10 of the most common email marketing questions

We get asked the same questions every day so we thought we would put the answers to the most popular ones here:

Simply a hard bounce is a permanent error sent by the receiving server. This could be a “User unknown”. These should be excluded to ensure there is no future blocking issues from ISP’s.

However to confuse the issue there are times when a hard bounce is not a permanent error but something like a “Content rejected as potential spam” or “Mailbox is full” message. While both should not technically be sent as a hard bounce in reality they do so set a threshold of at least two bounces before an address gets excluded to minimise the likelihood of valid addresses being suppressed.

Soft bounces are temporary issues where the receiving server is down for maintenance or cannot be reached. Many ISP’s also defer messages they can identify as lower priority (E.G. A HTML email which contains commercial phrases) if they are busy. These are usually re-sent to in the background by your email service provider.

No. An out of office automated message is a reply so therefore this means the message has actually been delivered. Increasingly corporate IT departments are using this function to inform senders that a person no longer works for the organisation.

At the time of writing we would say the industry average is between 15% to 20% for opens. Click-thru’s vary a lot more depending on the relevancy of content, the attractiveness of the offer and even depends on whether your content is included within the body of the message or requires the recipient to click-thru on a link to visit the website.

Nowadays it is more than just being on a whitelist or avoiding certain phrases. These are still important but here is a mini-checklist:

There are two main reasons:

Some recipients may get a mangled version of the HTML. In addition they may not know how to turn on images on their email client. Therefore it can be easier to view this in their browser.

Maxemail makes it easy to include a personalised web-based version of the email. All you need to do is include a simple merge tag and Maxemail will do the rest. Recipients clicking on this will then see an identical version of what they received complete with all personalisation and dynamic content.

Our opinion is making the email as relevant as possible is most important. Too many people run “load & blast” style email marketing which is based upon the idea that the more I send, the more revenue I will generate as some of the emails are bound to stick! The trouble is because email is a relatively inexpensive delivery mechanism the ROI on these type of campaigns is still good.  Over time though these lists will become less and less responsive as recipients become fed up of receiving irrelevant messages.

Emails that perform exceptionally have content tailored to each individual recipient utilising dynamic content and segmentation techniques. In addition these emails tend to suffer a lesser drop in performance over time as recipients know that there is usually something worth reading in the message.

AOL & Yahoo are the two major whitelists while Hotmail requires each sender to be part of the “Sender Score Certified” scheme. Emailcenter are on other whitelists and these are managed by our deliverability team.

Number one is don’t sent spam or even suspect email!

Even legitimate senders will occasionally get blacklisted but usually this is automatically removed or easily resolved by your email service provider.

When collecting email addresses record the time, date and IP address of the sign-up plus what URL they signed up on. Any confirmation email should also be recorded.

We looked at this in more depth a few months ago and you can see this research here.