Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Some tips on Bringing down The Amount of Email Bounces

By Medz Jaydo


Reducing and managing the number of email bounces has never been so crucial for an email marketer. Frequent managing of email bounces decreases the email delivery costs and boosts the conversions and transactions. This is a sign of a good email program.

Their email list needs to be cleansed on a timely basis. The cleansing process can be done manually or through list hygiene service where incorrectly formatted addresses, and invalid typos and domains could be checked for. Most of the companies experience their email churn of two to three percent each month. Here the Email Change of Address service or ECOA service can be used to deal with this problem. According to reports, lots of the ECOA companies receive at least one million email address changes every month.

Email addresses must be confirmed regularly. This can be done by sending auto-reply confirmation to customers when they register, subscribe or buy. If the message bounces, attempt can be created to correct the email address. The problem can be tackled by together with a second email address line inside the opt-in form which can confirm if the email address entered was correct or otherwise.

One of the basic steps to be taken is always to make the update process easier by including the website account and subscription management link inside the emails. The customers must be prompted to update information. They could be asked to verify or to update information during the time of completion of transaction in the shopping cart application. If any transaction is not made in a while, phone or direct mail can be used as information update. People who have bad email addresses and whose phone numbers or postal addresses are stored using the company can be contacted for email address correction.

Major domains such as Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. may be used to track bounces and open rates. If one is different from the others or if there exists a sudden change, this can be related to blacklisting or filtering. Therefore, it's also a good idea to check major blacklists and spam databases for your company's or email provider's name. In the event the name has been blacklisted, no bounce message is going to be received even if the message wasn't delivered. Monitoring and comprehension of spam filters helps in coping with spam complaints more efficiently. The conditions and terms of the spam filters should be reviewed carefully. Quite often the spam flag addresses are added maliciously. These flags has to be removed. Email providers also process bounces. Only understanding them can solve the issue. The basis on which soft and hard bounces are to be pronounced should be studied and later on on, managed accordingly.

As a result of financial troubles, mergers, and other announcements a huge list of service users of 1 particular ISP decide to shift over to a different ISP or take into account their email. Such members around the subscribers list must be emailed with a question raised on the domain name. They should be asked whether they desire to update their email and other information. It is a good practice to pretest your email before distributing the email to the entire list of subscribers. The test can be carried out on oneself, company employees along with a trusted group of current readers. Try including virtually all of the email services being used by most of the subscriber list members.

When every other attempt fails, it is best to delete or suppress recurring bouncers. For this function a suiting bounce deletion and suppression strategy needs to be designed according to the email program. Hard bounces should land directly within the trashed list as they are permanently undeliverable.




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