Once you have sent your creation into the ether the sophistication of email marketing becomes apparent. You now have to set to work examining the returns from your email marketing software. And be aware that the statistics will be arriving almost immediately.
The first figures of note will be your bounces. This is where your email has failed at the first hurdle. It has not even reached the inbox of your intended recipient. Many ask what is the normal bounce rate in email marketing. The answer is, as so often, it depends. You will be able to answer this question yourself once you have run a few campaigns.
We will ignore blocked emails and just deal with what are known as hard and soft bounces.
A soft bounce means that the email has not been delivered due to what is assumed to be a temporary fault with the recipient’s mail server. What will happen is that the email will be presented a number of times. Eventually though if the email continues to be rejected it will become a hard bounce.
Hard bounces are much more serious. It is where the user does not exist on that domain or that the domain itself is unknown. The fault lies with you. If you bought in an email list then you can take up the number of hard bounces with the supplier. However if the email list is one you have built yourself then the solution is down to you.
You should expect a proportion of email addresses to become non-functional each year. In the case of business addresses this can be as high as 30 per cent according to some research. The rate is lower for personal addresses but still many will change.
There is little you can do about this apart from perhaps including a reminder on the email itself to keep you updated of any change. If the address has been recorded incorrectly then all you have to do is discover why.
So you can see that the results from email marketing software are not something that should frighten you. Your most valuable asset is your email lists and anything that can indicate a problem in the way you gather details is to be encouraged.
