Posted: Wed, June 17, 2009
Bouncing back - Learning from your responses
By Andy Parker
Reading through my ever increasing and busy Twitter stream this morning, I picked up on a tweet from online music magazine drownedinsound.com. It simply said 'Sign of the recession: insane (like 2000!) "i've been made redundant" and "no longer works here" out of office replies to our mailout.'
It got me thinking. How can we analyse our email marketing bounces to improve our results and understand more about our market area?
Sign of the times
A scary notion isn't it? We can be so impersonal with the way in which we deliver and understand our readers/viewers that the first we hear of them losing their job is from a cold, hard auto responder.
Email marketing systems have become so automated, with immense reporting capabilities that we rarely have to deal with anything other than the metrics we desire and fast turnaround statistics.
Several years ago I was working with a client-side email marketing system, by that I mean it was installed on my desktop PC. It was essentially a glorified mail processor. You had to manage your own lists in an Access database and send your messages through your own mail server.
It meant that all the overheads - including the cost of the software was on you. ROI was hard to judge, as you had to equate a weekly cost in server processing with time spent creating the mailer itself, manually working the lists and scheduling the delivery. It also meant you had a PC (mine) which was out of action for a good 5hrs every week whilst it sent all the mail. That also meant for 5hrs of the week I was desk-less. We tried out running an over-night job, but the nature of the alerts meant they were getting in to the inboxes at the wrong time and often were overlooked the following day.
Hindsight is 40/40
This led to many issues, one of which was how to deal with bounce backs and direct message replies. We would get 1000's of auto responder returns to our mailer every week which often caused mail services to crash entirely. One of the basic ways we resolved some of these overheads was to create a honey pot or - catch-all mail box for replies. Perhaps somewhat naive upon reflection, we would run a script to empty this mailbox every 20mins, never looking through it. What I now realise in hindsight is I was binning a valuable resource for market research.
Dig deep and you will find Gold
Of course learning everything about your target audiences from email marketing alone would be rather foolish. We don't walk around with email blinkers on and it only takes turning on the television to see what is happen throughout the global markets.
If your main goal for email marketing is B2B, knowing which companies and groups you're targeting are rumoured to be hitting the big swirly could provide you a worthy insight into your targeted industry status, save you a lot of time refining lists and perhaps provide you an additional avenue to reach out and grab someone's attention.
Using your reply addresses
Using a system which allows you to express a dynamic reply address may be the way forward. Many systems currently available provide the ability to allocate a reply address for your mailers. This means that if someone was to click reply in response to your mailer there is a chance someone is at the other end.
Mailer Metrics on whether your message has bounced only gives you another number for another chart. Knowing what that number represents is far more insightful.
Request access to the honey pot mail box which is picking up the bounce notifications and replies from the system. Don't delete its content en masse without taking a peak at what is being returned.
If you notice multiple bounce backs from a single domain - look it up! Does the website still exist? Has the company gone into receivership? Has it merged? You still have a chance to reach out directly with this information and create a new lead, perhaps offline.
NOREPLY@THISDOMAIN.COM
Are there people responding directly to unsubscribe? If so why? Have you hidden your unsubscribe links in a quagmire of legal gobbledegook? Is your unsubscribe page broken meaning they can't unsubscribe from the site? There are many possibilities this could be occurring and each instance of a direct response to unsubscribe could be a sign of a failing mailer.
Do away with the NOREPLY@DOMAIN addresses. They add another level of impersonal bravado to your mailer which is only going to hinder your public image in the long run. Provide the same level of information you would if you were sending a personal email, at the very least a reply address and if you really want to impress and see significant trust value, add a from address and from name - and make them personal!
About the Author
Andy Parker forms part of the creative design team at Pure360.com. His specialist subjects are SEO, accessibility, web compliancy, XHTML, CSS and all aspects of design for use on the web.
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