Help! My Email Contacts Change Jobs Too Quickly

The distributors we talk to are often concerned about their ability to keep up with the turnover in their customer locations. If you customer contacts leave or change job roles at a fast rate, this impacts your email effectiveness. Marketing wonks call this “deliverability.”

Deliverability is about getting the messages you send into the right email box. Emails bounce and marketers like to track bounce rates as one measure of the health of their lists. If you have a high bounce rate, your list is old, inactive and needs to be maintained. Sometimes bounces are just temporary or “soft” bounces, maybe your recipient’s email box is full and the server is rejecting messages. Other bounces, “hard” bounces are a result of a permanent error. This is usually because your recipient has left the company or you have an incorrect email address.

Why is good list hygiene and deliverability important? Some spam blockers and Internet service providers (ISPs) will block all of your emails if your bounce rate is beyond their threshold level. The assumption is that if you don’t care enough to take care of your lists, then you probably aren’t offering much value in your email content either. To further complicate things, although your deliverability may be high for your total lists, it may be low for particular companies on that list. And ISPs may serve multiple companies and email addresses. You might find your emails blocked for any number of companies even though your overall list quality is high enough.

No one wants to be seen as a spammer. But in addition to the ISP and spam blocker troubles you might face, you also don’t want to waste time and resources on emails that never get delivered.

The key is regular list maintenance. You need to regularly clean your lists by removing bad emails. It’s also important to develop a strict permission-based email marketing program. That means that the people you are sending email to have opted in and really want to connect with you through email. Some marketers are afraid of losing emails on their list if they adhere to permission-based marketing. But in reality, the total effectiveness of your list will improve and more importantly, you will be treating your customers and prospects with respect by earning the right to market to them.