The average office worker gets 121 emails per day. How can we keep our contacts from unsubscribing?  That is a question many marketers face each day. Below are 5 reasons folks may be unsubscribing from your emails.

1. Your email doesn’t display correctly

Many times an email can view correctly in your inbox but may look different in others.  In addition, over 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device.

The key is to make sure your email renders correctly for everyone, you can achieve this utilizing tools such as Litmus or Inbox Inspector. These online tools allow you to see what your email will look like across a variety of different platforms and email clients.

If changes are needed, you or your designer can recode accordingly and you can sleep better at night knowing your email looked amazing in everyone’s inbox.

2. Your email has too much going on

Make sure your email looks professional. You don’t want to be classified as spam or your recipient’s may unsubscribe. Stay away from image heavy emails that may take time to load. A good rule of thumb for email design is 30% image and 70% text.

If your email looks too funky it may send the message that you don’t care about your brand or your business.  If you are not utilizing customized templates you may need to reach out to a graphic designer to make sure your message is visually appealing, clean, and is in the correct formatting.

3. You’re constantly trying to sell

Over advertising your product or service can cause people to unsubscribe.  There is a general rule of thumb to go by called the “80/20 rule”.

80% of your emails should be educational based pertaining to your industry; this includes whitepapers, webinars and helpful tips. Educating your customers/prospects can make you stand out as a leader and you will gain the trust of those needing your services when the time comes.

The other 20% should be sales or offer related. (Source: cio.com)

4. You are sending too many emails

Research findings have discovered the number one reason why people decide to unsubscribe was because they simply receive too many emails. A nice way to save a subscriber would be to give them an email frequency option in their profile.

In addition, autopilothq.com did a study on 327 companies proving that sending email communications every 2-4 weeks generates 2X the leads.

5. You aren’t targeting the right Personas

There is nothing worse than being bombarded with information that doesn’t pertain to you. Understanding your customer/prospects needs is an important part of marketing effectively.

A Persona describes who your customers are, what their goals are, and their behavior throughout the buying process. Personas find a human connection in heaps of analytical data.

By taking time to understand your customers/prospects, you can effectively tailor your email messaging to their needs and giving you a competitive edge in the marketplace.

“Bounce” is supposed to be a fun word. It makes me think of being a kid again. Bouncing my basketball inside the house and driving my mother crazy. It may remind you of your kids bouncing off the walls, especially with the candy and sweets season in full swing!

Unfortunately, in the email world, bounce isn’t a fun word at all. No client or customer wants to hear that their email “bounced”! This means that the email did not reach its intended destination for one reason or another.

The definition of the word “bounce” as related to email, according to Wikipedia, is an email returned to its sender after failing to reach its destination.

A bounced email is sent back to its origination as “Undeliverable” by the receiving ESP (Email Service Provider). An example of an ESP would be Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL. When the email is returned to you, it is coded/flagged as either a “Soft Bounce” or a “Hard Bounce”.

Understanding the difference and how to manage each type of bounce is a vital part of being able to keep deliverability up. Keeping your IP and sending domain in a good standing reputation is crucial to the success of your campaigns.

When an email is returned and flagged as a “Hard Bounce”, the email is permanently bounced back to the sender because the receiving email address is either invalid/expired or does not exist, and will not be able to be delivered.

When an email is returned and flagged as a “Soft Bounce”, the email is bounced back to the sender due to a temporary delivery issue. There are a couple reasons why the email may have soft bounced;

– Recipient’s mailbox is full

– The mail server is temporarily unavailable

– Rejected for content or sender reputation related reasons

– Your message was too large (images or attachments).

– Your message was considered spam.

One of the most important things in email deliverability is making sure you are cleaning and updating your lists after each deployment of hard and soft bounces.

Hard bounces should be cleansed immediately and not sent to again. From time to time, even if you have delivered to an email address in the past, it may eventually hard bounce as the email address is phased out or deleted.

Most email deployment platforms have auto-cleansing rules that will help remove hard bounces automatically so you do not have to worry about re-deploying to them.

Soft bounces are returned with a “Delivery Response Code” and/or a “Delivery Response Message” in the bounce log. This will give you a better idea on why the particular email “bounced” and you can update your database accordingly.

In general, it is encouraged to re-send to soft bounced emails.  Most email platforms are set-up to retry delivery on soft bounces up to a set amount of times until it is then considered a hard bounce and cleansed. Once you have tried to send to the soft bounced email three times, the best practice to suppress the record and not send to again.

If you are having a hard time cleaning up your database CAS can help! With our email verification and appending services we can make sure your campaigns go smoothly. Call us today 866-461-4693.