Hygiene – Important for the person, more important for your email.
Email communications are still one of the fastest and least expensive methods to communicate with your customers, but there is work and planning that must go into the communications.
Emails are personal information so you have to keep track of when that person gave you their email address allowing you to send communications. Similarly, if a recipient tells you to stop sending email notifications, you have to. So maintain a removal file and make sure emails from this file do not get added back to the broadcast list.
To make it easier for your clients to reach you, it’s best to include all of your contact information in the communications.
It’s good to broadcast on a regular basis. You have to make sure that you have something to say to educate, entertain as well as sell your product/service. People will let you know if it’s too often by either telling you or not opening your emails.
The suggestions discussed above are important, however, the work in your list hygiene comes with the managing of bounces and blocked email addresses. Emails bounce back to you when they cannot be delivered. The failed deliveries can happen for a number of reasons. The email may not exist anymore, the person’s email folder could be full or their mail server may not be operating properly at the time the email was sent. Another reason an email may not be delivered is that the mail server that the person is on may identify your email a spam and refuse all email delivery from your email address or ip address.
If you continuously broadcast emails to address that do not exist or have you blocked, you may attract the attention of spam lists. Once you’re on a spam list, your email address will be picked up by a lot of spam protection software and then your delivery rates and open rates will plummet. To stay off the black lists, you have to remove the emails that constantly bounce from your broadcast list. The servers that have you blocked are a little more difficult to clean up. If the people are your clients, contact them and explain that you believe they’re blocking your communications. The client may be able to clear it up on their end by contacting their IT person, or by putting you on a “safe list”.
There are on-line services that can help you broadcast emails, companies that will maintain your databases for you as well as software packages that let you do it in house.
It’s important to know what you’re looking for so you can identify the service that meets your needs.
So in summary.
• Be upfront with your email recipients by giving them every way possible to contact you either to purchase or be removed from your list.
• If someone requests to be taken off your list, remove them and ensure they don’t get added back onto the list.
• Broadcast regularly, but only if you have something to say.
• Remove email addresses that are not receiving your emails.
• Address the clients that have your emails blocked.
Steven Elliott
