No matter your objectives for using Bronto - driving sales revenue, cultivating donations, etc. - message deliverability is critical to reaching your goals. Quite simply, the greatest content, design, and execution amount to nothing if your message doesn’t make it to your contacts’ inbox.
Lucky for you, the friendly folks at Bronto are here to help you navigate the treacherous delivery path your messages must travel. In addition to the numerous deliverability enablers included in your subscription (ISP relations, feedback loops, DomainKeys authentication, etc.), we’re happy to recommend the following concepts and best practices that will help you maintain clean lists, minimize unsolicited email complaints, and, in turn, improve your overall deliverability.
DJ Waldow, Account Manager to the Stars, drew from his experience working with our top customers to aggregate these suggestions. Enjoy Part 1 of a 4-part series today and stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
All Natural, Organic Lists
Deliverability starts with a good list. A good list is comprised of contacts that have given you permission to send to them - they know why
they are receiving your messages and recognize you as a company when
they see your message in their inbox. A good list is not bought or rented, but instead organically grown through an opt-in, permission-based form on your website or from your database of current customers and prospects. A good list is a valuable asset for your company, an accumulation of all of your customer relationships - not a group of nameless contacts that you “blast” (We hate that word…) when you need to communicate information or make your revenue quota.
If you don’t have a good list, then you’re not going to realize good delivery…and you’re going to fail as an email marketer. Simple as that.
Crystal Clear Communication
Take the time to set frequency and content expectations for your subscribers. Clarify the types of communications they are opting in to receive from you on all of your web forms and within the body of all of your messages. Be vigilant in following these expectations. If you communicated that they will receive a monthly newsletter, do not send an email once per week. If the expectation is for updates on specials, do not send the monthly newsletter. Honor the individual’s preference and work like crazy to create outstanding content that they’ll happily consume.
Also, make sure that there is not a long delay between messages, especially the first one. We suggest that you customize Bronto to deliver an automatic message to contacts right after they sign up. This keeps your company name and brand fresh in their minds.
Bounce the Bounced (and the Inactives)
Use Bronto’s Clean feature to maintain good list hygiene. By removing invalid and inactive contacts from your account, you protect yourself against the ding on your reputation you receive each time you send to invalid contacts. Plus, you guard against the unsolicited email complaints that come from old contacts that may not remember you or remember opting in to your list(s). Depending on your sending frequency, we suggest that you disable contacts that have not opened or clicked in the last 10 or 20 messages.
The good news is that Bronto helps with this automatically. Once an email address bounces 5 times, we automatically change the status from Active to Bounced, immediately making the email address inactive.
Related posts:
- Friday Webcast - August 18 - Delivery 201 Last week’s webcast, “Delivery 101″, defined the email delivery landscape...
- 6 Considerations to Lower Complaints & Improve Your Sender Reputation Got complaints? The bad news: Complaints are the best...
- TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST! In our ongoing effort to make Bronto clients better marketers,...
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Good lists are so key.