Are you a frequent or an infrequent e-mailer?

A challenge that some of our infrequently e-mailing clients bring to us is that they often see a spike in spam reports and opt-outs when they do get around to sending an e-mail. To be clear, by infrequent e-mailers, I’m referring to a campaign every 2-3 months.

Now, the opt-outs are just an opt-out and they’re to be expected, these are savvy e-mail marketers and they know better than to take opt-outs personally, but they were troubled by the spam reports. Most of these complaints were probably spurred by the simple fact that it had been a while since the subscribers had gotten a message and they had perhaps forgotten that they had signed up in the first place.

What we suggested was a two-fold approach. First, make sure to attach an auto-responder to all their sign-up forms and to make sure that the auto-responder has information about message frequency (more info on auto-responders here). Why? Well let’s say that you email every quarter. If a subscriber signs up two days after you sent your last campaign they’ve got a nearly three month wait for the next message. In the meantime they’re likely to forget that they even signed up. An auto-responder will get to them right away and can explain to them exactly what to expect from you.

Second, if it’s been 6 months to a year since your last mailing, use a re-engagement campaign to actively weed out the subscribers who are no longer interested or who have abandoned their email address. We’ve mocked-up a re-engagement message and included it below. Notice that it’s simple and offers a clear method to unsubscribe as well as a brief description of the typical message frequency and type. The goal is to get anyone who isn’t interested to click the unsubscribe link now rather than reporting your regular campaign as spam. Additionally, we suggested that after the campaign clients use List Sweeper to remove any pending hard-bounces and ‘Mailbox Full’ type soft-bounces.

Our fake re-engagement campaign:

If you’re a GMail user you’ve likely already heard of or may be using Priority Inbox.

Priority Inbox is a new-ish feature on from GMail that automatically sorts users’ inboxes into ‘Important’ mail and ‘Everything Else.’ I know, the feature has been around for a while but it seems to have stuck so I think it’s worthwhile to explore how it can affect e-mail marketing.

The abridged version of how Priority Inbox works is that it tracks users’ interactions with messages to determine which messages are important and which aren’t. In other words, if I consistently open new mail from companyx.com and click on one of the links, Priority Inbox will assume that I consider mail from companyx important. GMail has some more in-depth explanation but it’s safe to say that messages that users interact with are ‘important.’

I’ve heard some moaning and groaning about how the ‘Everything Else’ classification is just Spam Jr. and that it kills the potency of a campaign. My response? Deal with it. Yes, it’s possible that open rates may suffer a bit by pre-classification of a message but this is really an opportunity to enhance your results by focusing on the relevancy of your campaigns. We’ve talked about the importance of sending relevant campaigns before; this is extra incentive to do it. If Priority Inbox measures historical user involvement and targeted campaigns lead to more involvement then sending targeted campaigns will lead to classification of messages as ‘important.’

It’s time to dig in to your subscriber demographics and find a measurement that you can use to divide and target your subscribers. For example, if my company sells gears, springs and pulleys, rather than send a blanket email to all subscribers I’d get much more mileage out of smaller targeted campaigns that only sent information about gears to those customers who have previously bought gears. Subscribers who get a message that they perceive as relevant to them are much more likely to interact with the message. Include links to your other products as a sub-section of your message but if a customer only buys gears, the focus of the message should be gears.

ReachMail can help! Use the demographic filter tool to create mail filters that can be used to target specific subscribers based on one or more demographic criteria. For more info on demographic filters check out this post or head on over to reachmail.net/support and search for demographic.

One of the biggest challenges that you face as an e-mail marketer is keeping lists clean and tidy. An area that we frequent find clients overlooking are soft bounces of the ‘Mailbox Full’ type. These are bounces that came back because the mail server couldn’t cram one more byte into the subscriber’s over-stuffed mailbox.

They have no place in your list. These represent subscribers that have moved on, not just from your newsletters but from that e-mail address all together.

What’s worse is that eventually the ISPs holding those abandoned e-mail addresses are going to deactivate them or hold onto them as spam traps. Continuing to message these addresses after this point is going to negatively impact your sending reputation.

So, ReachMail makes it quick and easy to scrub those records out of your lists. Simply head on over to the Contacts and Lists tab and select the List Sweeper function on any list. In the function select the option to deactivate the Mailbox Full soft bounces and click the Run List Sweeper button. Voila! Your bounces are deactivated.