What is email hygiene? Why is it so important? For me to answer these questions I must first cover why email is so important to your success. In short, email is a critical part of your marketing strategy. Email is and will be one of the most used weapon of your marketing arsenal. If you are not able to use it due to poor practices then you are done. You will have to change so many things to make it right you will pull your hair out. The second thing to cover is that emails travel around the world through what is called Email Service Providers (ESP). These providers are responsible for the delivery of emails. They monitor complains about email spammers. They filter out spam using automated algorithms. Think of them as the traffic cops of emails.
now that you know the main components of emailing, now I can cover proper hygiene. What is meant by email hygiene is making sure that your emails follow these three main rules:OK
THE EMAIL ADDRESS HAS TO BE CORRECT
THE PEOPLE THAT YOU ARE SENDING EMAILS TO HAVE OPTED INTO YOUR EMAILS
THE PEOPLE THAT RECEIVE YOUR EMAILS ARE OPENING THEM.
Point 1, is the simplest of the items on the list. Yet I can’t tell you how many times we mess this up. We either don’t format it correctly or just have it incorrect. The proper format is xxxxx@yyyy.zzz, the key here is the “@: sign and the “.” sign.
Point 2, is another point most people forget. You have to provide your recipient a way to opt out of your emails. This point is more to protect you from complaints. I will cover why you care about this in the following paragraphs.
Point 3 is the hardest. This means that the emails you are sending are relevant to the people receiving them. This is where you will earn your keep as an email marketer. You will have to review open rates and clicks to make sure what you are sending is appealing to the audience.
So what happens if you don’t follow these rules? You will get what is called email bounce. There are two types of bounce, soft bounce and hard bounce. The higher the rate of bounce the worse your email domain is rated by the ESP.
The hard bounce is easy to fix. Although there could be many reasons for this, the result is due to a permanent inability to deliver the email. The common reasons for a hard bounce are not having the correct email address or domain does not exist or the recipient email server blocked the delivery. For the first two just fix the address and domain and you should be ok. As for the ESP blocking the delivery, you will have to contact the email provider they are using to see why they are blocking you. This is very uncommon but I thought I mention it.
The soft bounce, is a little more out of your control to correct. This happens when an ESP rejects the email due the recipient mailbox being full, offline, or the email is too large for the recipient. The first two are temporary and by retrying could fix the issue. The third will require you to contact the email service provider to see what the limits are and reduce your email to those limits.
Now that you know what to look out for, monitor your campaigns. Make sure people are receiving the emails and they are opening the emails. This kind of reporting is simple to get if you are using a creditable email service delivery system. They should provide these reports free of charge. Keep in mind people will opt out and change email addresses regularly so the key is to constantly monitor your emails campaigns. If email addresses do bounce I suggest you put them into a separate email list until you can correct them or delete them.
I hope this information was useful. Remember if you make your content engaging and keep up your hygiene you should establish a strong email list. These list are the cornerstone of your marketing and overall business success. Good luck out there and sell much!