Have you ever wondered how Email Marketing becomes more relevant within your Digital Marketing strategy? All results of email campaigns must have a follow-up and their performance is associated with a metric. Email marketing, like other strategies, provides data that, when analyzed, will allow us to know if the return on the investment made has been achieved or not .
Are you one of those who do not believe much in the performance of this powerful tool? I bring you this interesting Direct Marketing metric that mentions that for every dollar invested in email marketing, your return can be up to $40.
From my experience at RD Station, I have learned that Email Marketing is a fundamental channel in the relationship with our leads, and it will continue to be so even after converting those leads into opportunities and clients.
This channel will also serve to communicate to customers about your offers, news, upcoming releases, etc. Which means it won't be used just for acquisition.
Having a good reputation on email servers is key to not being blocked and placed on a blacklist for spam, which would throw away all the effort that has been put into content development.
So, to carry out all this, you must measure and consider a basic metric: the bounce. Basically, when we talk about bounce, we are referring to the rejection rate of those emails you have sent, a situation that can be caused by a temporary or permanent cause.
So what is bounce and how can you work on reducing it? Find out in your next few minutes of reading.
Hard bounce
This is the most worrying of the cases in which an email is not delivered. Its meaning translates to a strong bounce, and this is what happens with email. For some permanent reason, it bounces and does not reach the inbox of the address it was sent to.
When it happens? Once you have made an email shot, the email servers perform a validation of the addresses, when the email address has been typed incorrectly or no longer exists.
It is common for you to receive an undelivered mail alert after this shipment and this usually happens with business email addresses, where people used to manage corporate accounts, but when they left there, the email address ceased to exist.
It is recommended that the Hard Bounce does not exceed rates of 3%. If you do, you run the risk of being blocked by email servers for future mailings.
Soft bounce
This "soft bounce" means that the email was not delivered, but nothing prevents it from being delivered in the future. It is given for temporary reasons such as:
- The email server is experiencing a fault and failed to trigger correctly.
- The recipient's inbox is full, and there is no space for your email there at the moment.
This metric is less severe compared to a hard bounce. Ideally, it should not exceed 6%, and that email addresses that always have this type of bounce should be monitored since it could then be a permanent failure.
How to control these bounce rates?
It is very difficult to control 100% this type of bounce with the emails sent, what you can do is work to reduce them and keep them within the recommended limits. Here are some actions that will help you in this task:
Clean your database
You have received or have a database: do you know how reliable the email addresses that are there are? If it's been around for a long time and hasn't been updated, chances are you'll get bounce rates when you take a shot.
As I mentioned before, it happens with corporate accounts, which are changing all the time and becoming inactive due to the departure of employees. That email you had at your first job a few years ago, do you think it still works?
To carry out this cleaning of your databases, there are specialized tools, in free, freemium, and paid versions such as CaptainVerify, Kickbox, and Email validator .
Email segmentation and sending software
Tools like RD Station Marketing have different functions that will help you avoid this type of blockage:
- The tool performs a partial shot of the email to review its performance. If, for example, you select 300 contacts, the tool fires half and if everything is fine in terms of bounce, it does the full shot later.
- Inactivate these email addresses, which will cause them to be excluded when sending an email again.
- Collect these addresses within a segmentation to eliminate them later so they do not continue to affect your shots.
Actions when creating emails
There are certain things that you can take care of when building your emails to improve their performance:
- Avoid as much as possible the excess of images within the body of the message. This can affect both loading time and delivery.
- Includes the option to display in plain text.
- Do not make the message too long, in such a way that it affects its scannability.
- Don't put too many calls to action within the body of the email.
- Do not make the unsubscribe option very visible.
- Avoid including links that lead to outdated pages or that show errors.
Analysis and improvement opportunities
After carrying out all the necessary practices to control the rates of Bounce, it is time to analyze. You should review the practices that need to be replicated, what to stop doing, and the action plans with deadlines and specific activities that lead Email Marketing to become one of the most effective channels within your strategy.
Conclusion
Databases are the main input for Email Marketing campaigns. Keeping them up-to-date and “clean” will avoid later problems with bounce rates. This, accompanied by the use of support tools, will be key to being successful with your Digital Marketing strategy.
If you want to learn everything you need to shoot effective emails, download our email marketing guide.
Good results!
