I’ve wanted to write some commentary on a few interesting issues that have come up recently in my work, so this will be the first in a series. Today’s topic is email marketing and sanitizing your mailing lists.

When your web site visitors sign up to receive email from you, the information your site collected goes into a database. Unless you allow users to change their email preferences on your web site, that database never gets updated. Eventually, some of the email messages you send will be undeliverable, or “bounce” as it’s called in the email marketing industry. Today I’ll explore the two types of bounces, some reasons for them and how to handle them.

Emails can bounce for a variety of reasons. Maybe the email address is invalid, inactive or closed, the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.

The two types of email bounces are called “hard bounces” and “soft bounces.” Seems simple enough, right? Not quite‚Äîit’s a bit more complex than that. Let’s look at the two types and how to handle them.

“Hard Bounces”

Hard bounces happen when an email was sent to an email address that is no longer active. This could happen for a couple of reasons. One possible reason is that with the increasing adoption of broadband internet services, people are switching internet service providers and subsequently, their email address changes and their old email address is deleted.

Another reason a hard bounce happens is because people change jobs, abandoning their old e-mail address. When someone leaves their job, places of employment terminate that person’s email account. In my experience, 50% or more of your email marketing list could be comprised of work email accounts, so this is a common reason for hard bounces.

Tip For Reducing Hard Bounces

About the only thing you can do to combat hard bounces is to include a short paragraph on each of your e-mail communications letting customers know that if they change their email address they should let you know so you can update your contact list.

“Soft Bounces”

Soft bounces occur when email is sent to an active email address but the email is turned away before being delivered. Often, the problem is temporary‚Äîthe mail server might be down or the recipient’s mailbox is full. The email might be held at the recipient’s server and delivered later, or the sender’s email program may attempt to deliver it again.

Soft bounces can also occur because a person has an out-of-office notification enabled on their work email account. 90% of the replies to email campaigns that I help deploy are out-of-office notifications. As a marketer, you wouldn’t want to remove these people from your e-mail lists since they will eventually read the message and have the ability to receive future messages.

One note of caution about soft bounces: soft bounce reports from your email vendor are not always accurate because they often don’t report all soft bounces or the actual reason for the bounce. When comparing email vendors, you should ask to see a sample bounce report so you can see what data is offered. If the vendor can‚Äôt produce a sample report, inquire about how they handle soft bounces.

Save Money By Sanitizing Your Email List

Sanitizing your email marketing list is a very important component of running an email marketing campaign because it can save you money. Most email vendors charge you per email address you send to, and sending emails to invalid addresses is wasteful spending.

The first tip is simple—you should remove hard bounces immediately after every campaign. Some email vendors will do this for you automatically without your attention, while some others require you manually remove the names. It depends on how sophisticated your email marketing campaign is, but you should remove hard bounces every time you send an email newsletter.

Soft bounces are tricky. You should monitor soft bounces, and if your email vendor allows you to read the messages that come back, you can monitor reasons for soft bounces. Typically, I do not remove soft bounces from my email marketing lists unless I notice that a particular address bounces multiple times over the course of a few months.

Most of the campaigns I deploy are small in nature (under 25,000 names) so I have all replies/bounces sent directly to an email address I’ve set up to collect these. When I send a mailing, I monitor the mailbox. Using this method, I can find out why messages are bouncing back.

Unsubscribes

While this one goes without saying, you should remove all people who unsubscribe from your mailings immediately after the campaign is sent. If you don’t remove the person, you’re breaking the law. Most email vendors automatically unsubscribe email addresses for you, but if you’re running your own campaign, you may need to do this manually.

Email marketing can be a very profitable tool in your marketing arsenal. Make sure you keep your mailing lists clean, and you’ll save money.

Business 2.0 is reporting today that a movement to require sales tax on all online orders is in the planning stages and legislation could hit Washington by next month.

This is bad news for online consumers, as well as small internet merchants. Online retailers without an IT staff could have a hard time writing systems in the checkout process to calculate sales tax for all 50 states. For online retailers with downloadable goods, it might not be as simple. This is one topic to watch. The sales tax issue has come up before and not been acted upon, but the revenue sales tax could generate is hard to ignore, especially with the growth of ecommerce over the last 5 years.

Larry Chase has released his top 10 trends in internet marketing for the next 10 years. While some of the top 10 are pie-in-the-sky, there are a few practical trends I’d like to discuss here. If you’d see all 10, please read the article.

The concept of pay-per-call is Larry’s number one, and the advent of pay-per-call marketing is on the horizon now. For those of you that might not be familiar with pay-per-call, this marketing form is where a marketer puts an ad up and pays for a call, not a click or an impression.

Pay-per-call is going to be huge for internet marketers, especially for my real estate clients. You see, a phone call is much more valuable than an online click (and will probably be a lot more expensive to the marketer) because of the personal interaction. Pay-per-call could even be huge for online retailers. Whether an online retailer has a trained call center or a simply a sales clerk accepting phone calls, customers that call are much more likely to purchase since humans can close sales better than web sites. Average order size is likely to increase also as customers call.

The other trend of note is that email marketing will not die. I happen to believe this. As retailers continue to learn how to market effectively while adhering to CAN-SPAM legislation, users will be savvier when it comes to controlling spam. I’ve been in the email marketing business for over 5 years, and I’ve seen sales increase year-over-year from email, even with the CAN-SPAM regulations.

Earlier in the week, Consumer Reports was critical of search engines for not clearly disclosing the difference between search results and ads. Yesterday, Harris Interactive released a study that found that a majority of internet users don’t know the difference between natural search results and paid results.

56% of internet users don’t know the difference between natural search results and paid results. More Google users (54%) recognize ads than Yahoo and MSN users.
The study also found that 51% of online adults use search engines for shopping, which is no big surprise. Online users are not necessarily loyal to one search engine, and people search to compare prices.

My analysis: These findings illustrate why a majority of most marketing budgets go to paid search. Since people are searching to compare prices, online retailers have more control over what is shown in the search results when they pay for placement. Natural search algorithms are always changing and therefore unreliable for making sure you’re site is near the top of the list. Additionally, natural search results are unreliable when it comes to the content of the listing.

The Federal Trade Commission is arguing (and rightly, I might add), that legitimate marketers, not dishonest marketers, will be harmed if Congress enacts legislation that would require ‘ADV’ to precede the email subject line in your email marketing communications.

The argument is that legit marketers will comply with the legislation and thus be blocked by email SPAM filters, while spammers would not comply. Simply put, requiring ‘ADV’ in front of any email subject line would not reduce SPAM.

This study, cited by Internet Retailer, found that 51% of small-to-midsize companies don’t respond to customer emails. That’s right, they don’t respond of all! 70% of smaller companies don’t reply within 24 hours.

I must admit that the study surprised me a bit. The “mom and pop” store often relies on customer service to earn a loyal customer base, and this principle transfers to the online arena as well. The fact that retailers were among the least responsive to customer email floored me. If you own a small or medium-sized business, the best way to lose your customer is to not respond at all. Want to increase your sales? Reply to your customers within 12 hours of getting the email, and make sure you respond to all of the customer’s questions and concerns.