive emails, this feature becomes handy.

c. Try Sending on Different Days - Maybe our mails just reach their inbox at the wrong time, and they end up skipping to read our mails for more important tasks. Record response rates for different dates and times and once a trend is established, try to stick to a specific day and time.

d. Stabilize the Message Frequency - Subscribers subscribe to read our messages. But not all have the same luxury of time to read these messages. Perhaps consider sending messages more frequently (say, 2 times a week) to those in active list and less frequently (once a week ) to those who are inactive.

e. Modify Content - Changing content does not just refer to text content. It could also email layout, subject line and personalization. What’s important is that we deliver what is being asked, and nothing more.

We spend considerable amount of time crafting our email copy and designing and testing the email layout. If only half of our intended audience receives the message, we could sometimes ask if the campaign is worth our effort and time.

Having a high delivery rate is good, but let’s remember that it’s only an intermediate step of the whole email campaign and should not be treated as a success indicator. For those who receive the email, we can ask how many among them will open the mail and read the message. And to those who decide to open the mail, how many will click on the links or perform calls to action.

So before we aim at targeting high click and open rates, we should first ensure that our mailing list is alive and ready to receive our messages.

Photo credit: Ben Heine

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