Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

Have your e-mails recently been black listed from an ISP and you’re not sure why?  You’ve checked the reports from your e-mail marketing provider and it shows that you are not receiving any spam complaints.  So what’s the problem?

The problem may lie in your e-mail delivery bounce rates.  If you’re bounce rates are too high, the ISP may think you are trying to spam them and block your domain or IP address.  Statistics from research marketing firm NFO WorldGroups show that there is a 31% turnover rate in e-mail addresses over a 12-month period.  Why?  People graduate college, change jobs, try out a new free e-mail service or any number of other reason.  Spammers who buy e-mail lists are most often buying old lists, so many of the e-mail addresses in their lists are no longer valid.  They do not care about list management and therefore do not scrub their lists for invalid e-mails and they just keep sending and sending.  Because of this practice, ISPs recognize a high bounce rate as an attempt at spam and will react swiftly to keep their users same.

Let’s take a look at the different types of bounces.  There are really only two types, a soft bounce and a hard bounce.

A soft bounce means that the address was found but the delivery attempt failed due to other factors.  A soft bounce may include:

• Inactive Account
• Temporary Domain failure
• Out of Office reply
• Mailbox full
• e-mail limit has been exceeded

Most e-mail marketing systems will retry sending your e-mail to the subscriber several more times over 24 hours. (These retries are usually not included in the tracking summary’s “sent” count.) If the e-mail is successfully delivered and the subscriber opens the e-mail, the subscriber’s status is changed back to Active. If all attempts fail, the application follows the same process as for a hard bounce received for a subscriber whose current status is Bounced, described below.

A hard bounce is an attempt to send an e-mail to an address that has failed typically because of:

• Bad address syntax
• Unknown user
• Unknown domain
• Invalid Address

So basically, if you send several e-mails to an ISP and those addresses do not exist, then the ISP thinks that you are trying to guess at e-mail address in an attempt to spam and they may block you.

There is no magic number to what your bounce rates should be under.  But for example, if you have a subscriber list containing 2000 e-mail addresses and 10% of those bounce, that is 200 failed attempts.  If you try this several times without scrubbing those addresses from your list, there is a good chance an ISP will block e-mails from you.

Let’s look at the following fictitious example for list management.  Lets say this e-mail marketer has not been scrubbing their list.  In fact, every month they are pulling new data from their in-house CRM tool and making new lists.

• July 2008 e-Newsletter contained 2,311 subscribers received a 5.7% Bounce Rate - 105 Hard bounces and 10 unsubscribes
• June 2008 e-Newsletter contained 2,156 subscribers and received an 11.2% Bounce Rate - 148 Hard Bounces and 8 unsubscribes
• May 2008 e-Newsletter contained 2,234 subscribers and received a 10.7% Bounce Rate - 157 Hard Bounces and 4 unsubscribes

Before then the bounce rates were much lower and there was never a problem being blocked for spam.  After the July e-Newsletter, you received several notices from ISPs that your e-mails will now be blocked from deliverability.

The point of all this is to show you that list management is a crucial step to successful e-mail marketing.  You can’t just import e-mail addresses and let it fly.  You must get permission and continuously scrub your data to ensure maximum usability.

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