7 Plays to Make Your Email Deliverability Unstoppable
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Increasing your email deliverability rates can drastically improve your bottom line. Now more than ever, the modern marketer needs to be freshly equipped with innovative deliverability strategies to get their emails placed in the inbox. Join email expert, Mike Madden, to learn actionable takeaways from how to implement bounce management campaigns to segmentation strategies for higher deliverability and click-through rates! In this webinar, you will learn about: - Soft and hard bounce management - Innovative inboxing strategies - Reactivating cold subscribers
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7 Plays to Make Your Email Deliverability Unstoppable
- 1. 7 Plays to Make Your Email Deliverability Unstoppable Mike Madden Demand Generation Program Manager Marketo
- 2. • This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will be sent to you after the webinar concludes. • Have a question? Chat in the bottom right and I’ll get to your questions after the webinar. • Posting to social? Use our hashtag - #mktgnation • There is a brief survey after this webinar. Housekeeping
- 3. Page 3© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Getting Your Email Delivered is Tougher
- 4. Page 4© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 According to Return Path, just 79% of commercial emails land in the inbox
- 6. Page 6© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Soft bounce vs. hard bounce A soft bounce is a temporary problem with email deliverability, usually due to an unavailable server or a full inbox. A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email, usually a result of an email address being non-existent, invalid or blocked.
- 7. Page 7© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Set a lower soft bounce threshold Whether you use an ESP or marketing automation, you should be able to set a soft bounce threshold. At Marketo, if an email soft bounces more than 6 times in 30 days, we retire that email.
- 8. Page 8© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Soft Bounce Management: Clean Existing Emails Audience:
- 9. Page 9© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Soft Bounce Management: Clean Existing Emails How the Audience is Processed:
- 10. Page 10© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Soft Bounce Management: Triggered Campaign Audience:
- 11. Page 11© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Soft Bounce Management: Triggered Campaign How the Audience is Processed:
- 12. Page 12© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Set the hard bounce threshold to one After the first hard bounce, retire that email for good! At Marketo, an email is marked as invalid after the first hard bounce.
- 14. Page 14© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Email Hygiene Matters There are two considerations for email hygiene: 1. What you can do 2. What an external data vendor can do
- 15. Page 15© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Email Hygiene: What You Can Do Using marketing automation, set up campaigns that listen for junk emails like: • Syntax errors in emails: Ex. me@ao.lcom • Role account emails: Ex. sales@company.com • Rude emails: yousuck@gmail.com
- 16. Page 16© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Email Hygiene: What Data Vendors Can Do Use Data Validation vendors to scrub your emails lists! They’ll tell you which emails are: • Safe to send • Bad • Unknown
- 17. Clean Code is Happy Code
- 18. Page 18© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Internet Service Providers Love Two Things
- 19. Page 19© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 How to Write Clean Code: Close All Tags HTML tags are written with a start tag, an end tag, and with content in between.
- 20. Page 20© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 How to Write Clean Code: No duplicate code WISYWIG editors are notorious for inserting random or duplicate code. Example <span style=“color:blue;”>Please<span style=“color:blue;”> keep your code clean.</span></span>
- 21. Page 21© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 How to Write Clean Code: Update Title Tags
- 22. Page 22© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 How to Write Clean Code: Alt Tags The following elements have alt tags: • Logo (top left) • Social buttons (top right) • Banner Example Code: <img src="http://pages2.marketo.com/rs/561-HYG- 937/images/11319-YourMarketingAutomationChecklist- Email_564x355.jpg" alt="Your Marketing Automation Checklist" width="564px" height="355" border="0" />
- 23. Page 23© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Previous Template – All Views Desktop: Tablet: Mobile:
- 24. Page 24© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 New Template – All Views Desktop: Tablet: Mobile:
- 25. Page 25© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 The Results: 27% Higher Unique Clicks 28% Higher CTR 31% Higher Click/Open And improved our inboxing rate!
- 26. Measure and Optimize Your Email Inboxing
- 27. Page 27© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Beyond Deliverability, There’s Inboxing Did you know that when an email goes to the spam folder or junk folder, it still counts as delivered? There are tools that measure inboxing, which is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox.
- 28. Page 28© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Does This Look Familiar?
- 29. Page 29© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 What does Inboxing Look Like?
- 30. Page 30© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Inboxing with Spam Filter Breakdown
- 31. Page 31© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 How to Increase Your Inboxing 1.Lower your soft bounce threshold 2.Remove hard bounced email addresses after one hard bounce 3.Scrub your lists using external data vendors! 4.Make sure that you only send to subscribers who are opted-in 5.Stop sending to old emails!
- 32. Segmentation by Engagement and IP Addresses
- 33. Page 33© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 The #1 Thing Internet Service Providers Love?
- 34. Page 34© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Use Engagement to Your Advantage Last Engagement < 90 Days Last Engagement > 90 Days Total Delivered 20,000 80,000 100,000 Open Rate 18.0% 3.0% 6.0% CTR 3.0% 0.2% 0.76% Unsubscribe Rate 0% 0.31% 0.25% Inboxing 95% 55% 63% Staggered Sends Inboxing 95% 70% 75% You’ve just increased your inboxing rate by 19%!
- 35. Page 35© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Separate Email Campaigns by IP Addresses Email campaigns can be separated by: • Importance • Engagement • Purpose
- 36. Don’t Buy Lists
- 37. Page 37© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Don’t Buy Lists
- 39. Page 39© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 What is a Reactivation Campaign? A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time. Why use reactivation campaigns? • Awaken the sleeping subscribers that still want to hear from you • Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you • Clean out your email lists
- 40. Page 40© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Great Examples
- 41. Page 41© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Great Example: Kate Spade
- 42. Page 42© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Great Example: Hotels.com
- 43. Page 43© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Reactivation Campaign Tips 1. Isolate your sleepy subscribers 2. Test language, offers, deals, and anything else you can think of 3. Give them a BIG unsubscribe button 4. Think beyond a one-and-done campaign
- 44. Page 44© Marketo, Inc. 2/18/2016 Key Takeaways Set lower email bounce thresholds Scrub your email lists Keep your code clean and concise Look beyond deliverability at inboxing Segment your audience by engagement and IP address Don’t buy lists! Reactivate your sleepy subscribers
- 45. Questions? Or send me an email: mmadden@marketo.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmadden824
Notes de l'éditeur
- And with that let’s get going!
- Getting your email delivered is tougher. Much tougher. Five years ago, getting your email delivered was a matter of having the right email address and that the email was not super obvious spam. By that, I mean your email didn’t say FREE in all caps 50 times. But in today’s world, avoiding spammy words isn’t enough to hit the inbox. Big internet service providers have followed Gmail’s push towards an engagement model. What does that mean? You may have noticed that Gmail now has tabs: one for primary email, another for social, and a third for promotions. Hitting that primary inbox is increasingly difficult because now Gmail looks at several things: Continuously opened emails Unique clicks as well as multiple clicks Scrolling Frequency of engagements (does the recipient open emails and engage with them regularly)
- According to Return Path, only 79% of commercial emails hit the primary inbox. That means 1/5 end up in junk, spam, hard bounce or go undelivered. If you are counting on all 100% of delivered emails to hit the inbox and 1 in 5 do not, that’s a BIG deal! Also, how many times have you ever looked in your spam folder and clicked a bunch of those emails? Probably not often. When we see that something has been determined spam, we tend to keep our distance. In order to make sure you get delivered in this tougher email saturated world, what should you do?
- Soft bounce: a temporary problem with email deliverability that can be due to an unavailable server or full inbox. Hard bounce: a permanent failure to deliver an email, usually a result of the email address being non-existent, invalid or blocked. A hard bounce not only hurts your deliverability numbers but also hurts your sender reputation! Internet Service Providers or ISPs like senders that have low hard bounce rates because it shows that you take care of your email lists and keep them fresh. So the less hard bounces, the better. And hard bounces can be dangerous business too. Because this email may be invalid, non-existent or blocked entirely, it makes it a great candidate for a spam trap, which is an email address that was set up by an ISP to catch spammy senders. Hitting a spam trap will severely hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, especially with the specific ISP that set the trap, and could potentially put your IP address on a black list. A black list is an online database of spammy senders. If you’re on a black list, all I can say is good luck with your deliverability. It’s gonna be extremely difficult to get your emails through to your recipients. So what should you do improve your soft bounce and hard bounce rates?
- Set a lower soft bounce threshold Whether you use an email service provider or a marketing automation solution, you should be able to set a soft bounce threshold. Often times, they are set to a conservative number like 10 soft bounces = a hard bounce, or an email that should be retired. Soft bounces have a possibility of becoming something worse that could hurt your sender reputation. So, don’t take your chances! Here at Marketo, we built automated campaigns that are listening for soft bounce thresholds to be met. We built two campaigns. Let’s take a look at what one of these campaigns looks like in Marketo just so you can get a feel for how something like this is built. Here’s the details: 1) The first challenge we had to tackle was cleaning up all repeatedly soft bouncing emails in the past. We essentially had to clean out the junk before we could build an automated campaign that would scrub emails as we go. So we built a campaign that said if an email has soft bounced more than 10 times in the last 90 days, mark it as invalid. This removes it from all future marketing campaigns. Just this alone did wonders for our deliverability. 2) Now since we cleaned up past soft bouncing email addresses, we needed to set up an automated campaign that would listen for new thresholds to be met and scrub out soft bouncing emails. Here’s what the campaign said: if an email bounces more than 6 times in the past 30 days, mark it as invalid and remove it from all future email campaigns. What this does is clean the system as we go: so as we send more emails, more emails will be scrubbed, and the system will stay clean. It’s a self-cleaning environment.
- Soft Bounce Management: Clean Up Existing Emails The first challenge we had to tackle was cleaning up all repeatedly soft bouncing emails in the past. We essentially had to clean out the junk before we could build an automated campaign that would scrub emails as we go. So we built a batch campaign that said if an email has soft bounced more than 10 times in the last 90 days, mark it as invalid. This removes it from all future marketing campaigns. Here we have the audience from that campaign.
- And here is how we processed that audience. We mark the email as “Email Invalid” and change the data value on the “Email Invalid Cause” to “Soft Bounce > 10 times, past 90 days”. By having a centralized field like Email Invalid, we can reference the field in all of our email campaigns moving forward and suppress those email addresses.
- Okay, so the last campaign was to clean up existing email addresses that have reached a high number of soft bounces. Next, we needed to build something that would capture soft bounces in real time and mark them as invalid. In the above screenshot, we listen, using a trigger (which is the orange box), for emails that soft bounce a minimum number of 6 times in the last 30 days. There is an additional filtering criteria (in green) that filters further by email addresses that haven’t been delivered a minimum of 2 emails in the last 30 days. We say this just to be certain that these emails are in fact going undelivered.
- The process here is very similar to the flow from the batch clean up campaign we just reviewed. The only difference here is the email invalid cause. But that’s it. So what have we accomplished with these two campaigns? With the first batch campaign, we clean up emails in our system that had a reputation for repeatedly soft bouncing. And then with this triggered campaign, we have introduced an automated scrubbing campaign. So as we send more emails, more emails will qualify for this trigger and be scrubbed out. Bounce management methods like this are critical to managing your deliverability. Lastly, these are numbers that we found worked well for our business and frequency of emails sent. These soft bounce thresholds may not be ideal for your business. Evaluate how many emails you send per week or per month and build bounce management campaigns that you and your team are comfortable with.
- So we learned how to manage soft bounces. Now let’s look at hard bounces. Retire hard bounces after the first bounce. Some email providers and marketing automation solutions do this for you but not all do. Make sure that any email that hard bounces is removed from your list. It won’t do you any good to keep sending to an invalid email. And if you’re using an email service provider where you load the email lists into the campaign from an external data source like SQL tables or Microsoft Access, be sure to export all of your hard bounces after each campaign to scrub them against your email database. So here’s an example for why you need to scrub out hard bounces. Let’s say that in the first 10% of emails delivered to Yahoo email addresses, you hit a spam trap, which coincidentally was at some point a hard bounce. Yahoo will now place restrictions the other 90% of the Yahoo emails from being delivered because they think you might be a spammer. So on an email campaign where you normally might have seen 98% deliverability, you could now see deliverability in the 60% range. Your reputation with Yahoo is tarnished and now you have to repair that relationship over time. Plus, if yahoo emails make up 30% of your list, that’s lost revenue every time you send an email until Yahoo likes you again. Making sure hard bounces are retired after the first bounce is critical. Okay, let’s move on to something less scary
- Number 2: Practice Good Email Hygiene
- Email hygiene is a lot like your own personal hygiene. You probably brush your teeth twice daily because it’s good for you. And just like scrubbing your teeth to prevent cavities, you need to scrub your email database to prevent hard bounces and spam traps, which I would argue are A LOT worse than cavities. Side note: I wish this was my golden retriever brushing his teeth. My golden retriever would never let me brush his teeth, unless I was brushing his teeth with bacon. There are two angles to email database hygiene. It’s comes down to what you can do within your system vs. what an external data provider can do for you. Let’s cover both of these in more detail.
- Using Marketing Automation, you can set up campaigns with triggers that listen for junk email values that you know are either invalid, non-existent or company domains. This will help you keep bad email addresses to a minimum in your database. Listen for syntax errors poorly formatted email address. You can set up a campaign that listens for domains that are formatted incorrectly, just like the AOL example here. Listen for role account emails. These aren’t likely to be invalid but they probably wont get you in touch with the right person. And if that company ever retires that email address, you could just be sending your email to an undeliverable address, which hurts your deliverability and sender reputation. Plus, these email addresses are usually available on the contact us page of any website, making them easy targets to be harvested off the internet and turned into pure spam traps. Lastly, listen for emails that are very obviously coming from “rude” people. It stinks that people would put different variations of “you suck” into your database but that’s just what happens. We know for sure that we don’t need to send to these emails because they don’t exist. The good news is they are easy to spot and you might get a laugh of out it. Keep in mind too that you need to set up two types of campaigns: one that cleans up existing email addresses and another triggered campaign that listens for new junk email addresses to enter the system. This ensures that your databases stays clean top to bottom. And if you’re using an email service provider, you likely won’t get this functionality. Marketing automation will help you get a better handle on your deliverability measures, so it may be worth looking into if deliverability is a priority for your company.
- Emails go bad. Some go bad after 6 months, others might go bad after 6 years. And they go bad for various reasons but mostly it’s because they go inactive for an extended period of time. When that email you don’t use goes unused for a year (or some long period of time), an internet service provider like Gmail might turn that email into a spam trap and hitting a spam trap can, as you know, kills your sender reputation. To help keep your lists clean, there are great data companies that validate your emails. They’ll come back with results showing which emails are safe to send, which are bad, and which are unknown. ISPs love seeing you, as a sender, send to clean email addresses. It’s just good email etiquette. Once you learn of those values, you can go into your email database and label each email address with the appropriate value. Anything that is marked as bad, you should purge from your email database completely. The emails will be spam traps, honey pots (which is a pristine spam trap), invalid, undeliverable, or junk. Emails marked as unknown are a little different. You don’t actually know for sure if they are good or bad but I think it’s worth you finding out. Create small campaigns, and by small I mean maybe 500 people, where you send to “unknown” email addresses using an email that you know has worked well in the past. Create trigger campaigns that listen for that email to be delivered. If it is delivered, mark it as “safe to send” and add it to the rest of your valid email address database. Anything that hard bounces, soft bounces, or goes undelivered is probably best to be marked as bad, which you should label and purge from all future campaigns. Keeping your list clean and scrubbing it annually or biannually will help ensure that you reduce hard bounces, soft bounces, and spam traps. And if you’re email database is growing extremely rapidly, you may want to scrub them once a quarter just to be safe. The positive result here is that you lower your business risk hitting a spam trap and getting blacklisted AND AT THE SAME TIME, all of your email metrics will increase.
- Number 3: Clean Code is Happy Code
- Internet Service Providers love two things: watching your every move and looking for clean code. It’s true. Not only do ISPs look at who you send to and how they engage with your email, but they also dissect your code using spam filters. And if spam filters don’t like your code, you may not make it through to the primary inbox. No worries though! I will cover all that you need to know and show you a real life example of how we cleaned up our code and made it through more spam filters.
- Follow these simple checks for cleaner code: Close all tags HTML tags are written with a start tag, an end tag, with content in between. Tags for paragraphs, tables, spans, divs, and others all needs to be closed. If you leave HTML tags open, you’re email may break, causing it to render poorly. AND ISPs will see it as incomplete code. If you aren’t familiar with HTML code, work with someone on your team who is and make sure there aren’t incomplete or floating tags in your emails or underlying templates.
- WISYWIG editors are notorious for inserting random or duplicate code, especially when you copy and paste text from an external source like a Microsoft Word document. It’s extremely unfortunate because on one hand the WISYWIG editor makes our lives easier but on the other, the underlying code might contain some dupes or random code. ISPs and spam filters look very closely at email code. Code that contains errors like duplicate lines of code, open tags, missing tags, or a weird markup language is considered spammy. Here’s a simple example of duplicate code. I’ve written a sentence that is to be styled the color blue. I’m using <span> tags and inline CSS to style the text “Please keep your code clean”. The code in red is a duplicate because it is styling text that is already styled, meaning it is inside of the main <span> tags. If we remove it, the sentence will still appear blue but the code is more clean and concise. So to check these, look at the underlying HTML in the editor you use. If you don’t know HTML too well, pull someone aside who does and make sure these duplicate lines of code or random code are no where to be seen.
- ISPs and spam filters love to see your title tag be meaningful and relate to your email content. Here’s a screenshot from our HTML editor in Marketo. I’ve highlighted the title tag. You’ll notice it says “Your Marketing Automation Checklist”. What do you think the offer was? Yep, it’s a marketing automation checklist. Update this tag for every new email you send and it will help your deliverability.
- A commonly accepted best practice for email marketing is to use “alt” text, which stands for alternative text, on email images. Here’s why you should use “alt” tags: Most email clients block images by default. When images are blocked, your alt tags will display the text over the blocked images. This is a handy way to communicate messages even when images cannot. If you’re in a situation where images can’t load due to a bad or broken connection, alt tags will save the day! You’ll see in the screen shot on the left that our alt tags are displaying text that’s telling the recipient what the images are. And in the example code on the right, I’ve made the alt text bold and red. If you aren’t already using alt text in your emails, please start using it. It will help your deliverability rates and potentially even your open rates too!
- Let’s take a look at an email template update just a few months ago. The goal here wasn’t even to clean up the code: it was to make sure we have the best mobile responsive email possible. As you can see, things looked pretty good until we got to a tablet size. The issue here was that we weren’t able to accommodate every screen size. So as the email would transition down from desktop to mobile phones, we’d experience a slight break in the banner on the tablet sized version. BUT we had tested this email template using Litmus to verify that it rendered well across the majority of browsers and devices. We were confident very few people would see the version in the middle. HOWEVER… We saw this as an opportunity to explore developing a new template that will help us in the long run. And in a world that’s going mobile, we felt that we had to do this sooner rather than later. So, we made some corrections and crafted a new template that we felt would perform well across all devices, platforms and browsers. And in the process, we consolidated the code, making it cleaner and more concise.
- Here are the brand-new templates! We tested them against the ones I just showed you. Are you ready to see the test results?? Drumroll please!
- Okay, these results were super, SUPER cool because these emails looked so similar from the start. The new template with more mobile ability increased unique clicks by 27%, increased the click-through-rate by 28% and increased the click/open rate by 31%! All of these numbers are statistically significant! Even more impressive is that after cleaning up the code, we improved our inboxing rate, which is directly in relation to how spam filters analyzed our code! What I want you to take away from this is a couple things: Mobile responsive is no longer a nice-to-have but an absolute must-have! It’s not always about the copy or the fun creative images. Think of the template as the vehicle that gets your email to where it needs to be. If that vehicle isn’t working well, your email won’t perform to it’s full potential! Invest some time into optimizing your templates and every single email you send WILL perform better. Also, clean code is happy code.
- Number 4: Measure and Optimize Your Email Inboxing
- Did you know that when an email goes to the spam folder or junk folder, it still counts as delivered? So you might have a 99% email deliverability rate, which seems awesome, but maybe only 50% of those emails actually hit the primary inbox. And if you’re like any business that relies on email marketing to drive revenue, 49% of your emails going to spam or junk is a BIG deal! But how would you know if that’s happening? Luckily, there are tools that measure inboxing, which is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox.
- Here’s a screenshot from a campaign I ran in Marketo. You’re probably used to seeing metrics just like this. 1,142 emails were sent, 1,124 emails were delivered and your deliverability rate was 98.4%. That’s a pretty great deliverability rate, but as I just mentioned, what percentage of those emails actually hit the inbox and not a spam or junk folder? This is where an inboxing tool becomes your new best friend!
- Here’s a screenshot from Marketo’s integrated deliverability tool called 250ok. As you can see, deliverability is broken down much more granularly than “you got 98.4% deliverability”. Each row represents a different email provider and the columns show you your inbox rate, your spam folder rate, and the rate of emails that went missing entirely. These domains can be weighted so that if 50% of your email list happens to be Gmail, you get a fair inboxing representation in this tool. The total inboxing on this campaign was 89.5%, which is very good especially since we know from Return Path that on average only 79% of emails hit the inbox.
- 250ok will also provide you with a break down of how your email performed at the spam filter level. Some of the most recognizable spam filters are Barracuda, Cloudmark and Spam Assassin. As you can see here, this same campaign passed all of these major spam filters. Lastly, one of the biggest reasons to use inboxing tools is that they will provide you with detailed strategy recommendations on how to increase your inboxing rates for specific ISPs. So let’s say that you’ve traditionally struggled with delivering emails to Verizon email addresses. Inboxing tools will actually give you a Verizon specific strategy recommendation for how to increase your sender reputation and inboxing with Verizon email addresses, which takes away much of the guess work on how to get your emails inboxed. By following the strategies laid out by these tools, you can see great results in your inboxing in as little as couple months! I strongly recommend that you explore adding an inboxing tool into your marketing mix.
- But if you don’t have a tool that measures inboxing and you’re looking to make strides towards higher inboxing without having to pay for it, here are some tips to follow. Lower your soft bounce threshold The less times you soft bounce, the lower the risk for a hard bounce. This keeps your sender reputation up and email lists clean. Internet service providers love seeing companies send to clean email addresses and they’ll reward you by letting more of your emails hit the primary inbox. Remove all hard bounced email addresses after one hard bounce Remove emails that hard bounce once. Trust me, it’s not worth trying to email them again! You do not want to hit a spam trap or get blacklisted! Scrub your lists using external data vendors! Like I mentioned in earlier slides, using external vendors to validate your email lists really helps to keep your lists fresh! Do this bi-annually or annually to catch bad emails. A really great vendor that I’ve used in the past is FreshAddress. Make sure that you only send to subscribers who are opted-in This one might seem silly but try to only send emails to people that want to hear from you. If you send unwanted emails, more people will mark you as spam, which lowers your sender reputation and will hurt your deliverability. It’s just not worth the risk. Stop sending to old emails! Old emails can be dangerous. Someone that hasn’t engaged with your emails in the past year is not very likely to engage again. In fact, it might be more likely that the person will just mark you as spam because they don’t want to hear from you any more. Or even worse, the email might go bad and be converted to a spam trap!!! If you send to a more engaged segment of your total audience, your email metrics will increase. You’ll see higher opens, more clicks, lower unsubscribes and less spam clicks. As a result, internet service providers will say “Hey, that sender delivers emails that recipients love! People can’t seem to get enough. Let’s make sure that more and more of their emails not only get delivered but hit the primary inbox too”. There is another alternative. You can try what’s called reactivation campaigns to older emails in your lists. We will talk about these shortly.
- Number 5: Segmentation by Engagement and IP Addresses
- Getting an ISP to love you is no easy task. Getting all of them to love you is arguably more difficult that getting your celebrity crush to love you. Believe me, I know. So far, we’ve covered a few points for what makes an ISP love you as a sender: They love email list hygiene – both scrubbing that you do and scrubbing that an external data vendor can do And within that same category, they love soft bounce and hard bounce management. The love clean code They love when you don’t use super spammy words or phases. At this point, it probably feels like this relationship with ISPs is a lot of work, huh? And it is! But the #1 thing they love to see is high levels of engagement. That means lots of people opening, clicking, reading, scrolling, and engaging with your emails on a regular basis. When you have high engagement, ISPs will let the majority of your emails hit the primary inbox. Why? Because your email recipients want them and the demand is high!
- Okay, so ISPs let emails in and get placed in the primary inbox when your recipients regularly engage with them. So how do you use that to your advantage to get more inboxing? Let me give you an example. This is just a mock campaign. Let’s say you have 100,000 emails that are delivered. Within those 100,000 emails, 20k have engaged within the last 90 days. The remaining 80k haven’t shown engagement in greater than 90 days. Let’s look at the first column. If you were to just send those 20k emails, the open rate would be 18%, the CTR would be 3%, and the unsubscribe rate would be 0%. I’m assuming the unsubscribe rate is 0% because typically when people just engaged, they aren’t likely to unsubscribe. So these are great rates! Conversely, if you look at the middle column, if you just sent that 80k of emails who haven’t engaged within 90 days, the open rate would be 3%, the CTR would be 0.2%, and the unsubscribe rate is a little high at 0.31%. These numbers could definitely be better. When you send all 100k at the same time (the far right column), you have a 6% open rate, a 0.76% CTR, and a .25% unsubscribe rate. Normally, this is probably what you do and these would be the metrics you’d expect based on this example. Now, what if I told you that if you send the email to the engaged 20k first, wait 30 minutes, and then send the 80k unengaged emails, you’ll get better inboxing rates? Yep, that’s correct. When you send the engaged 20k first, the ISPs will look at you and say “Wow, look at all the engagement on that email. People seem to love this sender and what they have to offer! Let’s boost their reputation and keep it high.” Now when you send the remaining 80k emails, you’ll actually get higher inbox placement on those 80k just because you warmed up your sender reputation 30 minutes prior. Now look at the bottom row titled “Staggered Sends Inboxing” and compare it to the inboxing row right above it. For the first 20k sent, it doesn’t matter either way. But if you stagger sends, the inboxing increases on your unengaged emails from 55% to 70%! That increases the total inboxing rates for all 100k emails from 63% to 75%! That’s a 19% improvement! If you stagger your sends by engagement, you’ll see higher deliverability rates and much higher inboxing! This is a really cool trick that not too many people use today, but it is extremely effective!
- In addition to staggering your email campaigns by engagement levels to produce higher inboxing, you should also separate email campaigns by IP addresses. This requires you to have multiple dedicated IP addresses for your email marketing campaigns. I wouldn’t consider this necessary unless you are a high volume sender and your email lists are around 100,000 or more. There are a few ways that I would consider segmenting for IP address and it really all depends on your business needs. You can segment by: Lead or buyer importance. Does this person meet the right demographics, the right behaviors, and the right overall persona to buy from you? Anyone who doesn’t can go to a lower priority IP address. Engagement. Just like you could stagger your email campaigns by engagement, you can also take it one step further and segment them by IP address. For anyone that is highly engaged, send them emails from an IP you’d like to keep fresh. The deliverability, inboxing and engagement will be extremely high. For anyone who you would consider to be lower priority and hasn’t engaged in a while, send them emails off an IP you care less about. If you can segment these two groups, you’ll mitigate the business risk of someone who hasn’t engaged with you in a while marking you as spam and placing your IP on a blacklist. If the IP you care less about ends up on a blacklist, at least you still have a fresh IP designated for higher priority audience. Purpose. You could segment your email campaigns based on purpose. You could have an IP for operational emails like order confirmations or welcome emails. You could have another IP for your actual marketing material and promotions. And this all depends on your business model and your goals. You could even do a combination of all three. The important takeaway here is that separating email campaigns out by different IP addresses will ultimately help you mitigate business risk. If a lower priority audience wants to mark you as spam, that’s better to be on an IP meant for that than for an IP meant for reaching the right people.
- Whether you’ve been doing email marketing for a while or you’re a brand new business just starting up, buying an email list and having a larger email database is pretty attractive. And when big data vendors come in making sweet promises like “this list meets your target audience to the T”, how could you resist? Well, buying lists is generally a poor practice and it may be detrimental to your deliverability rates and sender reputation. Here are four reasons why: 1. Unsolicited emails: If your recipients have never heard from you before or never opted in to receive your communications, your emails could look like spam to them. When an email recipient marks you as spam, your sender reputation will decrease and ISPs will be suspicious of your activities. With enough spam complaints, you could land your IP on a blacklist, ultimately making it harder for all your future emails to be delivered to the folks who actually opted-in to your communications. 2. Quality: You can’t always trust the quality of a list. You don’t know where the names came from, whether the email addresses are correctly formatted, and whether they’ve been scrubbed for spam traps or syntax errors. The email addresses could be old and the demographics can be all over the place. You just never really know what you’re getting yourself into. 3. Spam Rate: Email service providers and marketing automation solutions typically have spam rate thresholds in place so if you receive a certain percentage of spam complaints per email delivered, they may terminate your contract. This is because if you are using IP addresses associated with an ESP or marketing automation solution and you’re sending spam, it’s a bad reflection on them as well to ISPs. And they need to maintain good standing relationships with ISPs to properly service their other clients. I’ve heard that for some ESPs, if your spam rate goes above 0.5%, they’ll reach out to you to do a full audit of your sending behaviors and list hygiene practices. They don’t want to jeopardize their business reputation just because you had to buy some lists. 4. Bad Metrics: This one should be obvious. Your email metrics will plummet with bad lists! These people didn’t want to hear from you, so very few of them will open and click your emails. Is getting a few email clicks worth losing customer engagement? No, especially when you have to explain the reason to your executives.
- A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time. A marketer typically has a list of customers or subscribers, with as many as 25-50% of these people classified as “inactive”. These people have raised their hand in the past, either through showing intent, engagement, or making a prior purchase. Therefore you have spent valuable time and not to mention probably a good amount of money on grabbing their attention in the first place. So, I ask, why not try to get the most value out of your efforts? Why use reactivation campaigns? Awaken the sleeping subscribers that still want to hear from you Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you Clean out your email lists The BIG idea here is that whatever normal campaigns you are running to these subscribers isn’t working. The language or the offers just isn’t enough to keep them engaged. And if it’s been a long while since their last engagement, they get tired of receiving your emails and mark you as spam. Rather than let that happen, you are proactively asking if they still want to receive communications from you.
- Here’s a great example from Crocs. The reason I love this is the headline “It’s been awhile”. It feels approachable and friendly. And it makes you think, “Huh, I wonder how long it’s been…” It even feels like it’s just an old friend reaching out to catch up rather than a business trying to sell something. It’s much better than something like “Where the heck have you been??”, which feels sort of accusatory. Or something like “We wish you’d buy from us again!” Crocs offers a 20% discount to verify the subscription, which is an awesome way to jumpstart a sleepy subscriber and get that back on the fast track to a purchase.
- This one is particularly good. Not only is Kate Spade trying to activate a sleepy subscriber, but they’ve segmented to know that this particular subscriber is a Gmail email address. They’re asking them to check their promotions tab, drag the Kate Spade emails to primary inbox and ensure that all Kate Spade communications end up right in front of their eyes. If you have a large Gmail universe within your email lists, try to use tactics like this to make sure your subscribers are whitelisting your email address. You’ll also notice a reoccurring theme here with some of this language. Dating. “Let’s Stay Together”, “It’s Been Awhile”, and “We Miss You” is the perfect language for effective reactivation emails. It’s soft and surprisingly, it makes you feel like they truly miss you and love you. This builds trust, branding, and a greater tie to your company.
- This one is a little small but I’ll read it to you. Hotels.com says “We haven’t heard from you in a while. As a valued subscriber to the hotels.com weekly deals and specials email, we want to make sure we are meeting your needs. Please verify your email subscription to keep receiving great offers in your inbox” Then it gives you two options. A Yes button and a No Button. The No button is hyperlinked to the unsubscribe page. Anyone that chooses to unsubscribe can do so very easily. This is important because you don’t want someone who is looking to unsubscribe mark you as spam just because they couldn’t easily find your unsubscribe link. Another thing to note here is the use of color. Green for yes and red for No. This is EXACTLY how to run a reactivation campaign. Use colors that people associate with go and stop. I’ve ran a test like this before where I used a Yes/No button combo and tested green and red vs. no colors. I made the Yes button green and the Unsubscribe button red. I saw that by having the color variation like the email above, 40% more people chose to say yes rather than unsubscribe. Something that Hotels.com could have done to improve this email is offer a deal like 20% off your next hotel booked. Also, I would have made the Yes button larger and the No button smaller. Sometimes it helps to highlight the desired action you’d like the email recipient to take.
- Isolate your sleepy subscribers First, you have to choose who is right subscriber to get this campaign. Like I said earlier, I like starting with people who haven’t engaged with you in the past year. If you find that the audience is too small or too big, go ahead and play with the engagement window to suit your needs. It will all likely depend on the frequency at which you send emails and the size of your database. If you use a marketing automation solution or you are thinking about using one, you can set up triggers that listen for inactivity windows and send reactivation campaigns. These are great because you don’t have to constantly worry about creating new campaigns. Test language, offers, deals, and anything else you can think of The fun thing here is that you don’t really know what will work to awake your subscribers. So you can test a bunch of new language (maybe some dating language), crazy new offers, awesome deals, or any other fun ideas that you think might work. The more farfetched, the better. Give them a BIG unsubscribe button You’re probably thinking, “Are you crazy, Mike?! Why would we do that?” Well, part of running these reactivation campaigns is also to determine who doesn’t want to hear from you anymore. And allowing someone to opt-out and unsubscribe from your emails is FAR BETTER than having them mark you as spam. And in my experience, if you offer someone a choice between two CTA buttons: one to unsubscribe and another for a 20% discount or another type of great offer, they are going to take the offer. And anyone that unsubscribes is doing you a big favor by not marking you as spam now or in the future. Also consider what we call FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. Nobody wants to miss out on great deals. If you tell them their going to miss out on unbelievable, record breaking deals, they’ll probably stay opted in and highly engaged with you. Think beyond a one-and-done campaign Don’t just run these campaigns as one and done batch and blast campaigns. Think about a series of emails that get progressively more and more to the point. The first one can be around “It’s been awhile”. To anyone that doesn’t engage with the first one, send a second email a week later around “Are you still interested?”. And if that doesn’t do it, send one more email that says “We’d love to keep sending emails to you but we’re afraid you don’t love us anymore. And we’d hate to keep bothering you. Re-subscribe today or miss out forever”. It’s a harsh message but let me tell you…it gets the job done. The folks who are really still interested will re-subscribe and those who aren’t won’t. It’s just that simple.
- Alright, that’s all I have for you. Before I answer a few questions, I’d like to remind you that there is a brief survey after this webinar. Please take 30 seconds to complete it to let me know how we can make these better for you in the future. Now on to the questions! What do you think of welcome emails? I am a big proponent of welcome emails! When it comes to database cleanliness, most of the issues occur at the email acquisition stage. Welcome emails or a welcome series is a great way to accomplish a few different things. You can: Set expectations for email frequency and offer types Ask new subscribers to whitelist your email domain, which increases email inboxing over the long-term. Even better, for Gmail specific addresses, ask them to drag your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. This ensures inbox placement in the primary tab. Build trust and branding with a warm, personalized message (I’ve heard than using a welcome email or welcome series can increase long-term email engagement by over 30%) Monitor soft bounces and hard bounces because you can clean out your lists if there are obvious junk values. Some people may sign up with a junk email address just to get an offer or deal. Other may have undesirable bounce types. You can catch these in a welcome email campaign and scrub them out before they make it into your long-term email strategy. Does 250ok, the Marketo deliverability and inboxing product, have a way to review email rendering? The answer is yes! 250ok has an entire section devoted to optimizing your email for design. The section is called “Design Informant”. It shows you screenshots of your email across most mobile devices, browsers and email clients. And what’s really cool is that it also gives you code optimizations to optimize your email’s compatibility with different browsers and clients. Lastly, on an email level, you can run your email through 250ok in a test campaign to do a complete spam audit. Your email will be evaluated by the most common spam filters and scored appropriately. 3. The examples you showed for reactivation campaigns appear to be for B2C companies. Is this a strategy that works for B2B companies as well? Great question! Yes, this strategy works for any type of company. The reality is that no matter what kind of company you come from, there’s a great chance that a portion of your email database is unengaged. And let’s think about it for a second: you already spent the money to acquire that new name. So it’s actually much cheaper for you to pursue reactivation campaigns than acquire new names. Where there is a difference between B2B and B2C companies is the email domain breakdown. B2B companies tend to have more company domains in their email database, so some segmentation strategies do not apply as well. But for non-corporate domains like Gmail or Yahoo, specific reactivation campaigns can be ran to drive higher inbox placement for those ISPs. Take the Kate Spade example that I showed you that called out Gmail and asked the recipient to drag the email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. That’s an effective tactic and can work for both B2B and B2C. And with that, I’d like to conclude today’s webinar. Thank you so much for joining me and I hope you learned some very valuable, actionable takeaways. If I wasn’t able to get to your question, I’d love to hear from you. Go ahead and send me an email for connect with me on LinkedIn. There is a brief survey after this webinar concludes and I’d greatly appreciate if you fill it out. It will give me an idea of how helpful this was for you and what you’d like to learn next time. And just to remind you again, these slides and webinar recording will be available to you later today or tomorrow. Thanks and have a great day!