Michael Wise
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Email campaigns are an extremely efficient and cost-effective way to deliver a message to a large list of contacts immediately and all-at-once. However, many businesses are surprised and disappointed when a campaign sent out to a list of 1000 contacts only produces a handful of opens, clicks, or phone calls. What gives!?
Sure, it’s possible 990 out of 1000 people saw your email and immediately dismissed, ignored or deleted it, but it’s much more likely that something else is happening. For a large percentage on your list, your email never made it to their inbox. So, they never saw it.
In this article, we’ll address why this happens and outline the steps necessary to ensure it stops. We’ll then explore strategies to improve the performance of your campaigns by outline some best practices for writing, tracking, and optimizing your email campaign.
A results-driven email campaign strategy should address these four elements:
Deliverability is a report that counts the number of emails in your campaign that were successfully sent (delivered to the recipient’s Email Service Provider (ESP)) and those that bounced (returned as undeliverable). A hard bounce is a permanent failure that indicates a bad email address, while a soft bounce is a temporary error (like a full inbox).
Email Deliverability Rate = (Successfully Delivered Emails / Total Emails Sent) x 100
For example, if you sent 1,000 emails and had 50 bounces (hard and soft combined), your email deliverability rate would be: 95%
Email Deliverability Rate, which you should strive to keep in the 95-99% range, tells you how accurate and up-to-date the email addresses are in your campaign’s contact list.
Spam Inbox Mitigation
Just because an email is delivered to the recipient’s ESP doesn’t mean it actually showed up in their inbox. That’s because ESPs have security features (spam filters) in place to automatically remove or redirect certain types of emails that it determines might be spam. When this happens, your email is banished to a spam folder and not the recipient’s inbox.
P2PE (Point-To-Point Encryption)
Auto & Predictive Dialing
Stealth Voicemail
Unfortunately, there’s no direct or foolproof way to know from your end when this happens.
However, you can mitigate against this risk by following a number of technical guidelines and best practices. Doing so will often have a huge impact on the response rates of your campaigns.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) “spam test” in three major areas
Sending Infrastructure is the technical process that verifies the email domain of the sender legitimately belongs to the entity sending out the email. DKIM ,SPF, and DMARC are three types of authentication protocols used by ESPs. This is primarily triggered when sending bulk emails through a third-party service (like Mailchimp for example).
2. Your emails look like spam
You’ve used spammy words, a high ratio of images compared to text, too many hyperlinks, or didn’t include an unsubscribe link. Occasionally, even URL shorteners can trigger a spam filter.
3. Your emails are behaving or being treated like spam
ESPs keep track of things like high bounce rates, unsubscribes, and of course, emails reported as spam. All of these elements, commonly referred to as “sender reputation,” impact whether your emails will be flagged and blocked system-wide.
If your emails don’t use flagged words and are well received by your audience, your deliverability should be quite high. A healthy deliverability percentage should be in the upper 90th percentile.
The ARM industry has a unique set of legal (FDCPA and CFPB) requirements when it comes to contacting a consumer about a debt. Depending on the kind of message you’re sending, some or all of these compliance requirements will be relevant and should be followed.
However, once a responsible party has been notified and the debt validated, you’ll want to send out notifications and reminders that encourage those consumers to resolve their account. At this point, we can apply some of the basics of email marketing to make sure your messages get read and acted upon.
These are the 4 main elements of an email:
Blind or Curiosity
This approach, which plays on the power of curiosity and the unknown, is one of the most effective ways to get your emails opened and clicked.
Direct or Benefit
Urgency or Scarcity
Proof or Results
You can use a merge tags to make mass email campaigns more personalized. Statistics show that emails that include the recipient’s first name in the subject are twice as likely to get opened.
Of course, if you’re sending emails that contain detailed account information, you’ll be using a lot of merge fields. However, in the case of limited content messages, including a first name merge tag will likely double your open rates.
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