The Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Email Results in 2015

We all make New Year’s resolutions. Why not make a resolution to improve your email results in 2015? By making some simple changes and updates you can see better results from your email campaigns in 2015. Follow these 5 simple recommendations and see your results take off!

1. Clean Your List

The New Year is a great time to start fresh. One way to accomplish this is by performing some basic hygiene on your lists. Your list can easily be cleaned by removing all bounces, unsubscribes, and unengaged subscribers. Identifying bounces and unsubscribes is very straightforward. SocketLabs assists you in this process by placing these email entries on a suppression list. Suppressing these entries helps improve and protect your IP reputation with the ISPs thus improving your inbox placement. To completely remove these entries from your email lists download them from the SocketLabs Control Panel “Failed Messages” and “Complaint” reporting pages.

Defining and identifying unengaged people is a bit more challenging and is more specific to one’s business. One way unengaged individuals can be identified is through a subscriber’s interaction with previous emails. This interaction can be distinguished through open and click tracking data which is also readily available to our customers through the SocketLabs’ Control Panel “Engagement Tracking” reporting page. Removing subscribers that have never or rarely opened or clicked on your email can also help improve your inbox placement at the large ISPs.

All of this data can also be obtained programmatically through the SocketLabs Reporting or Notification API for further convenience.

2. Segment Your List

Research has proven that effective list segmentation will increase open and click rates while reducing bounce and complaint rates. Segmenting your general list into more focused lists can be accomplished by dividing your list into your user’s areas of interest. Other ways to break up a list is by geographic area, age, gender, level of education, or purchasing history. Purchasing history can be further narrowed down by items purchased, date of last purchase, purchasing frequency or cycle. The reality is people are more likely to engage with your email if the content is relevant to them. When users receive unwelcome information they will often unsubscribe or identify an email as spam which can have a negative impact on sender reputation and inbox placement.

3. Validate New Sign-ups

Adding invalid email addresses to your list can also damage your sender reputation as passing high volumes (> 10%) of bad addresses impacts your deliverability. That’s why we recommend using either a double opt-in validation process or employing an email validation service at registration. This can be particularly important if you are collecting email addresses from a mobile application where typos occur at a much higher rate.

A double opt-in process will ensure that the subscriber desires to be on your list. It does this by confirming the original sign-up with an email to the subscriber. This email will contain a link that the subscriber will need to click for confirmation.

4. Use a Custom Bounce Domain

SocketLabs strongly supports using a custom bounce domain. The bounce domain is another name for the return path and is where receiving mail servers send bounce and error messages. Setting a custom bounce domain helps to tightly couple your FROM address domain with the bounce domain. It also removes any traces of your email provider from the SMTP protocol communications and email header. This is important for authentication which helps with both deliverability and inbox placement. It also avoids the via tag displayed within Gmail when these two domains do not match. More information on Custom Bounce Domains can be found here.

5. Comply With All Local And Federal Email Laws

All email communication in the United States is governed by the CAN SPAM Act. In Canada, email is governed by the new Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL). There are also state and local laws that can apply to emails. Make sure you are complying with all applicable laws when sending your email campaigns. Not only is it the law, but there can be steep fines for those that do not comply. Additionally, violation of these rules will cause problems with your email service provider. At SocketLabs, we take these laws very seriously and our knowledgeable deliverability team works very closely with our customers to make sure that emails are legally compliant. More information on these laws and proper email construction can be found here.