What are email bounces? - Part 2

Email bounces can hinder the success of your marketing campaigns and it is very important for marketers to take corrective action for this. Here are some steps you can implement to reduce the rate of your bounces.

• Check out how your list service vendor handles the bounces.
• Once you get the information from the vendor, check for yourself how many addresses are bouncing and who they are.
• Once you get a soft bounce, resend it a few more times before considering it a hard bounce.
• Temporary soft bounces should be attempted again for sending and the same applies for ‘Out of Office’ emails.
• Take at least a month’s time before invalidating any record from your database.
• It is also a good idea to connect to prospects through other channels if their email address does not really work.
• You should always consider testing your email campaigns before starting the. This will certainly help to reduce the number of bounce-backs.

Below are some examples of hard bounce codes with the description of the error.
5.1.2 - Bad destination host 'DNS Hard Error'
550 - No such user - Administrative prohibition
5.1.1- Unknown or illegal alias
5.1.0- Unknown address error

Email bounce backs are undoubtedly irritating and can bring the flow of your marketing to a halt. However, by exercising little caution and strategies, you can surely reduce them to great extent to ensure the success of your campaigns.

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What are Email bounces? – Part 1

Email bounces occur when the emails sent are not delivered to the recipient. It can be caused by a number of reasons.  There are 2 main types of email bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

A hard bounce occurs when the email is returned because the recipient’s address is invalid. It can occur if the domain name is invalid; recipient is unknown or due to a network problem.

A soft bounce occurs when the email reaches the inbox, but bounces back before it reaches the recipient. This can happen due to a full mailbox, or has very little storage space.

Email bounces can hinder the success of your marketing campaigns and it is very important for marketers to take corrective action for this. Let’s look at some of them in the next post.

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The Ultimate Checklist to Filter Bounces

Bounces are emails that are returned as undelivered and the most common factor that affects deliverability. To avoid this:

• Have your lists properly filtered and get rid of any invalid email addresses
• Reduce your bounces by correcting formatting errors like invalid addresses, domains and typos
• Look for missing @ signs or missing domain names and fix them at the earliest. Another reason for a bounce-back is that the recipients have changed their addresses or moved to a new domain
• Request your ESP to get you granular delivery reports to manage your lists
• Confirm email addresses by sending welcome emails to all the recipients on the list
• Carry out a test email campaign to identify any basic errors.
• Bounces can purge an email address, hence set a bounce threshold for a given period of time.
• Monitor your delivery rates by categories such as domain names, time of sending and other criteria. Track them and if you see a negative pattern in the deliverability rates, call an expert for help.
• Make sure you update your lists timely and incorporate changes in addresses to avoid frequent bounce-backs.

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9 Reasons Your Messages Might Get Blocked

It is a common factor that email marketing messages are hit back by the ISPs even when they were opted for by the clients. Here are 9 reasons why your email might not reach your prospect's inbox:

1.    If emails are regularly send out to invalid email addresses that would affect the reputation of the sender. This is one of the main reasons that ISPs block email messages.

2.    The other factor that affects the sender’s reputation adversely is the spam complaints from recipients and a high bounce rate.

3.    Bad email addresses are monitored by ISPs frequently to identify spammers and dishonest senders. Spammers usually use fake ids to send emails to people on a huge mailing list without taking care if they are valid or not.

4.    If any percentage of your messages goes to invalid email addresses, you have the chance of a temporary block with the ISP.

5.    ISPs block emails from marketers who tend to use poor email acquisition techniques to build their list while compromising on quality.

6.    Your email messages will also be blocked if you try to send to inactive lists in an attempt to re-engage old customers.

7.    ISPs also block messages from marketers who have changed their email service providers and have not paid due attention to effective list hygiene practices.

8.    Sometimes, the words in the subject line of the email can cause a filter to trigger and block your email.

9.    Sending emails too frequently from the same email address can also cause a trigger and result in blocking of your emails by the ISP.

Avoiding the above bloopers would ensure you smooth deliverability rates for your email. However, you must ensure that you are following honest email marketing practices to avoid being labeled as a ‘spammer’.

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ListAustralia Offers Readymade Lists Tailor-made to your Business

Whether you own an advertising agency or a healthcare company, the first thing you need to start a marketing campaign is the right contact database.  Most often, marketers do not have the time and resources to engage separate resources to prepare detailed databases of consumers and organizations. Moreover, when the business requirement is a little specific or niche, readymade databases prove to be the best bet.

ListAustralia provides a variety of pre-packaged or readymade databases to help marketers like you.
        
ListAustralia’s readymade lists are:
•    Varied and prepared according to different industries
•    Completely verified and are updated at regular intervals
•    More than a million contacts so that you are never short on number of prospects
•    Based on various categories like organizations, industry, individuals’ details and many more
•    Ready-to-use and are delivered within 24 hrs of placing an order

You can now start a marketing campaign at any time. With our pre-packaged lists, you can target any section of the industry and consumers. Using different kinds of pre-packaged lists also lets you compare the response rates from various cross-sections of the market. You can gauge how well is your product received amongst the prospects.

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ListAustralia Offers Custom-Built Lists for your Industry

A recent study shows that accurate databases can reduce marketing costs by 35%
A customized list is the right tool to help you in identifying the right prospects for your business. These B2B lists are developed by industry experts after necessary market research and validation. Such customer databases can help you identify your potential customers and their preferences and choices of products.

Why Get A Custom-built List?

 • The lists are highly authentic and compiled from reliable sources like government listings, public filings, tradeshows, conferences etc
• Each and every listing in the database is verified by our professionals through telephone and email, both
• The custom-built lists can be used for specialized marketing campaigns instead of a generalized one
• Since the lists are verified and collected from authentic sources, a very high deliverability rate is guaranteed to ensure the success of your marketing campaigns.
• The quality of custom-built databases is further strengthened by segmenting the lists into various categories like occupation, location, zip code, demography and others besides the basic contact details of the customers
Now-a-days, you can also get a custom-built list based on the SIC code of the organization. An SIC code represents the industry to which your prospects belong. Such a classification is helpful for formulating niche campaigns and allows for targeted exposure for your products.

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Consumer List Appending for Smart Campaigns & Better Deliverability

 

It is very important to have an updated marketing list for your campaigns to be fully effective. ListAustralia’s specialized list appending services will help enhance the quality of your database by adding fresh new contacts and removing the old, inactive ones. Our appending services improve the overall quality of your databases and help you gain new prospects.

Why Choose Our Appending Solutions?
• Our appending professionals cleanse your database and find missing and incomplete records from the database. These are then deleted and replaced by new, active contacts.

• Before including a record in the database, our professionals verify with the prospect if the current contact details are valid. Once confirmed, the record is finally incorporated in the database.

• Our appending services enable you to cut unnecessary cost and time in appending your marketing lists. You can hence, concentrate more on the core marketing activities of your business.

• We append contacts in frequent intervals; hence, you can be assured that any list delivered is free from any obsolete record.

Timely appending of databases can improve the deliverability of your campaigns by 60%

Our fast and cost-effective append solutions can help you get a fresh, clean list of consumers in a quick turnaround. Our customized methodology is formulated keeping in mind the needs of your business and the market domain it caters to.

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Actionable Tips to Avoid Email SPAM. Act Now!!!

This post explains how you can avoid spam filters and how simple modification can reduce accidental spam flagging by spam filters.

Avoid words that trigger spam
Do not include spam tainted words in your email "subject line" and in the “email body”. As preventive steps, run the email template through the spam checker. This will help you weed out inadvertent usage of spam words. Another way to keep you updated on new words is by tracking and avoiding words that appear in junk filter list of Microsoft Outlook’s junk filter or in the third party email clients.

Some of the common words that spam filters include are:
Free!,$$$,50% off!, click here, call now!, subscribe, earn $, discount!, online marketing, order now, please read, don't delete, etc.

Use a consistent “From” field
Use a consistent sender in all outgoing emails. Use your brand name, not an anonymous name, in the "from" field. Moreover, consistent messaging policy enables you to meet the right expectations of the recipients and help you to maintain good relations with ISPs.

Remove unsubscribes
Don’t mail to someone if they have unsubscribed. As a good practice, group the unsubscribe and remove them within 10 days of the request. Failure to remove opt-outs will result in user complaint. Too many complaints will attract the attention of ISPs and in turn their filters will stop your mail from traversing. Due to such serious retribution, most email vendors ensure that opt-outs are automatically removed from the database.

Keep HTML formats Simple
It’s important to keep your HTML formats very simple by avoiding javascript, embedded forms, and hidden text in HTML emails. If your HTML message has more than 50% HTML tags, there are more chances of getting caught in spam filters.

Here are 3 elements in HTML to avoid:
1. Avoid HTML table with a thick border
2. Avoid JavaScript contained in the HTML message
3. Avoid making HTML code harder to understand in decompiled form

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