Since the start of the pandemic, we have seen a huge spike in the number of emails sent from our platform. Unsurprisingly, the overarching subject of interest has been COVID-19. During these uncertain times, we know how important it’s been for you to be able to reassure your partners, clients and customers of your business operations. Many have opted to use a “blanket” approach and have chosen to send their comms to all contacts across their accounts. While this may seem an effective way to reach a lot of people quickly, it can have more damaging consequences:
- Deliverability -
Sending to a high volume of old/bad contacts will register a significantly higher number of bounces. Email service and internet providers scan for high bounce rates and use it as an indicator of spamming activity. If a communication is deemed to be spam, it’s likely that our mail server IPs or your sending domain will be blocklisted by these organisations – this means you will potentially not hit the inbox of any contacts. The other major thing that affects deliverability is the number of spam reports. If you send non-targeted comms that your recipients have not requested to receive, you will record a higher number of spam reports. Internet service providers keep a collective count of these spam reports and blocklist senders accordingly. - Email Volume -
Sending to inactive contacts is a waste of your email volume. Intuitively select who you send to and save your email volume for the contacts who regularly interact with your email campaigns. There’s no point continuing to send to contacts who aren’t interested – instead, save that email volume and deliver additional rich content to your most engaged contacts.
What are the alternatives?
Spoiled for choice! There are three ways that you can better manage your lists:
- Regularly clean your contact lists using Advanced Search
- Send targeted comms using Advanced Search
- Let your contacts select the content they receive using Sign Up Forms
We recommend reading through all the different options before deciding on your list cleaning and segmenting strategy.
Regularly clean your contact lists using Advanced Search
First of all, if you're unsure how to run an Advanced Search across your contacts, you need to navigate to "Contacts" > "Advanced..." drop-down > "Advanced Search". If you require a more detailed walk-through, check out this article.
It's so important that you routinely clean your lists to remove your least engaged and undeliverable contacts. Below, we've included some examples of searches you can run to weed out your bad contacts:
- Removing undeliverable contacts:
This search will pull all the contacts who have either hard bounced or have hit the soft bounce threshold which consequently marks them as undeliverable. By default, the soft bounce threshold is set to 25. This means that if a contact soft bounces 25 times consecutively, they will be marked as an undeliverable contact.
Once you've run the search, select "Save as Dynamic Group" and name the group. Under the "Dynamic Groups" sub-tab, find the group, click the corresponding drop-down and select "Delete Contacts". This will delete the contacts from your account and therefore from any groups they were in.
In the event you ever re-import an undeliverable contact, they will still be marked as undeliverable when re-added since this information is stored centrally on our servers. No need to worry about re-sending to bad contacts.
Although the platform doesn't attempt to send to contacts who are marked as undeliverable, contact lists can quickly become cluttered if you allow the bounces to accumulate. It would be of huge benefit to run monthly or quarterly searches to remove the undeliverable contacts to keep your lists as simple as possible. To re-run the search, navigate to the "Dynamic Groups" sub-tab, click the corresponding drop-down next to the group and select "Run Search Again". Once complete, delete the contacts as outlined above. - Removing contacts who are continually soft bouncing:
A contact is granted +1 score for each unique view and +1 for every click. A contact's score decreases by 1 when they bounce. If we set a search for contacts with a score that's -3 or lower, we are essentially finding the contacts who have soft bounced at least 3 times. They would have to bounce another 22 times before they are actually marked as undeliverable, so it's good practice if we can get on top of this before they have to be marked by the system. Just a note that, on request, we can reduce the soft bounce threshold from 25 - just let us know!
Once you've run the search, select "Save as Dynamic Group" and name the group. Under the "Dynamic Groups" sub-tab, find the group, click the corresponding drop-down and select "Delete Contacts". This will delete the contacts from your account and therefore from any groups they were in.
Run the search quarterly to remove contacts whose inbox you cannot reach. To re-run the search, navigate to the "Dynamic Groups" sub-tab, click the corresponding drop-down next to the group and select "Run Search Again". Once complete, delete the contacts as outlined above.
Send targeted comms using Advanced Search
First of all, if you're unsure how to run an Advanced Search across your contacts, you need to navigate to "Contacts" > "Advanced..." drop-down > "Advanced Search". If you require a more detailed walk-through, check out this article.
The approach in the section above is more of a "guerrilla" strategy. We know that you may be apprehensive to just delete a chunk of your contact list. This approach offers something a little more strategic and enables you to attempt to hit the inbox in other ways. Let's take a look:
- Update the email format for disengaged contacts:
This search will pull contacts who have been sent more than 5 campaigns and their score equals 0. This means that they have been sent 5+ campaigns and have not interacted with any of them.
Reasons for this could simply be that they're not interested in your content, but - more than likely - the problem is that your comms are either not hitting the recipients' inboxes or they are not downloading the images which is how we measure views.
Email security filters are significantly more likely to mark HTML comms as spam compared to plain text emails. In an effort to hit these recipients' inboxes, it would be beneficial to send them the plain text version of your campaign. You are much more likely to hit the inbox, and they will have the option to open the HTML version in their browser if they're interested in the content, from which we can record the usual reporting metrics.
Once you've run the search, select "Save as Dynamic Group" and name the group. Under the "Dynamic Groups" sub-tab, find the group, click the corresponding drop-down and select "Update Email Format". You will need to switch the format from "HTML" to "Plain Text".
Next time you send a campaign, be sure to keep an eye on the scores for contacts in this group. If a contact's score rises above 0, you know that you can only hit their inbox with plain text emails. This is how you'll need to send to them moving forward. For any contacts whose score remains as zero, you know that you're still either unable to hit the inbox or they're not interested in the content. In either case, the contact should be deleted from your contact lists. - Segment your lists based on contact information:
This strategy relies on the quality of your data. You can use the information stored against a contact's record to create targeted lists to try to drive engagement. One example might be based on location. If you are sending global comms and have contacts located across the world, have you considered scheduling your campaigns to cater for the different time zones?
Use the Advanced Search function and define the conditions to create segmented lists. Once you've run the search, select "Save as Dynamic Group" and name the group. Next time you send a campaign, create copies for each segment and schedule accordingly.
By using segmented groups, you can analyse engagement between the groups in an instant via the reporting dashboard for your campaign. Simply navigate to "Delivery" > "Groups" from within the campaign report. Tinker with your strategy until you've got it down to a tee.
Let your contacts select the content they receive using Sign Up Forms
If you are unfamiliar with Sign Up Forms in Concep Send, this article will walk you through where to find and configure them in the platform.
With Sign Up Forms, you can create a series of lists which the contacts can choose to subscribe to. Typically, each list would be a different subject area (i.e. Litigation, Real Estate, Tax etc.) which the contact can opt to subscribe to via the Preference Center. This enables you to send targeted comms without much legwork. It also means you can be sure that you're only delivering comms that matter most to your contacts. Consequently, you can be happy that your deliverability won't be affected by spam reports and that you are using your email volume productively.
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