Most MSP Marketing Won’t Do This For Their Clients
Email marketing can be a dynamic marketing tool for MSPs, but there is a line that has been drawn that separates being productive and being detrimental. You want your MSP business to stand out enough that your emails will be noticed, opened, read, and interacted with. While you might be led to believe that email marketing is a thing of the past, it still has a place in digital marketing strategies.
Sending an email successfully may sound like one of the easiest things you will ever do, but the process is not always simple. Not only do you have to concern yourself with formatting your email the right way based on your recipients, but you will also need to pay attention to the factors that will impact the deliverability of the emails you send.
If you don't think about email deliverability, there's always a chance that your emails will never reach the intended recipient's inbox. You do all the hard work to send an appealing email to your email subscribers just for them to bounce back.
Email Bounce Back? What Is That?
An email is bounced back when an email you send is not successfully delivered to your intended recipient. This is something you would like to avoid. After all, you have spent precious time finding an email address for the lead, creating the email, and personalizing the email only to have it bounced back. Email bounce back is ever-present in the world of email marketing. However, it does not have to be something that you will be stuck with forever. With some good strategies, you can use bounced emails to your advantage.
What Are the Different Types of Email Bounces?
Email bounces can be categorized as soft bounce emails and hard bounce emails. Soft bounce emails are temporary or easily fixable whereas hard bounce emails are practically permanent.
Soft Bounces
- Mailbox is full
- The recipient's email server is down or offline
- Auto-Replies
- The email message is too large.
Hard Bounces
A hard bounce is when the receiving mail server states that the address you're sending the email to is not valid. It's an incorrect email address. Some common reasons for a hard bounce are invalid email addresses, an email server that no longer exists, misspelled domain names or recipient addresses, etc.
There is not much you can do that will change a hard bounce, so it's best to just clean up your email list. In some systems, including MailChimp, if you make changes to the records in the system, the next email you send will be sent to the new address.
How Will Hard Bounces Impact Your MSP Email Marketing Campaigns?
Email servers and spam filters flag high volume hard bounce rates as potential spamming. Unfortunately, this can lead to your messages being blocked and your IP address added to a blacklist, jeopardizing your email deliverability.
Poor deliverability means your email marketing campaigns won't land in your intended recipients' inboxes. This can also prevent you from achieving your MSP email campaign goals, as well as your revenue and sales goals.
If your bounce rate is becoming an issue, you should begin focusing your attention on a few key ways to keep your bounce rate low:
- Clean your email list with an online application or by manually cleaning it.
- Don't purchase an email list.
- Use an email service provider like Mailchimp to send bulk emails.
You can manage your email list by practicing good email list hygiene. Keep your email list healthy and implement more accurate email marketing tactics and data insights to enhance your email campaigns. Keeping an email list clean and free of email addresses that will bounce back is a top concern for MSPs. No MSP wants to pay for email subscribers with an inactive email address or to deal with hard bounces.
Leveraging Out-Of-Office Replies
Have you been filtering your out-of-office replies to a specific folder and leaving them there indefinitely? If you have been doing this, you have been making a major mistake. Instead of filtering these replies, you can use the out-of-office bounces to your advantage. You can use out-of-office bounces to your advantage. Instead of worrying about how you can fix these email bounce backs, you can use this tactic to leverage your out-of-office replies.
Auto-responder emails give you an excellent opportunity to add a new subscriber. Responses that have ''contact this person'' or ''this person is no longer employed here'' are great ways to build your marketing database.
Many companies set up auto-responders when one of their employees leaves the company, alerting people outside of the company of the change and sharing who to contact. When you discover that a lead has left before you receive a hard bounce, it will give you an advantage over other MSPs that are also hoping to land that particular lead. Reach out to your new contact right away and follow your old lead.
When a person is away from the office, it's common to set up an Out Of Office auto-responder to inform people. If the Out of Office email mentioned a person to contact in your lead's absence, add that new contact to your database. Every type of Out-of-Office reply will contain valuable nuggets that you can use to gain new contacts. If you receive an Out Of Office reply, you should look for valuable information like:
- Information for your contact you didn't already have
- Updated information for your contact
- Dates the contact will be out of the office
- Contact information of the person you can reach out to while he/she is away
At Ulistic, we make sure you are able to leverage these types of opportunities. When you receive an Out-Of-Office reply, we look for those little nuggets you may have missed to add a new subscriber to your marketing list using MailChimp. We have plenty of experience working with Mailchimp, and we'd be happy to help you with using it to market your managed IT services. To learn more about how Ulistic can help, contact us today.
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