Overview

 

This article provides best practice guidance on transferring marketing lists to Vuture, and sending mailings for the first time.

 

Why is data best practice important?

 

The most immediate and severe impact of poor data practice is that your firm is blocklisted. Recipient servers refer to blocklists when they are assessing whether or not to accept incoming mail from a sender, so it's important to steer well clear of them. You can read more about blocklists here. 

 

In addition to this, good list hygiene increases the engagement of your contact base, which is something internet service providers, or ISPs, such as Google, Microsoft and Oath, use to gauge sender reputation. So if you can engage a higher proportion of your marketing lists, your deliverability rates will improve. You can read more on this here.

 

Finally, list hygiene affects your return on investment. If you can keep a higher proportion of your list active and engaged, it will lead to better open and click rates, more website visits, and therefore more leads for your business development team.

 

How does poor data practice lead to blocklisting?

 

By poor data practice, we mean failing to clear out old, unengaged contacts from your mailing lists, or sending mailings to purchased data: contacts who have not engaged with your firm. When an email address becomes inactive, which can be for many reasons, for example when two firms merge and all email domains change to incorporate both organisations, it can be re-purposed as a spam trap.

 

Spam traps are maintained by anti-spam corporations, such as Spam Cop and Spamhaus. These organisations track when spam traps are mailed to, and add senders to a blocklist if they are repeat offenders. You can read more about spam traps here.

 

How do I guard against blocklisting?

 

First off, be aware of all the best practice guidance we've included in this helpdesk article. Although Vuture will monitor list health as best we can, we can't find all instances of spam trap hits, so it's up to senders to uphold list hygiene best practice.

 

To help you get off on the right foot, we've created this checklist:

 

• During the project phase, you will be asked to provide a list of opted-out contacts. Please make sure you let us know about any contacts who you are no longer able to mail, so we can suppress accordingly. This includes previously bounced contacts, contacts who have explicitly opted out of your email programme, contacts set aside for regulatory reasons (e.g. GDPR), or those who you simply don't have any information about and where you're unsure how they arrived in your list.

 

• Implement a process to validate any new data. Determine all the ways new marketing data can make its way to a mailing list, and ensure that data is opted in and the relative risk of sending to it is assessed. Ask questions like: 

 

Is the data very old? 

Does it contain spelling mistakes? 

Do the domains still exist? 

 

• Changing email providers is a great chance to clear out your mailing lists. Whether using a CRM, or Vuture as a standalone tool, only move over contacts who have engaged with your firm in the past 12 months. Engagement includes:
  1. Email opens
  2. Email clicks
  3. Form submissions
  4. Event RSVPs
  5. Business (non-marketing) emails received, if you track this in your CRM

 

• Make sure you have a sunsetting policy in place. This includes:
  1. How do you make sure you're mailing all new contacts? Implement a welcome email to engage from the start. You can read more about creating an effective welcome campaign here.
  2. Assess the frequency at which you email all contacts. We'd recommend at least five mailings per year to all individuals on your marketing lists.
  3. When contacts become unengaged, send a re-engagement email to them. You can do this by adding contacts to a list using rules in your CRM, and setting a recurring trigger in Vuture to mail them. Make sure this email includes a link to a preference form.
  4. When do you stop emailing contacts who are not engaged? We'd recommend removing contacts from mailings if they haven't engaged in the last 12 months.

 

• Take steps to maximise client engagement, and avoid unnecessary contact churn.
  1. Keep contact preferences up to date.
  2. Use engaging subject lines. Vuture's AB testing functionality can help you find those which resonate most with your audience.
  3. Cross-sell content to make sure contacts have opportunities to sign up to other relevant blogs or topic areas.
  4. Review email timing for your audience. Do your contacts tend to engage more at a certain time of day? Use Vuture's E-marketing Strategy Dashboard to help you.
  5. Personalise content using placeholders, or variables.
  6. Segment your lists by engagement level, or the relationship you have with contacts, for example. Think about how you can message these segments in different ways - you might want to use different messaging for clients and leads or prospects.
  7. Ensure you’re adopting template best practice. You can read more about this here.

 

• Switch on the Vuture automated whitelist tool to help you identify unengaged contacts. You can find more information on this here.