Campaign Delivery Management

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Before the send: Testing

In this section, we will look at what you can do before you send your email, and after the email has been sent, in order to improve your email deliverability.

So first, let's look at what you want to check before sending your email. There are multiple places where you can test and optimize for deliverability, including:

• Subject line
• From name
• Time of day
• Day of the week

If more recipients are going to open your email at certain times of the day, why not send it at that time to increase those opens and clicks? Again, increasing those opens and clicks loops back into better deliverability stats for ISPs to monitor. Let's talk a little bit about a software called Litmus.

Litmus includes a from name and subject line checker, which can help to optimize your email before sent. It lets you know if the subject line is simply too long or too short, in terms of character length, includes spam characters or is too vague. The from name checker checks both the domain the email was sent from and what the reply to address is.

It is strongly suggested that you use a real email address instead of a no-reply address. Using tools like Litmus really helps you to spot things that a marketer in a hurry might otherwise miss. It is well worth your time to make sure that if you don't have a human being able to spot all of these issues, that you simply automate it with the tool.

Before the send: Reviewing

Another check to perform before sending your email is to review previous campaign performance. This will help you to highlight any issues you've had previously, to ensure that you've at least implemented some of the fixes before sending the next one. I would advise beginning with any issues relating to the top of the email funnel, the deliverability level, before then applying fixes to subject and copy and so on and so forth.

Always review previous campaign reporting in your ESP, to identify any possible deliverability problems first. Reports should be reviewed 24 hours after they send. Measure your opens and clicks and bounces and so on. If your ESP provides bounce details on each bounce, review those to identify any trends and take the corrective action.

Before the send: Checking for blacklists

The very last thing to check before send is checking for blacklists. Again, this is another quick tool that you can use in order to check that this is happening. Multiple sites exist that can check and monitor an IP and domain blacklists. So simply go to mailtester.com and get your email sent so that you can check if you're on a blacklist, if your domain is not authenticated, if the email contains any general errors, and if there are any broken links.

All crucial parts to a successful email campaign.

After the send: Engagement metrics

After the email has been sent, roughly 24 hours later, check the engagement of the email for the good metrics, such as the opens, the clicks, the conversions, the trends. Your ESP should also be providing you with all of the metrics that will then help you improve for the next, such as the opt-outs, the unsubscribes, the bounces, and the spam.

If you notice, for example, that one of your emails has nearly a zero click rate or a high bounce rate, this will indicate to you that something is wrong. You should definitely investigate before continuing with your campaigns, as the same issue will just continue to crop up.

After the send: Understand, manage, and remove

The last thing to review and manage after the email send, is bounce management. In most email campaigns, there will always be at least a few hard bounces. It is important to note these are permanent failures and email will never be sent to them again, so it's best to just remove them from your email list in the first place.

You should:

• Monitor your email delivery.
• Manage good list hygiene.
• Use double opt-in.

And by maintaining this healthy email list, it means you will always have a better chance of getting your emails delivered to those who need it or those who want it.