Email Marketing and promotion using Email Campaigns is now on boom. Getting good results with Email Marketing is not easy and success is measure in terms of different aspects though the ultimate target is either getting more clients, customers, users or a lead generation, purchase, registration.
The success depends on various stats and figures associated with an Email Marketing mailer/campaign. The main statistics associated are:
- Email Address (total)
- Delivered (and its %)
- Bounced (and its %)
- Unique Viewers (and its %)
- Unique Clickers (and its %)
- Unsubscribers
All of the above parameters are very important and it depends on the mailer content, subject, frequency, delivery season, delivery day and delivery time etc. to control and achieve better statistics. Taking them one by one:
- Mailer Content – How attractive is your mailer content. What do you want to achieve from your mailer. Do you want a click to a website and further steps, email subscription right from the mailer or just some information, all this depends from mailer to mailer and for every kind of mailer it should be modified
- Target audience – Who is you Target audience. Is your mailer for the audience who will be interested in it or you have send a mailer to every email address you have found. It is important to send mailers to target audience only.
- Subject – That’s the first thing a subscriber/recipient see. It should be crisp, attractive and should prompt them to open the mail. Choose it wisely.
- Frequency – Are you sending mailers too frequently. Try avoiding it.
- Delivery Season – In which season you sending the mailer. Is it a holiday season and your mailer is related to business or it is break after the year completion for students and your mailer is related to education, tutions etc.
- Delivery Day – Is it a weekday or weekend. Or from the past experience mailers get good response on Wednesdays or Thursdays for others. Do work on it and check what is best from past behaviour.
- Delivery Time – Mailer at 11:00 PM, chances are less. Mailer at: 10:30 AM chances are good. Again, get it from the experience and kind of mailer. When is your target audience online and send mailer to them at that time otherwise mailer might come below or on even second page in inbox.
- Kind of Subscribers – Only New or Existing. Do you send same mailer to a new list of email addresses every time or do you send different mailer to same list of email addresses (some could be new). There would be different approach to different set of recipients. It should be same look and feel for the latter case and try on different mailer content and look on former approach.
So the question comes, How to increase Email Delivery Rate and perform better on other parameters?
- Email Delivery rate – If you want to increase email delivery rate then keep in mind that email addresses are correct. You have spam free IP-Address. You haven’t send a mailer recently using the same IP as some sites doesn’t accept frequent mails form 1 IP. Your mailing list shouldn’t be very big.
- Now, what if you have a big list of email addresses. Now, when there is a big list of email addresses you need to break down your email list in small chunks because if there are large number of email addresses on same domain then they might get as undelivered.
- So, for this take all of your email addresses in an excel sheet. Take domain name from them. Lets say your email addresses are in column B, then use this formula in excel to take out domain name part =MID(B2,FIND(“@”,B2)+1,LEN(B2)-FIND(“@”,B2))
- After using this, you will have domain name part of email addresses. Sort the sheet on domain names
- Add a new column Sort No.
- Now, if you have say 20000 email addresses then distribute this list into 4 sub-lists with each having 5000 email addresses. For this add numbering in Sort No. column as 1,2,3,4 then 1,2,3,4 and so on.
- Now, apply filter on Sort No. and choose email addresses with Sort No. 1
- This will have distributed email addresses and there are now less chances of getting undelivered.
- Also, in excel look out for common domain name mistakes. Like if domain name name gmail.com but it is written as gamil.com then there are chances that it will bounce back. You can make a list of such Typo errors and by using vlookup you can filter out such email addresses