Bryan Eisenberg on email marketing: “Do massive Segmentation and opt out your list”

Bryan Eisenberg was one of keynote speakers at the Fusion Marketing Experience. The event had a very impressive line-up with experts from all parts of digital marketing. Bryan shared his email marketing tips:

With a presentation on the second day about one of his favorite topics “Always be testing” (also the name of his book). This time Brian referred to Adwords and Pay per Click testing, see that article here.

Email marketing: Do massive segmentation

I got to speak to Bryan a bit more about e-mail marketing. Bryan has been running his own newsletter for years with over 40.000 subscribers. Bryan: “Do massive segmentation. Once you think you have segmented, segment again. And if possible, segment again. In good e-mail marketing, you segment first, and then personalize within that segment.”

Segmenting is a very effective email marketing tactic

And he is right, several kinds of research have shown Segmenting as one of the most effective email marketing tactics. Even more: Testing with Target Audiences (in other words: segment testing) is also found to be very effective. 91% of marketers find segmentation testing effective. That is huge. Testing segmentation is the number one effective testing tactic according to research by Marketingsherpa.

Brian continues on massive segmentation: “For instance, you can personalize an e-mail to people who are interested in tv’s versus stereo’s. Segment your e-mail campaigns to previous customers versus subscribers and know what you will be sending to them. First segment and after that go a level deeper and do more personalization. Use a RFM (Recency, frequency and monetary value) formula to calculate the right TV or bundle to offer and what discount percentage to give.”

List hygiene also counts.

Bryan: “One of the things we did on our own newsletter was to opt a large part out. We had 40.000 people on our list and asked everyone that wasn’t active to opt in again. In 7 months the e-mail list was up to the same size, but much better quality. That means higher open rates and click through rates AND better deliverability. Not enough people do this list hygiene thing. At the very least put them [the inactives] on a separate list. There is a technical term for people that aren’t willing to keep their list clean: Pussies.”

He ends with one last tip: “Never forget old content is new content to new people.”


Image by Remy Bergma


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3 Strategies for Maximizing Email Deliverability

Let’s get one thing straight: deliverability is sexy. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s the only way your emails get seen, opened, and clicked on. And if you can increase your deliverability by even just 1%, it can have a significant impact on your ROI.

But achieving high deliverability rates that could make even a mailman jealous doesn’t come easy. Think of it this way: as an email marketer, you’re like the friendly neighborhood mailman. Every house that you deliver email to has a guard dog (ISP). And on days when you have junk mail (spam) or aren’t friendly to folks on your route (poor IP reputation), these dogs will chase you away and only let you deliver some of your mail. To maximize your email deliverability, you need to be familiar with these three deliverability tactics:

1. Set Lower Bounce Thresholds

When you hear the word “bounce,” you might think about fun trampolines or bounce houses. But for marketers, when an email bounces, it’s like bouncing on a trampoline except without all the fun with about 100 times the danger. Okay, I might be exaggerating—but there are definitely some business risks involved. To understand why, let’s first define soft bounces and hard bounces.

Soft bounce: A temporary problem with email deliverability that can be due to an unavailable server or full inbox.

Emails that soft bounce over and over again should be retired from future campaigns. If an email continuously soft bounced 10 times in the last 10 campaigns, it might be soft bouncing for reasons other than a temporary server issue. To keep your deliverability rate high and the risk of that soft bounce becoming something more, it’s best to retire that email for good.

Hard bounce: A permanent failure to deliver an email, usually as a result of the email address being non-existent, invalid, or blocked.

The less hard bounces, the better. ISPs prefer senders to have low hard bounce rates because it shows that you take care of your email lists and keep them fresh. Furthermore, because a hard bounced email may be invalid, non-existent, or blocked entirely, it’s a great candidate for a spam trap, which is an inactive, deliverable email address owned by an ISP to catch spammy senders.

Hitting a spam trap will severely hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, especially with a specific ISP, and could potentially put your IP address on a blacklist, an online database of spammy senders. Once your IP is on a blacklist, you’ll find it awfully difficult to get your emails delivered.
So what should you do to improve your soft bounce and hard bounce rates? Employ a bounce management strategy! Here’s how:

Managing soft bounces: Whether you use an email service provider (ESP) or a marketing automation solution, you should be able to set a soft bounce threshold. Oftentimes, these are set to a conservative number like 10 soft bounces = a hard bounce or an email that should be retired from email campaigns for good. To see how we manage soft bounces here at Marketo, check out my previous blog.

Managing hard bounces: Retire all invalid address hard bounces immediately. Most email providers and marketing automation solutions do this for you, but not all do, so make sure that any email that hard bounces is removed from your list. And if you’re using an ESP where you load email lists into the campaign from an external data source like SQL tables or Microsoft Access, be sure to regularly export all of your hard bounces and add them into a suppression list after each campaign. Then, scrub them against your email database when running a list selection.

2. Don’t Buy Lists

Whether you’ve been doing email marketing for a while or you’re a brand new business just starting up, buying an email list and having a larger email database can seem attractive, but it’s generally a poor practice and it may be detrimental to your deliverability rates and sender reputation. Here are four reasons why:

1. Unsolicited emails: If your recipients have never heard from you before or never opted in to receive your communications, your emails could look like spam to them.

 

When an email recipient marks you as spam, your sender reputation will decrease and ISPs will be suspicious of your activities. With enough spam complaints, you could land your IP on a blacklist, ultimately making it harder for all your future emails to be delivered to the folks who actually opted-in to your communications.

 

2. Quality: You can’t always trust the quality of a list. You don’t know where the names came from, whether the email addresses are correctly formatted, and whether they’ve been scrubbed for spam traps or syntax errors. The email addresses could be old and the demographics can be all over the place. You just never really know what you’re getting yourself into.

 

3. Spam Rate: Email service providers and marketing automation solutions typically have spam rate thresholds in place so if you receive a certain percentage of spam complaints per email delivered, they may terminate your contract. This is because if you are using IP addresses associated with an ESP or marketing automation solution and you’re sending spam, it’s a bad reflection on them as well to ISPs. And they need to maintain good standing relationships with ISPs to properly service their other clients. I’ve heard that for some ESPs, if your spam rate goes above 0.5%, they’ll reach out to you to do a full audit of your sending behaviors and list hygiene practices. They don’t want to jeopardize their business reputation just because you had to buy some lists.

 

4. Bad Metrics: This one should be obvious. Your email metrics will plummet with bad lists! These people didn’t want to hear from you, so very few of them will open and click your emails. Is getting a few email clicks worth losing customer engagement? No, especially when you have to explain the reason to your executives.

3. Segment by Engagement

Getting an ISP to love you is no easy task. Getting all of them to love you is arguably more difficult than getting your celebrity crush to love you. Believe me, I know (you know where to find me, Adele). The number one thing ISPs love to see is high levels of engagement, which means lots of recipients opening, clicking, reading, scrolling, and engaging with your emails on a regular basis.
When you have high email engagement, ISPs will allow the majority of your emails to hit the primary inbox because the demand from your recipients is high. This is called inboxing, which is the percentage of emails that hit the primary inbox as opposed to the spam folder or junk folder. So how do you use email engagement your advantage to get more email inboxing?

Let’s take a look at four scenarios based on this mock situation:

Let’s say you send 100,000 emails that all get delivered. Of those 100,000 emails, 20k engaged within the last 90 days and the remaining 80k haven’t shown any engagement in more than 90 days (the numbers in the examples are made-up based off of my previous experience with campaigns of this nature).

Scenario 1: If you were to just send emails to the engaged group of 20k, the open rate would be 18%, the click-through rate would be 3%, and the unsubscribe rate would be 0%. I’m assuming the unsubscribe rate is 0% because typically when people just engaged, they aren’t likely to unsubscribe. So these are great metrics!

 

Scenario 2: Conversely, if you only sent an email to the 80k group of unengaged emails, the open rate would be 3%, the click through rate would be 0.2%, and the unsubscribe rate is a little high at 0.31%. Metrics that could definitely be better. Again, these numbers are just to illustrate a point.

 

Scenario 3: Now, if you send an email to all 100,000 at the same time, the open rate would be a 6% open rate, with a 0.76% CTR, and a 0.25% unsubscribe rate. This example is probably what most marketers do and therefore the metrics you’d expect based on this example.

 

Scenario 4: If you take a different approach and only send the email to the group of 20k engaged email addresses first, wait 30 minutes, and then send the email to the group of 80k unengaged emails, you’ll get better inboxing rates. This is because when you send emails to engaged recipients first, the ISPs will boost your reputation based on the high engagement on that email. So, when you send to the group of unengaged emails, you’ll actually get higher inbox placement just because you warmed up your sender reputation. In this example (and similar experiences I’ve had), by sending the 20k engaged emails first, inboxing for the group of 80k unengaged emails increased from 55% to 70% when email sends were staggered. The overall effect on inboxing was an increase from 63% to 75%, which definitely moves the needle!

 

Key takeaway: If you stagger your sends by engagement, you’ll see higher deliverability rates and much higher inboxing. This is a really cool strategy that not too many people use today, but it is extremely effective.

Deliver results

Get your emails delivered and placed in the primary inbox by following the three deliverability strategies I’ve outlined. First, set lower soft bounce and hard bounce thresholds to reduce your risk of hitting spam traps and hurting your sender reputation. Second, do not, I repeat, do not purchase lists. You can’t always control for list quality or cleanliness. Lastly, stagger your email sends by levels of engagement. You’ll achieve better inboxing and overall stronger email metrics.

Do you have any deliverability tips or tricks that work for you? Share them in the comments below!

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28 Deliverability Terms Every Email Marketer Should Know

Spam. No, we’re not talking about the gelatinous mass sometimes referred to as “dinner.”

As email marketers, we strive to produce great content and work to build emails that drive brand awareness, engage our customers, and encourage prospects to purchase our products. It sends a shudder down our spine to think about landing not in our subscriber’s inbox, but in the dreaded spam folder. It’s our duty to build something great, not spammy.

Yet deliverability is a tricky thing to master, in part because there’s a lot of technical language to learn. Here are 28 deliverability terms you need to know as an email marketer:

THE BASICS

Let’s start with the basics. What are we even talking about? Often, marketers use delivery and deliverability interchangeably, but they mean slightly different things.

• Delivery refers to whether or not a receiver accepts the message you’ve sent. Does the domain or email address exist, or is your IP address blocked or not? So if an email is successfully delivered, that just means that it made it to the intended recipient’s inbox or spam folder.
• Deliverability or Inbox Placement refers to where that message ends up once it is accepted. Did it get to the inbox?

Imagine that every email you send is a traveler flying from a major airport. Successful delivery would mean that the traveler arrived at the correct airport, proved their identity (authentication) with a ticket and passport, and TSA verified them as safe to pass through security into the main terminal.

Once they cross through airport security, deliverability would be where their flight ultimately arrived. Most of the time, they can safely get to the departure gate (delivery) but then might be rerouted from Dallas to Houston because of weather (deliverability).

Similarly, there’s some confusion between the terms ESP and ISP:

• ESPs, or Email Service Providers, provide platforms to send commercial and transactional email on your behalf. MailChimp, Pardot, Emma, Constant Contact (the list could go on an on!) are all ESPs.
• ISPs, or Internet Service Providers, provide mailboxes to end users as part of their paid services. These are generally your cable or internet providers, such as Comcast and Verizon.
• Inbox Providers include ISP-provided inboxes as well as paid or free webmail accounts and email apps. Examples of this would be Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, or Inbox by Gmail.

Now, some internet-related basics:

• IP Address: A number that uniquely identifies any device connected to the internet. “IP” stands for “Internet Protocol.” Similar to how a street address helps people find buildings, an IP Address helps computers find each other on the internet.
• Domain: Similar to an IP Address, domain names refer to locations of servers and devices connected to the internet. Domain names can represent a whole bunch of different IP addresses. For example, the domain www.litmus.com would address the collection of servers that host our website. Whether that is www.litmus.com/blog or www.litmus.com/community, the domain is the same.
• Sub-domain: In our case, litmus.com is our domain name. Email.litmus.com is a sub-domain of litmus.com that we use for marketing emails. Subdomains are useful, as they can be used to isolate mail streams from one another for both branding and reputation reasons.

YOUR SENDER REPUTATION

Investing in your email-sending infrastructure helps build a better sender reputation, which boosts your credibility when sending emails. Your sender reputation is essentially a score, like your credit score, that immediately signals how trustworthy you are to an ISP. Each organization and ISP might have different scores for you.

There are two types of sender reputation:

• IP Reputation: IP addresses uniquely identify you and your server (see above). Reputation is attributed to an IP address based on what metrics an ISP has historically seen from that IP address and how users engage with mail that originates from it.
• Domain Reputation: This has become more important in recent years. Email isn’t always sent from just one IP address or provider, so using your sending domain to track reputation allows a receiver to accumulate a reputation score across the board. That means taking ownership over your sending domains is imperative to the the health of your entire organization and brand reputation.

This SendGrid article talks more about the different types of sender reputation. You need both a good IP reputation and a good domain reputation to effectively deliver your email.

Other aspects of sender reputation include:

• Domain Name System (DNS): This is a way of resolving a domain name into an IP address. It’s basically like a telephone book that keeps track of everything.
• MX, or Mail Exchange, DNS Record: This is a specific type of DNS record specifying where mail that is destined for a domain name should be sent. It denotes the host responsible for receiving mail, not the sender. Essentially, it’s the server that mail for that domain is sent to.
• TXT DNS Record: A place to store extra information about the domain, often arbitrary text or binary data. TXT records may be used for authentication purposes.
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): A domain plus more information about what we want from that server. When we think of a URL, it’s actually a type of URI identifying a resource by its primary access point (it’s “location” on the web).

Get your email scanned by every major spam filter before you send with Litmus’ Spam Filter Testing.

AUTHENTICATION & INFRASTRUCTURE

Just as travelers show their passports and plane tickets, emails must pass through authentication to prove that an email is from who it says it’s from. Here are a few terms you’ll want to familiarize yourself with:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): A sender policy framework allows mail services to double check that incoming mail from a specific domain has, in fact, been sent from that domain. SPF protects the envelope sender address, or return path, by comparing the sending mail server’s IP address to a master list of authorized sending IP addresses as part of the DNS Record (see above).
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This allows your organization to claim responsibility for your email, the same way a minor needs to be claimed by parents or guardians when travelling internationally. It’s an identifier that shows your email is associated with your domain and uses cryptographic techniques to make sure it should be there.
• Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC): Designed to combat phishing, DMARC gives you insight into the abusive senders that may be impersonating you–and can help you identify them. It allows a sender to indicate that an email is protected by SPF or DKIM. The sender can then receive a report back on any messages that failed the authentication and identify if anyone using the domain could be a spammer.

TRACKING YOUR PERFORMANCE

It can be difficult to track how you’re doing. Spam filters, designed to keep spam out of the inbox, can sometimes pick up any marketing content. Using Litmus’ spam filter testing can help determine whether or not you’ll be marked as spam, but several other factors must also be taken into account:

BOUNCES

• Hard Bounce: Hard bounces occur when the receiving server is either unable to deliver or rejects the message. It can also occur when there is no mail server at that address, or the domain doesn’t exist at all. This can be caused by anything from typos to deleted user accounts. In most cases, if you receive a hard bounce, immediately removing them from your list is the best course of action. A hard bounce indicates a permanent reason that an email can’t be delivered and that this address should not be mailed to in the future. Removing them doesn’t necessarily mean deleting them; you can also deactivate them or add them to a suppression list. That way, you won’t re-acquire the same invalid email address and send to it again.
• Soft Bounce: A soft bounce means that the recipient exists, but for whatever reason, they couldn’t receive your message. Soft bounces typically indicate temporary delivery issues. This could mean a user’s mailbox is full. Though this isn’t your fault, you should eventually consider them to be the same as hard bounces. MailChimp, for instance, unsubscribes users that soft-bounce seven times in a row. It could also mean the email you sent exceeded the maximum size the subscriber’s inbox allows. In addition, Rate-Limiting or Throttling might be at play. If you send large volumes of email to the same ISP, you might start being throttled. An ISP may only allow a certain amount of connections per hour or per day, so if you exceed that, you may get blocked.

SUBSCRIBER BEHAVIOR AND ENGAGEMENT

Different subscriber behaviors can change your deliverability and affect your sender reputation.

• Spam complaints: This is when your recipient marks your email as spam. It could be the recipient felt you didn’t have permission to email them, you were emailing too frequently, or were sending irrelevant content. As Litmus Research Director Chad White says in his book, Email Marketing Rules, “Having permission only gets you so far nowadays. Irrelevant and unwanted email is the new spam in the eyes of both consumers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).” Keep in mind that the way your customers define spam may differ from the technical definition.
• Feedback loops: A feedback loop allows the sender to receive a report every time a recipient clicks on the “mark as spam” or “junk” button. To maintain a clean email list, you can then suppress, or prevent, unwanted messages from appearing in that particular inbox. Subscribing to feedback loops and using this data to quickly remove folks who are no longer interested in your email helps to maintain a positive reputation. For more on feedback loops, check out this great guide from SparkPost.
• TINS (This Is Not Spam): By marking something as NOT spam, your subscribers may save you from the spam filter. This requires them to go into their spam folder and manually whitelist your address.
• Whitelist, or whitelisting: The opposite of a blacklist, this means your server is considered spam-free or is an “approved sender.” It’s often used by email applications to allow users to mark whether or not they trust emails from specific senders, this overrides some of the filtering that may exist from the ISP. You can also apply for whitelisting programs that a few ISPs offer. (Going back to our airport analogy, this is like TSA precheck). While not a guarantee to end up in the inbox, a sender may receive preferred delivery as long as they stay within the proper thresholds of the program.

UH OH…I’VE BEEN BLOCKED

It’s a marketer’s worst nightmare! Practicing good email list hygiene, or the practice of going through and cleaning up your subscriber lists, will help you sleep better at night. Here are some terms you may encounter that will prompt you to start scrubbing:

• Spam Traps: Spam traps are commonly used by inbox providers and blacklist providers to catch malicious senders, but quite often, legitimate senders with poor data hygiene or acquisition practices end up on the radar as well. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn’t belong to a real person nor is it used for any kind of communication. Its only purpose is to identify spammers and senders not utilizing proper list hygiene. For more information, take a look at this post on how to identify spam traps and what to do about them.
• Blacklist, or blacklisted: Over 500 nonpartisan organizations work to monitor and block web addresses that produce spam. Getting blacklisted is an email marketer’s worst nightmare! There’s a few different types of blacklisting that can occur:
• IP Blacklisting: When you send an email, it will originate from an IP address. When an IP is blacklisted this indicates to anyone who utilizes that blacklist to block the mail originating from that IP address.
• Domain blacklisting: If your domain appears frequently in emails that hit spam traps, there may be a chance that your entire domain will be blacklisted. This can be even more damaging as the block is not localized to just an IP address, thus affecting you across all your sending platforms. This is why it is important to use a separate subdomain for your email marketing.

In general, ISPs take engagement very seriously. If your email generates positive interaction and engagement it can boost your sender reputation. That means your standard success metrics, like opens and clicks, still matter. On the flip side, if your emails are consistently deleted without being opened or they are marked as spam, that doesn’t look good–for you as a marketer or for your deliverability.

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