How can I find and fix what’s happening to my emails?

If you regularly have large numbers of emails that are failing to be delivered, we’ll help you find and fix the reasons for FREE.

As we introduced in Why aren’t my emails getting delivered? Email deliverability can have big implications for your business, over and above the missed opportunities to target your current and potential customers.

Even the largest enterprises with the most sophisticated digital marketing resources are unlikely to achieve 95%+ deliverability for every single one of their campaigns. But to recap on our previous blog, if your emails are achieving delivery rates of less than 90%, or this rate is declining from one campaign to the next:

• It’s unlikely this is solely the result of data quality issues.
• It won’t just be prospects that are failing to receive your emails – it could easily be your existing customers as well.
•  If you don’t take action the situation will only get worse, and you may even risk being blacklisted by your internet service provider (ISP).

So what can you do? If you’re using Marketo, there are a number of tools available to help you see what’s happening to your emails and fix any issues.

See what’s really happening to your bounced emails

Many Marketing Managers, when they see that an email has bounced, will simply write this off as being due to bad data. They’ll, therefore, do nothing to manage or repair the maybe 10-20% of bounced emails, or exclude them from their campaign.

But with Marketo, you can access a regularly updated list of around 50 ‘bounce codes’ telling you the reason the delivery failed. If this was a hard bounce, it could be that the email address contained a typo, a dot in the wrong place, or was addressed to a .com when it should have been a .co.uk. Alternatively, if it was a soft bounce (i.e. the address was correct but the email failed to make it to the recipient’s mailbox), there’s an opportunity to recycle the email over a 3-6 month window, to try to engage with the target and so increase the success of your campaign.

If an email is getting caught in a spam filter – especially if it’s to an existing customer – it’s vital to know why this is happening and what can be done to correct it. Did it not fit with the recipient’s browser? Did it have spam-related keywords? Were links or images causing any problems? Or were there issues with the IP address from which the email was being sent?

How to get it sorted?

Clearly, not all organisations will have the time or resources to analyse these kinds of issues or want to invest in additional tools. This is where we can help, by doing the analysis for you, and using deliverability best practices to help ensure more of your emails get through to your intended recipients.

To give you an idea of the benefits, send us a recent email with a poor deliverability rate, and we’ll do a FREE Litmus test to help you see how you could improve it. Just hit Contact Us to get started.