Instill these best practice procedures to improve campaign rate of return by reaching your target market and enticing a call to action.
Regular analysis of consumer communications is key to maintaining a good reputation in the marketplace, better understanding of your target audience, and improve consumer engagement.
- Use A Dedicated Marketing Email Address - Set up a unique custom email from your domain just for consumer communications. This aides in tracking all marketing campaigns and provides a dedicated marketing return address that may be a group email for the marketing team to monitor all feedback after campaign delivery. If a subdomain handles your marketing efforts and ends up with some spam complaints, your primary domain reputation won’t suffer as a result.
- Review & Revise - We recommend running and reviewing reports on email and letter campaigns on a daily or weekly basis to assess key metrics, such as those listed below, to evaluate consumer engagement on each campaign’s activity. Revise campaign strategies such as sending to a smaller target group, using engaging subject lines, or including call to action links.
- Validate Email Addresses - are you getting a lot of undeliverable emails or letters? Run reports to see if the email addresses are undeliverable. Use this as a learning tool to be proactive in reaching out to consumers to validate and confirm the email address on file. This is a great way to connect with consumers.
- Avoid Free Email Services – Free email services such as Yahoo or Gmail are commonly filtered as spam. These domains are typically used for personal use, not business use. Sending company communications from such domains can put your company at risk of being blacklisted.
- Be Direct– emails are meant to be a quick read, with an attention span of only 8 seconds content matters. Avoid letter layouts with extraneous information like the date, consumers mailing address, or other unimportant information. To quickly grab consumer’s attention, configure emails to be direct and to the point with just a paragraph or two of impactful content.
- Avoid Blacklisting with Domain Authentication (DKIM). No matter what solution you use, ensure your domain has been authenticated for sending emails to avoid being filtered to the dreaded spam or junk folder. Authenticate your email by verifying your domain (DKIM), this will ensure your emails get delivered.
- Bounce Rates – There are two main types of bounces in the industry. Understanding both can help improve a companies’ reputation and increase consumer engagement. As a rule of thumb, above a 2% bounce rate can begin to damage delivery status and can increase the risk of your organization getting put on the blacklist. As a high-level overview, here's how bounce rates stack up.
Hard Bounce Rate – Consists of emails that cannot be delivered due to permanent delivery failures. Of the many, below are the most common reasons. Despite the reason all hard bounce email addresses should be removed from lists.
- fake address
- email domain isn't a real domain, or
- recipient's server doesn't accept emails
Soft Bounce Rate – consists of emails that temporarily could not be delivered, such as:
- full Inbox
- file too large
Most providers will continue to attempt to deliver the email over the period of a few days. If these same addresses continue to pop-up, remove them.
8. Monitor Click Through Rates – The average click through rate is between 1%-5% depending on the target market. Assess how many consumers are engaging with your emails or letters by continuously monitor campaign click through rates.
9. Manage Unsubscribe Lists – Review unsubscribe lists on a daily basis and be sure to update email lists accordingly or ensure your email software removes names automatically, like our EasyWebDocs solution. If you are seeing a high volume of unsubscribe notices, consider changing your campaign strategy with a few proven practices:
- segmenting your target audience,
- reduce the number of communications sent on a weekly or monthly basis, or
- use a more friendly subject line
10. Know your Target Audience – Break down campaigns into smaller groups associated by common criteria to help personalize communications and increase engagement. Assess consumer data to find common threads that bind consumers together whether it be a common client, billing time-frames, or newly acquired vs legacy accounts; establishing target audiences allows you to connect more closely with the consumer.
Sources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/difference-between-hard-soft-bounces-ht
Was this article helpful?
That’s Great!
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry! We couldn't be helpful
Thank you for your feedback
Feedback sent
We appreciate your effort and will try to fix the article