Hard/Soft Bounces and Unsubscribes – Improve Your Email Marketing

The best way to get to know Agile CRM is to launch an email campaign, but how do you know if your campaigns are working? Agile now includes a number of stats to help you improve your campaigns, get to know your customers and increase your email ROI. Today we wanted to highlight three key metrics that any email marketer should be checking regularly: Unsubscribes, Hard Bounces and Soft Bounces.

Unsubscribes

Email marketing has evolved for over a decade, and while some email campaigns are awesome, useful and productive, the crowded email marketplace has unfortunately become noisy and spammy. People are sensitive to spam and when someone receives an email that feels spammy – even if they know that they signed up for emails from your company – they will probably unsubscribe from your email campaign. Email marketers need to respect this and make sure they are sending useful and informative content to interested people. The ‘Unsubscribed’ statistic in Agile CRM’s email campaigns helps you to maintain a set of interested subscribers and grow a solid reputation for your company. Regularly check your Unsubscribes from the campaign stats to see how particular contacts are responding to each campaign.

Tips for Reducing Unsubscribes

• Create separate email campaigns for new users, paying users, users who haven’t actually onboarded yet, and users interested in particular feature sets
• Send emails at regular intervals, and start with a reasonable goal such as one email newsletter or two new-feature emails per month
• Use feedback web grabbers on your site or app to find out what kind of information your web visitors would like to see in email campaigns
• Surprise your readers with emails containing time-sensitive discounts or free upgrades
• If your hottest leads are unsubscribing, follow up with them to find out why; the personal touch can make a huge difference

Hard/Soft Bounces

Email marketers know that bounces (automatically returned emails) take a heavy toll on the reputation of your domain with your email sending service. An email bounce is any email that cannot be delivered, and it’s important to know the difference between hard bounces and soft bounces.

• Hard Bounces happen when there’s a permanent reason an email address is rejecting/returning your email message. A common reason for a hard bounce is that the email address or the domain associated with it (eg. gmail.com) doesn’t exist anymore. A hard bounce can also happen if your emails are being blocked. Check your hard bounce stats to see if you should check with a particular domain or email service to correct the issue. If you simply have an out-of-date email address for a contact but have their phone number or another way to contact them, reach out immediately and correct the issue – don’t continue attempting to send emails to a hard-bounced email address.

• Soft Bounces basically include every other reason an email might have been returned. A recipient’s email inbox might be full (this happens less than it used to in the old days of email, but it’s still a possibility), your email message might have been too large (did you accidentally include a huge image or file?), or the recipient’s email server might have been temporarily down or offline. It’s a good idea to regularly check your Soft Bounces in Agile’s email campaign stats to resolve these issues.

Agile CRM’s email campaigns include a ton of marketing automation features to help you scale the smart way, and we’re constantly adding and updating features. Don’t have an Agile CRM account yet? Sign up today.