Remove Bounces Before You Mail and Improve Inbox Placement Rate
Guest Blog today courtesy of Craig Swerdloff, CEO, LeadSpend
According to the DMA’s Email Experience Council, Inbox Placement Rate is defined as the ratio of emails that are delivered specifically to the recipient’s inbox, divided by the total emails sent. It is the truest measure of email delivery success, excluding emails that hard bounce, are blocked by the ISPs, or are filtered into the junk or bulk folder where they are unlikely to be read. It is a critical success metric for you as an email marketer, and one that you can effectively manage.
ISP’s ultimately determine whether to route your email to the inbox based on your sender reputation. Your sender reputation is a score determined over time based on past mailing behavior and feedback from customers. The key factors that determine your sender reputation include hard bounces (sometimes referred to as “unknown users”), spam traps, and spam complaints. Additionally, engagement metrics such as opens, clicks, or even the number of people that add you to their address book, further affect your sender reputation. Decrease hard bounces and your sender reputation increases and more of your email is delivered to the inbox.
Recently, Return Path stated that Inbox Placement Rates for legitimate email marketers are declining quickly. One in five email messages is now being filtered out of the inbox by the ISP’s. Not surprisingly, email marketers with better reputation metrics have cleaner lists. A hard bounce rate above 1% for legitimate email is considered problematic and Return Path recommends you quickly address the issue. A lower bounce rate strongly correlates with improved sender reputation and higher Inbox Placement Rate!
LeadSpend delivers a simple, fast, and accurate real-time email verification service. The service provides a reliable way for marketers to safeguard against sending messages to invalid email addresses, a process that can significantly reduce hard bounce rates and improve email marketing performance. Many marketers integrate our platform at the point of collection, ensuring invalid email addresses never make it into their database. Customers who inadvertently enter an invalid email address can be alerted immediately and offered the chance to self-correct their address. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly 75% of the time they do.
LeadSpend is offering Nexternal customers 25% off their first list validation project or 25k free real-time queries. It’s easy to get started and there are no setup fees and no strings attached. Just click here.
Craig is the VP of Sales at Nexternal and is known in the industry as an expert in eCommerce, systems integrations, and online marketing. Craig has been with Nexternal since 2000 and his passion and experience are apparent to all who work with him.
