Without careful tactics when sending out automated email campaigns, you can ruin your brand and end up in the spam box potentially causing your email credibility to go down the tubes. By using poor templates, outdated data, or irrelevant, impersonal content, you could be doing more harm than good.
The use of bad templates in an email campaign can hurt your business more than you think. Not only will recipients ignore links in your email and see them as unsolicited ads, but they may also suspect your email is infected with spyware or adware and hit delete. Also, many templates are filled with language that gets picked up by ESPs – causing your email to be filtered and rejected. In this way, automated email does not work for your business.
If you send a monthly generic message out automatically, many of those emails will bounce back or worse, go unnoticed and unopened each month. This does not go unnoticed by ISPs who favor senders that generate engagement. You need to ensure inactive subscribers are isolated and pruned to keep your list clean.
One of the quickest ways to damage your email domain credibility is to send to spam traps. Spam traps are inactive email accounts that become locked. ESPs sometimes recycle these inactive accounts and turn them into spam traps. Sending to a spam trap won’t trigger a bounce, but you may be red-flagged and senders may end up on an email blacklist.
Relevant data matters a great deal, and it needs to be curated to target your message effectively. How did you build your email list? Are these past clients? Did they sign up for a free offer? Did you buy a generic list filled with spam traps? Where are they in the engagement cycle? The right message needs to get to the right person at the right time to achieve maximum response.
Once engaged, contacts need to be segmented into a content stream depending on where they are in the customer journey and what the customer persona is. According to Optinmonster, 82 percent of marketers report an increase in open rates through personalization.
ISPs are constantly looking out for erratic spikes in sending volume so it’s a good idea to send to small groups a few times a week, rather than one large mass. Segmentation is a great way to achieve this, but segmentation can only come from knowing your customer. Again, managing your data is imperative.
To cause even more issues, firewalls are tougher to get through and this can cause huge disadvantages for automated email campaigns. If a specific IP address has received complaints, an email from that address is likely to be identified as spam or not accepted at all. If you are sending emails through a marketing automation platform, you may be sharing the reputation of other businesses on the platform. Because the IP address is shared, your reputation is shared.
The Sales Group – Global can help avoid these issues by leveraging current market data and ongoing prospect profiling to build targeted communication. We can drive your sales cycle forward by engaging new customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, using our proven RAMP (Revenue Acquisition Management Process) System to develop a tailored business development program that will provide the results you need to significantly expand your client base communication and sales.
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