How To Create Healthier Email Marketing Lists With Analytics

Inside the new eBook, “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics”, marketing expert and SugarBush President Mark Parent explains how marketing analytics can greatly enhance a myriad of things, from blogging and social media activities to SEO and landing pages. Chapter 5 delves into one of the most often overlooked and taken for granted tools in a marketer’s toolbox: email.

“83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox,
it is because of a poor sender reputation.”
- Mark Parent, “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics”

Bounce & Delivery Rate

According to Parent, of all of your email marketing analytics, your bounce and delivery rate are two of the most crucial to measure. A high hard bounce rate or a low overall delivery rate is often a symptom of an unhealthy email marketing program. That means your email deliverability rate could be negatively impacted by things like:

• Your email sending reputation
• The health of your email list
• The value of your content
• How well segmented your email list is

Is Your Email Even Getting There?

A poor sender reputation – scored by many ISP’s using the free service by Return Path called Sender Score – is crucial to email deliverability. How well you do rank?

HOT TIP: If you’re experiencing a high hard bounce rate – the undelivered emails that are the result of a permanent problem with an email address, such as being invalid or non-existent – immediately remove all of these email addresses from your list to prevent gaining a reputation as an email spammer and harming your email deliverability.

Scrub Your List

“Your email delivery rate should always stay at 95% or higher,” Parent explains in “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics”. “If it is lower than this or you find one month it slips below 95%, use this opportunity to scrub your list of the following contacts to decrease your bounce rate and increase your deliverability rate:

• Duplicate and invalid email addresses
• Contacts who haven’t opted in
• Alias email addresses
• Email addresses that hard bounce
• Completely disengaged email recipients

HOT TIP: If you find just one campaign has a below average delivery rate, it doesn’t mean the entire list segment needs to be deleted. Instead, examine the content of the email to see if there as an accidental indication to SPAM filters or ISPs that your message should be blocked.

Once you’re email marketing list is healthy again, you can focus on click-through rates, conversion rates and per email revenues. To learn more about how to make a more effective email marketing list with analytics and to maximize the results after it’s been brought back to life, download  the new eBook, “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics” from SugarBush Inc. today!