How To: Conduct Deliverability Research Using MailChimp Software
Email marketing is a marketing strategy that takes a great deal of planning, but the results are worthwhile if you know how to do it right. Software like MailChimp are designed to help business owners easily attain results without having to strain their expenses or spend too much time. If you have your own email campaigns set up using the MailChimp software, it’s time to gauge the effectiveness of your emails by conducting deliverability research. Here’s what you should know:
Hard Bounces
Hard bounces are considered permanent reasons when emails fail to be delivered. To keep your email marketing process streamlined and fuss free, it is recommended that hard bounced email addresses are removed from the active subscription area. Place the email address in the cleaned subscribers section so they will be excluded from mailing lists for future campaigns.
Soft Bounces
Soft bounces usually happen when there are temporary delivery issues to certain addresses. In the MailChimp software, soft bounces are recorded in campaign reports. In the event that it continues to happen, the address can eventually be cleaned. Soft bounces usually happen if the user has a full mailbox or the recipient’s email server is down. Another possible reason would be that the email message is too large in size so take care not to create email campaigns that are too taxing in terms of file sizes.
Send Time Optimisation
Only available in paid accounts, the send time optimisation feature in MailChimp makes email marketing a great deal more convenient since users can decide optimum times to send email campaigns. To use the send time optimisation feature in MailChimp, navigate to the campaign builder and choose schedule. Look for the let MailChimp optimise function and schedule your campaign.
Duplicate copies
In situations where subscribers receive duplicate emails from you, you may need to check your lists in your MailChimp account to see if the company is on both your lists. Reduce the chances of this happening by choosing to merge and combine the lists into one masterlist. Instead of separating, use groups and segments to target your subscribers instead.
Clipping
Email messages tend to be clipped when the file size, including text and URL, exceed their byte size limit. Both the message and the tracking code may be clipped in situations like this so it would be ideal if the email messages are smaller than 102KB. Make sure that there are no additional formatting codes in the email you are sending, along with the subject lines being different instead of similar. Trim out any content that may not be necessary and test it out with an inbox preview to see if that solves the issue.