Once you have spent considerable time and money developing a house list it is important that you maximise the effectiveness of the list while minimising the maintenance that is required. Here is our advice for achieving this:

Each bounce can be placed in one of the categories below:

• Temporary bounce
• Gone-away
• Bad Address

Here is our advice of dealing with each of them:

Temporary bounces
This is where the recipients email server is experiencing problems and cannot deliver your message. It is also known as a ‘Soft’ bounce. To ensure the message does get through, a solution such as Maxemail can be used. Maxemail will continue to re-send the emails that have 'soft bounced' until they are delivered. If your software or provider does not provide this facility then on average we estimate that 4-5% of your emails will not get delivered.

Gone-aways
Another bounce you will regularly get is where the email address has changed, or the employee is no longer at the company. Rather than waste the opportunity to continue to communicate with the client, a list of these can be produced from Maxemail with the name of the relevant account manager alongside. You can pass this information back to you account managers who can find out who the new contact is or what the email address has been changed to.

Another solution would be to personalise the email using the email address and provide the opportunity for the recipient to change it. For example your email might read:

“johnsmith@company.com is the email address subscribed to this list. Should you wish to change the email address used click here”

Bad addresses
You will often on your first mailing to a house list get a large number of bounces where the email address is invalid. This is usually down to how the list is collected. To overcome these, here are some suggestions:

Use Double Opt-in
To avoid people entering fake email addresses when entering competitions or requesting a white paper from your website, use a double opt-in approach. This is where upon them submitting their email address an automated email is sent to that address. They then have to click on a link or reply to the message to complete the opt-in and verify the correct email address.

Refuse invalid addresses
To avoid your telemarketing teams or users entering addresses such as ‘dave@company’ or ‘dave.company.com’, you can set your database or form on the website to refuse the address and tell the user to enter a valid address.

Training Staff
Telemarketing staff sometimes do not identify the importance of inserting accurate data into the right fields. You may get them inserting an email address into the wrong field or putting additional information in like:

“marketing@company.com - This is the address for Dave the Marketing Manager”

By showing these staff how the information in the various fields in the database will be used they will see the importance of completing the database correctly.

De-duplication

Nothing will annoy your list more than if they receive the same email more than once.

Maxemail will automatically stop you from sending the same email to the same address more than once per campaign. You may of course have two addresses for the same contact such as marketing@company.com and ‘johnsmith@company.com’. These are not as easy for you to pick-up on. One solution would be to de-duplicate by the ‘@company.com’ part of the address but this would exclude multiple contacts you might have at that company. A better solution is to de-duplicate by multiple fields such as first name, surname and company name.

Unsubscribe Management

By law you must include a clear means of opting out of further emails. Failure to do this can make you liable under the Data Protection Act and lead to substantial fines, even on the first offence. To avoid this and to save considerable manpower resources it is best to send your emails via a system that automatically handles unsubscribe requests such as Maxemail. This eliminates human error and ensures no additional resources need to be allocated to the task.

An alternative to a simple unsubscribe link is to set-up a profile page. The recipient can then specify their content preferences, which email address they want to be used and how often they wish to be emailed, if at all. This will lead to fewer people opting out because you can offer more targeted content, to their preferred address over a period of time they are comfortable with.

You can view an example of a profile page in the Maxenews Newsletter.

Summary

By following the above tips for keeping your lists clean you can expect the following benefits:

• Reduced list management time
  
• Meet legal requirements
  
• Maximise your list potential

For further help and advice on any of the issues covered in this article, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01327 350921.