Technical Email Marketing: How to Improve Your Campaign Results

Technical Email Marketing: How to Improve Your Campaign Results

Gone are the days when business owners would simply drop creative into their mass email sending program, run a quick test email to see if the formatting is correct, then send their message in bulk to every email address on file.

In an effort to cut down on junk email, CAN-SPAM was introduced, spam filters were instituted on receiver side ESP’s and ISP’s began cracking down on content deemed “unfit” for their users. It’s become more difficult to reach inboxes as a result, even with good clean content being sent to opted-in subscribers.

But, by using some technical email marketing techniques, getting your sends in-boxed is no longer a difficult task. In fact, buy using the tools at EmailOversight, getting your messages into your subscribers inbox and generating revenue has never been easier.
Here are five technical email marketing tips that can help you get your messages in-boxed and improve your campaign results:

1) Remove hard bounces, spam traps and known complainers.

Hard bounces occur when the address you’re sending to is invalid. These addresses, when sent to, will cause a decrease in your sender reputation (score) and will increase the likelihood your messages end up in junk. Remove them.

Spam traps are valid email addresses ISP’s and ESP’s use to see how clean your email lists are. When you send to these spam traps, your sender score decreases and the likelihood of your messages ending up in junk increases. Although harder to identify than hard bounces, these too must be removed from your lists.

Known complainers are email addresses owned by real people who have been known to hit the spam button. Even if they haven’t hit the spam button on your messages yet, chances are they will. Known complainers must be removed from your lists before they hit spam, causing your sender score to plummet. EmailOversight knows who these known complainers are, and can remove them for you.

2) Enrich, validate and verify all the addresses on your lists

Even after removing some of the obvious problem email addresses, a cadre of bad emails reside in your lists. They’re just harder to identify. By verifying and validating all the addresses on your list, and enriching the data points, you can get rid of every single malicious address and you’ll find your emails ending up where they belong, in your subscribers inbox.

EmailOversight runs a scan on your email lists where the system connects every address with a real-time “PING.” Our system then receives back a response code from the address which determines its validity. Any delivery based issues like mal-formatted emails, over quota accounts and syntax errors are removed, leaving you with a super hygienic email list; one that when you send messages to, gets you in-boxed.

Next you should enrich the data in your email files. By enriching data, you can discover more insights on your subscribers like name, postal address, age, gender and more. By knowing more about the hidden data in your lists, you can better tailor messages.

3) Segment your lists

When you have specific data on your subscribers, you can tailor messages that fit them as “individuals” rather than bulk. Segmenting your lists buy age, gender, hobbies and purchasing history will allow you to send specific campaigns to specific types of subscribers. By doing so, you decrease the likelihood of a subscriber opting-out, complaining or hitting spam. You also will experience a much higher ROI per campaign as your targeted material goes to the right subscriber.

4) Watch your soft bounces

Unlike hard bounces, soft bounces are temporary. Soft bounces occur when a subscribers inbox is full, the email you’ve sent is mal-formatted or too large or the recipients server is down. Most emailing software systems will alert you to soft bounces.

These email addresses should be sequestered, or segmented and sent to at a later time to verify if the subscribers inbox is ready to receive. Once it is, you can move the former soft-bounce back to its original segment. But continuing to send to the same soft bounces could result in the lowering of your sender score. This is why sequestration is so important.

5) Open rates

Most email providers automatically calculate the open rates on all your sends. Keep an eye on your open rates. They can say a whole lot about the hygiene of your lists (see above) the enticement of your subject lines and the quality of your content.

In order to get and maintain good open rates, you must have clean addresses to send to. Once you know your lists are clean, the data enriched, addresses are verified and your subscribers are segmented, you’re going to need curious subject lines to elicit the open. A good subject line is short, sparks some emotion and, importantly, connects to the content within.

A bad subject line is easy to spot. It’s boring, misspelled, too long or has nothing to do with the content of the email. Subscribers who open on subject lines that are click-bait and do not connect to the content will stop opening your messages. Worse, they could hit spam. Your subject line and content should mesh, and they should be engaging and useful to your subscriber.

By monitoring the email open rates on your sends, you can get insights into what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong content wise. If you see a good upward trend in open rates, keep your subject lines and content written in a similar fashion. On the other hand, if open rates are plummeting (even with clean, verified, enriched and segmented lists), you’re going to need to change your content strategy.

These five quick tips to technical email marketing should help you get in-boxed, get email opens and generate more revenue. EmailOversight has the tools to help you turn these tips into marketing gold, and you don’t need to be an expert at technical email marketing to do it!

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