Brushing up on your (list) hygiene

Part two of four to building an effective engagement strategy

Let’s pick up on our conversation about targeting your most and least engaged readers. Today, we’ll discuss how you can manage email addresses that bounce and recipients who don’t open your emails. You want to keep things looking (and smelling) good, don’t you? (If you didn’t catch part one of this series, check it out here.)

Start with a little hygiene

So, you smell nice and floss twice daily? That’s great. You’re an over-achiever, aren’t you? Now we want to point out an entirely different type of hygiene that you may not have considered since the day you opened your Emma account. List hygiene means you’ve done due diligence to ensure you’re working with a squeaky clean list of addresses from the get-go. If you’re an Emma customer, you may have had a conversation with one of our delivery specialists, as they helped you verify your list’s permissions. If you haven’t given it a second thought since then, now’s the time to build a strategy around bounces and non-opens. Doing so means you’ll keep a happy, healthy list and see much more successful response rates. Sure, your list is bound to lose some members over time through this hygiene process, but quality matters much more than quantity when it comes to your audience.

Re-examine your mailing frequency (and check your bounces)

Your bounce rate could be telling you something about the effectiveness of your sending frequency. Last summer, MarketingProfs reported that marketers who sent email less than once a month produced bounce rates more than 200 times that of those sending on a monthly basis. The longer people go without hearing from you, the greater the chance that they’ll abandon their old email address without telling you. Or, they may forget about you altogether and let their filtering program relegate your message to the junk folder.

Frequency matters, but you should also use bounce numbers to gauge the success of your mailing’s delivery. Use the information Emma provides in your response section to check for patterns like several hard bounced responses from the same domain or an abnormally high bounce rate over all. If something seems amiss, reach out to our support team to help in uncovering the reason. Emma is known to have a great sending reputation and delivery rate (currently 98%), but if you suspect that Emma’s not connecting with a domain you’re trying to send to, we’d love to help check things out.

Don’t forget to see who’s *not* engaged

Cleaning up your audience means following up with non-opens as well. Historically, you may not have segmented your audience by activity or inactivity, but it’s worth working into your email strategy. Members who have never opened a mailing are telling you that they’ve all but officially unsubscribed. Consider removing these addresses — you’ll have more accurate response metrics with an up-to-date audience.

Deciding the amount of time to send to someone before considering the address inactive is tricky. This Marketing Sherpa study shows that the majority of marketers consider six months as a reliable window before an audience member is considered inactive. Removing non-opens will allow you to focus on segmenting other levels of inactivity such as members who are reading, but not actively clicking or otherwise engaged.

Put these strategies into action

Now that you’re in the right mindset, use Emma’s search feature to find audience segments based on engagement level. And don’t forget you can search and segment by many other parameters — location, age group or company name, for example. (Find the how-to’s here.) Identifying bounced addresses is even easier, as bounces don’t require a search. You can view the bounces in the response section for each mailing. While Emma moves hard bounced addresses to the “error bin” for you, keep an eye out for anything that doesn’t seem quite right.

And now you’re on your way to an audience that’s so fresh and so clean! If you have other ways of managing bounced addresses and non-opens, let us know in the comments below.

Stay tuned for next time when I tackle strategies for boosting response success.