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Best Practices for Subscription Acquisition and Email Sending

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Email marketing is currently one of the most important marketing channels for eCommerce businesses. It allows you to effectively connect with your customers in a relevant and timely manner.

 

If you don't have a defined strategy and are simply sending emails in bulk without carrying out any type of segmentation, you are losing sales, time, and money—and, even worse, damaging your deliverability rate. 

In this article, we will review the types of bounced emails and how they affect Connectif, as well as tips and best practices for improving email deliverability and, therefore, your email marketing strategies.

 

1. Bounced emails: types and causes

There are currently two different types of email bounces:

  • Permanent: emails for which the user's email address cannot be found and delivery is not possible. This is usually due to incorrectly written email addresses or addresses that no longer exist.
  • Temporary: emails that have not been delivered for other reasons:
    • Data overload on the server
    • The user's inbox is full
    • Too much information being sent
    • Connection failures
    • Sender suspicion
  

Connectif operates independently of the platforms that may be influencing these checks, so it does not act on bounces. Instead, it only records temporary bounces received from the server sending the emails.

For contacts that accumulate a total of 3 temporary bounces or 1 permanent bounce, the value of their Email status field changes to Bounced, which means that they are subsequently ignored by Send email nodes.

 

A user who accumulates one permanent bounce or three temporary bounces will not be able to receive any more emails from Connectif.

 

2. How to optimize the deliverability of your email campaigns

  

No matter how optimized a workflow and all its elements are, your campaigns will be affected if your emails do not reach your customers' inboxes.

The following is a summary of the most important factors to consider in order to improve or avoid affecting the deliverability rate of email campaigns.

 

a. Improving Sender reputation

  

This is the reputation of the email address from which email marketing campaigns are sent.

Best practices for optimizing sender reputation.

  • Be consistent with your sending. Sending emails consistently, without drastic increases or decreases, is key to sender reputation.
 

It is not recommended to go from 3 weekly sends to 5 from one week to the next. Whenever possible, be consistent with the time and day of sending.

  • Keep your email lists clean. This is basic, but it is not always taken into account. Lists must be legitimate, meaning that they must have been lawfully obtained from our website through campaigns in which explicit authorization to receive emails was requested. A basic indicator of list quality is the bounce rate, or “bounce.” There are two types:
    • Hard Bounce: This occurs when an email is sent to an email address that does not exist, usually because the customer made a mistake when entering their address or used a fake email address.
      • These addresses must be removed.
    • Soft Bounce: In this case, the mailbox is full or has an auto-reply enabled.
      • If soft bounces persist, you should consider removing the address.
      • Once the bounce rate reaches 2%, you must analyze the reasons for the bounce in detail.
 

Regularly review the bounce rate of your sends from "Analytics > Dashboards > Email".

  • Avoid spam reports. This is where you must always keep in mind that you should not buy email lists. It is vital to your strategy that your customers do not mark any type of email as spam.
  • Avoid spam traps. Again, this is related to purchased lists. A “spam trap” is a nonexistent email address used to catch services that collect email addresses from the web by scraping content—that is, obtaining email addresses illicitly.
  • Avoid appearing on a blacklist. These are lists of domains and IP addresses that have been detected sending unsolicited email.

 

b. Email content

 

Before sending an email, we should consider whether we are going to provide our subscribers with some type of value.

Improve your email content with these practices:

  • Be relevant. You may currently be sending emails to customers who are not interested in the content and are therefore very likely to unsubscribe or mark the email as spam. This is where personalization and customer segmentation come into play.
  • Be consistent with the design. You must be consistent with the design of the content you send, and it must align with your website's design. Customers are familiar with your brand and do not expect drastic changes in the emails they receive.
  • Be creative with subject lines. The subject line is the first thing the recipient sees before opening the email and provides a preview of its content. At this point, you should avoid using terms that Google or Outlook label as spam, such as subject lines written in all caps.
 

With Connectif, you can run A/B/X Tests to try different subject line variants and analyze, for example, which one has the best open rate.

  • Control the text-to-image ratio This is not a determining factor, but it is worth keeping in mind. 60% text and a maximum of 40% images is recommended.
  • Make unsubscribing clear. This is essential, as failing to do so can cause most emails to go directly to the spam folder. It is essential that the unsubscribe option be accessible and clear to the user. In addition, Gmail requires the unsubscribe button to be available with a single click.
 

Learn how the one-click unsubscribe button works in this article.

  • Avoid using URL shorteners. Their use in email is not recommended because they mask the link's final destination and are commonly used by spammers, making them a spam signal for the main ESPs.

 

c. Contact segmentation

Another highly relevant aspect that affects email deliverability is how recipients interact with the content sent. Therefore, it is very important to segment contacts in your mailing lists so that you can send content tailored to their needs and make your campaigns much more precise.

  

ESPs can determine whether a recipient interacts with a particular email from a sender and may even suggest, as Gmail does, that the recipient unsubscribe if they show no interest in the email.

Two metrics that will help you determine whether the content sent aligns with subscribers' expectations and interests are the open rate and CTR. There are other very interesting metrics, but these two are enough to determine the “health” of our sends in terms of interactions.

If you need a starting point, here are some segment ideas that every website should have and that can be created easily with Connectif.

  • By contact inactivity. If your contacts have been inactive for a certain period, it is advisable to segment them and “set them aside” from your email marketing campaigns for a while. In fact, it is good practice to suggest that they unsubscribe, thereby elegantly cleaning up your mailing list.
  • By behavior. Behavior-based segmentation is one of the most effective approaches from a conversion perspective. Segment by:
  • Categories visited.
  • Types of pages visited.
  • Products visited or even by referrer, among many other possibilities.
  • By purchases. One of the most common types, and necessary for RFM segmentation, is segmenting based on the number and frequency of purchases.
    • Number of purchases made in the last 30 days and amount spent.
    • Number of purchases made in the last 60 days and amount spent.
    • Number of purchases made in the last 90 days and amount spent.

 

d. Warming up a new sending domain

When you start sending emails from a new domain, it is important to gradually increase the sending volume to build a good sender reputation and support the deliverability of your campaigns.

Major email providers, such as Gmail, Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail, iCloud, and Yahoo, may respond differently to bulk sends from new domains. For this reason, it is advisable to send separately to each provider and adjust the volume daily according to the results obtained.

To properly warm up a domain, follow these recommendations:

  • Gradually increase sending volume: increase the number of emails only if the previous day's deliverability metrics were good.
  • Adapt sends according to the results: if a provider returns errors, reduce the volume or temporarily suspend sending for a few days.
  • Monitor metrics daily: review the results for each provider and adjust the volume of subsequent sends when necessary.
  • Prioritize contacts who have interacted previously: direct the first sends to subscribed contacts who have shown interest in your previous communications. This will support domain warm-up and help improve its reputation.

 

e. Summary of email marketing best practices for eCommerce

  • Be consistent with the number of sends. Do not change the frequency drastically.
  • Obtain email lists lawfully. Do not buy lists.
  • Keep lists free of “spam traps.”
  • Avoid spam reports.
  • Be careful with blacklists.
  • Make the content you send relevant. Personalize it.
  • Be consistent with the email design.
  • Be creative with subject lines. Run A/B/X Tests.
  • Always complete the preheader.
  • Text-to-image ratio.
  • Place the unsubscribe option somewhere visible.
  • Avoid using URL shorteners.
  • Segment contacts based on interest, purchases, etc.
  • Personalize sends according to expectations, interests, etc.

 

 

 Congratulations!
You've reached the end of the lesson.

  

Do you still have unanswered questions?
Remember that our Connectif specialists are available to you. To contact them, simply open a ticket with Support by clicking the blue “Help” button in your Dashboard.

 

Keep learning!

To make the most of your Connectif account, we recommend continuing with the following articles: