FAQs
We’ve compiled a list of answers to some of the questions we are asked most frequently about email marketing. Hopefully, we can make some sense of the subject, though in most cases, as TurboToad is a full-service product, we will take care of most of these issues for you. If you need more information, please contact us, we’re more than happy to help.
What do the terms in the Campaign Snapshot mean?
The Campaign Snapshot contains a number of important terms which explain the most recent results for each campaign you send. Below is a quick explanation about what these figures actually mean.
Total Opened
The total number of times your campaign was viewed by your recipients. This means that if you send a campaign to 2 recipients and one reads your email twice while the other reads it once, the total opened will be 3.
Unique Opened
The unique opened does not take repeat opens into account, meaning the figure represents the total number of recipients that actually opened your campaign.
Clicks
The Clicks data provides a number of important figures about the links in your campaign. As an example, “2,481 (14.28%) recipients clicked 7 links” tells us the following:
- A total of 2,481 recipients clicked at least one link.
- This resulted in a click-through rate of 14.28%.
- A total of 7 different links in the campaign were clicked.
Unsubscribed
The unsubscribed data tells you the total number of recipients that clicked the unsubscribe link in the campaign and also provides you with the percentage of recipients that unsubscribed.
Bounced
The bounce data tells you the total number of recipients that bounced and also provides you with the percentage of recipients that bounced.
Delivered
The delivered count tells you the total number of emails that were successfully delivered to your recipients. It is equal to the total number of messages sent minus the total number that bounced back. The delivered percentage tells us the total percentage of messages that were successfully delivered.
Does TurboToad Pro track everyone who opens an mail campaign?
Unfortunately, we cannot track every subscriber who opens your email. While we do provide information about who opened, the data is not complete. Your open rate is likely higher than what is reported because text emails cannot be tracked and because not all email readers report open tracking.
Also, by not displaying images by default, some email readers do not allow for open tracking and others allow the recipient to choose to allow or disallow open tracking as a setting.
Why do I have such a high number of bounces in my campaign?
This is not an unusual occurrence after sending your first campaign and is common when you’re using older, established client lists. Let’s say you have a mailing list that’s slowly grown over the years but hasn’t been contacted in the past 12 months (or longer):
The hard bounce
You have sent your campaign. 30% of your list hard bounce right from the word go. Another 25% unsubscribe immediately.
30%
Fact: Email address turnover averages about 30% every year. This means that each year almost a third of your subscriber list will have moved on to a new email address. If you haven’t sent to your subscriber list in a while, expect many of those trusted addresses to be out of date.
Typo’s are common errors
Believe it or not, a number of bounces will result from simple data entry errors - missing underscores, upper or lower case, incorrectly spelled names, etc.
Will we have a chance to repair the list?
Of course. Give the campaign a week or so to run it’s course then check TurboToad’s Campaign Reports for a list of bounced subscribers. Using this, you can verify email addresses or contact your subscriber to obtain their new email address.
What else can we do?
If your list hasn’t been contacted for at least 12 months, you should consider a permission confirmation campaign. This is a simple email that includes:
- An explanation of how, when and where they subscribed to your list.
- A compelling list of the benefits of continuing their subscription and a preview of what you’ll be contacting them about in the future. If you can’t say anything compelling then you shouldn’t be contacting them in the first place.
- A confirmation link the user must click to confirm their subscription. The best approach is to link to a subscribe form for a brand new list.
Any subsequent campaigns should only be sent to the new list.
Will we lose subscribers adhering to strict permission-based email marketing?
If a recipient on your list is not opening, reading, or responding to your campaigns ... They aren’t really your subscriber anyway.
How do I reduce the number of emails that bounce?
Managing the way you handle bounces for your Subscriber Lists has never been more important. Keeping a close eye on your bounces can reduce your email delivery costs, therefore having a direct impact on the ROI of your campaigns.
Let’s begin with a couple definitions:
A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient’s mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers will attempt to deliver the email regularly for a few days. If it is still undelivered, it becomes a hard bounce.
A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn’t exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient’s mail server has blocked your server. Servers will also interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.
TurboToad automatically moves subscribers that hard bounce into a “Bounced Subscribers” category, so they don’t receive future campaigns. You can also customize precisely how soft bounces are handled for each subscriber list.
Here are some quick tips on ways you can reduce bounces even further:
- Keep your subscriber lists clean
TurboToad automatically removes invalid email addresses as you add them, but when new subscribers sign up via a subscribe form, they may enter an invalid address. Check each list for incorrectly formatted addresses, invalid domains and typos. - Use double opt-in:
When creating a subscriber list, set it as double opt-in, allowing each address to be validated by the subscriber before it can be added to your list. - Monitor Delivery Rates By Domain:
Track your open and bounces rates by major domain, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and others. If one is significantly different than the others, or your experience a sudden change, your campaign may be getting caught by spam filters. - Understand and Monitor Spam Filters:
Get to know the more common things that most spam filters look for and make sure you avoid them in each campaign you send. - Test Your Emails:
Prior to sending your campaign to your entire list, send a test to yourself and others. Make sure you try and include all the major types of email clients used by members of your list when testing.
What are some good methods for avoiding spam filters?
Even when you’re sending an email campaign to subscribers who opted-in, your email can still be flagged as spam by overzealous spam filters. Simply using the word “free” in an email message can often land you in the spam heap.
Listed below are a number of simple tips and techniques you should consider when writing and designing your campaigns:
- Keep sender addresses as short as possible.
- Avoid continuous sending of messages to full or invalid mailboxes. You can do this by tweaking your bounce handling settings for each subscriber list.
- Minimize the use of these words and phrases in the subject line, message body, sender address, and reply-to address:
- Use of the word Free (although “free” tends to have more leeway than most other trigger words), $$, XXX, sex or !!! (any excessive punctuation)
- Subject contains “Double Your”, “?”, “For Only” or “Free Instant”.
- TOO MANY CAPS IN THE SUBJECT LINE
- Email contains at least 70 percent blank lines
- The from field appears to not contain a real name, ends in numbers or contains the
word friend. - The “reply to” field is empty
- The email claims not to be spam
- The email contains excessive images without much text
- Monitor new subscribers in your lists. Set suspicious “spamflag” addresses such as “abuse@” or “marketerspam@” as Inactive subscribers.
Ultimately, the most important thing you can do is adhere to the best practices for email marketing: Gain permission, compose relevant content, and deliver messages according to the customer’s needs, wants, and preferences.
What’s the best day and time to send my email newsletters?
The truth is, the optimal delivery time will depend on what you are sending and to whom you are sending.
Fortunately, one of email’s strengths is that it gives you the ability to test at a very low cost thresh-hold. You should use the time of day and day of week as variables in your tests.
Try segmenting (splitting) your subscribers into two (2) separate subscriber lists and sending to one half on a particular day and time and one half on another. Run a comparison of your results in the Reporting section and determine the best day and time for your market.
Running tests like this over the course of a few campaigns is the only way to really know when you will maximize your open rates.
Can I use flash in my email newsletters?
Short answer: NO.
By default, AOL, Outlook 02/03, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora will not display flash movies in a HTML email because the security settings prohibit embedded content like flash from running. On the other hand, Mac Mail has no problem displaying flash.
So, Mac’s rock, but what about web-based email clients such as Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail? Sorry, but these providers also automatically strip out any flash content in your campaign.
So what’s the solution? Simple: Don’t include flash content in your emails.
However, if flash is extremely important to the campaign, you can always create a landing page on your web site to display the flash content, then link to it from your email. Users will be able to view the flash content using a web browser.
