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Email marketing is currently one of the most important marketing channels for eCommerce. It allows you to effectively connect with your customers in a relevant manner and at the right time.
If you don't have a defined strategy and are simply sending mass emails without any segmentation, you are losing sales, time, and money, and worse, ruining 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 to improve the deliverability of your emails and, therefore, your email marketing strategies.
1. Bounced Emails: Types and Causes
Currently, there are two different types of email bounces:
- Permanent: those where the user's email is not found, and it is not possible to send them. This is usually due to incorrectly written or non-existent emails.
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Temporary: those where the content has not been delivered due to other reasons:
- Data saturation on the server
- User's inbox is full
- Sending too much information
- Connection failures
- Sender suspicions
Connectif operates independently of the platforms that may be influencing these checks, so it does not act on bounces but merely records the temporary bounces reported by 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, meaning they will no longer be targeted by the Send Email nodes.
A user who accumulates one permanent bounce or three temporary bounces will no longer receive 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.
Below are the most important factors to consider to improve, or not affect, the deliverability rate of your email campaigns.
a. Improving the Sender's Reputation
This is the reputation of the email address from which the email marketing campaigns are sent.
Best practices to optimize the sender's reputation:
- Be consistent with your sends. A consistent sending of emails, without drastic increases or drops, is crucial for the sender's reputation.
It is not advisable to go from 3 sends per week to 5 in one week. Whenever possible, be consistent in the timing and day.
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Keep your email lists clean. This is basic, but not always taken into account. Lists must be legitimate, meaning they must have been obtained lawfully from our website through campaigns that explicitly requested permission to receive emails. A basic indicator of list quality is the bounce rate. There are two types:
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Hard Bounce: This occurs when an email is sent to an address that does not exist, usually because the customer made a mistake typing their address or used a fake email.
- These addresses must be removed.
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Soft Bounce: This occurs because the inbox is full or auto-reply is activated.
- If soft bounces persist, consider removing them.
- If the bounce rate exceeds 2%, analyze the reasons for the bounce in detail.
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Hard Bounce: This occurs when an email is sent to an address that does not exist, usually because the customer made a mistake typing their address or used a fake email.
Regularly review the bounce rate of your sends from "Analytics > Dashboards > Email".
- Avoid the SPAM Report. Always keep in mind not to buy email lists. It is vital for your strategy that your customers do not mark any type of email as SPAM.
- Avoid Spam Traps. Again, an aspect related to purchased lists. A “spam trap” is a non-existent email address used to "catch" services that collect email addresses from the web through scraping content, that is, obtaining email addresses illegally.
- Avoid appearing on a blacklist. These are lists of domains and IPs detected sending unsolicited email.
b. Email Content
Before sending, think about whether you will provide any value to your subscribers.
Improve your email content with these practices:
- Be Relevant. Right now, you might be sending emails to customers who are not interested in the content and, therefore, are very likely to unsubscribe or mark the email as SPAM. This is where personalization and segmentation of our customers come into play.
- Consistency in design. You must be consistent with the design of the content you are sending, and it must be aligned with your website. Customers are familiar with your brand and do not expect drastic changes in the emails they receive.
- Be creative with subjects. The subject of the email is the first thing the recipient sees before opening it and serves as a preview of what the email contains. At this point, avoid using terms that are tagged as spam by Google or Outlook, such as subjects in uppercase letters.
With Connectif, you can perform A/B/X tests to try different subject variants and analyze, for example, which one has a better open rate.
- Control the text-to-image ratio It is not a determining factor, but it is worth considering. A 60% text and a maximum of 40% images is recommended.
- Unsubscribe option clearly visible. This is essential to avoid emails going to the SPAM folder. It is mandatory for Gmail that the unsubscribe button is available with a single click.
Learn how the one-click unsubscribe button works in this article.
- Avoid using link shorteners. Their use in the context of email is not recommended as it masks the final destination of the link and is commonly used by spammers. For major ESPs, it is a spam signal.
c. Contact Segmentation
Another critical aspect that affects email deliverability is the interaction of recipients with the sent content. Therefore, the segmentation of contacts in the email lists is of great importance to send content tailored to their needs and make your campaigns much more accurate.
ESPs can detect if a recipient interacts with a specific email from a sender and even suggest, as Gmail does, to unsubscribe due to lack of interest.
Two metrics that will help you understand if the sent content aligns with subscribers' expectations and interests are the open rate and the CTR. There are other interesting metrics, but these two will suffice to know the "health" of our sends in terms of interactions.
If you need a starting point, here are segment ideas that every website should have and that can be easily created with Connectif.
- By Contact Inactivity. If your contacts are inactive for a certain period, it is advisable to segment them and "remove" them from the usual activity of your email marketing campaigns for a while. Moreover, it is good practice to suggest unsubscribing and thus elegantly clean your email list.
- By Behavior. Behavior-based segmentation is one of the most effective in terms of conversion. Segment by:
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- Visited categories.
- Type of pages visited.
- Products visited or even by referrer, among many other possibilities.
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By Purchases. One of the most common and necessary to perform the RFM segmentation, is to segment based on the number of purchases made and frequency.
- Number of purchases made in the last 30 days and amount.
- Number of purchases made in the last 60 days and amount.
- Number of purchases made in the last 90 days and amount.
d. Summary of Best Practices for Email Marketing for eCommerce
- Be consistent in the number of sends. Do not drastically change the frequency.
- Email lists obtained legally. Do not buy lists.
- Keep lists clean of "spam traps".
- Avoid the Spam Report.
- Be careful with blacklists.
- Be relevant with the content sent. Personalize.
- Consistency in email design.
- Creativity in subjects. Perform A/B/X Tests.
- Always fill in the pre-header.
- Text/image ratio.
- Unsubscribe option in a visible place.
- Avoid using link shorteners.
- Segment contacts based on interest, purchases, etc.
- Personalize sends according to expectations, interests, etc.
Congratulations!
You have reached the end of the lesson.
Do you still have unresolved questions?
Remember that you have our Connectif specialists at your disposal. To contact them, simply open a support ticket by clicking on the blue "Help" button on your Dashboard.
Keep learning!
To make the most of your Connectif account, we recommend continuing with the following articles:
- Email Domain Authentication, to authenticate your domain and send emails with Connectif.
- Email Channel Configuration, to learn how to configure this channel.
- Email Editor, to learn how to design your emails in Connectif.
- Email Subscription Notification Errors, to identify errors in subscription changes and address them.