Day 13 | Important Pre-BFCM To-Dos

BFCM is full of fun stuff…

Exciting discounts and coupons, creative copy and design, and a fairly certain surge in email subscribers and sales.

But there are a few house-keeping items to check off your list:

1. Assess email deliverability.

Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to land in the recipient’s inbox rather than getting lost in spam folders or blocked by email service providers. It’s a crucial metric that directly impacts the success of your email marketing campaigns and customer engagement efforts.

There are four important ways to measure the deliverability of your emails. They are:

  1. Open rates: A simple percentage of how many people open an email.
  2. Complaint rates: This metric measures how often your emails are marked as spam.
  3. Bounce rates: This is the rate at which emails fail to reach an inbox, or bounce, negatively impacting your sender reputation.
  4. Delete without read rates: This refers to how many emails have been deleted without being opened.

Here’s a snapshot of how these metrics are visualized within your ActiveCampaign account below.

metrics in activecampaign

2. Verify your sender reputation.

Have you seen a decline in your open rates? When did you notice a spike in spam complaints or your domain performing poorly?

Identifying these dates can help identify factors contributing to poor inbox placement.
If your reputation has declined, it was likely due to one or more negative events (high spam complaint rates, misconfiguration, introduction of new/poor lists, unexpected increase in volume, etc.). The more data you have, the easier it will be to pinpoint the causes and build a recovery plan.

3. Test emails for spam triggers.

Spam check is a tool that you can use to help identify areas of “spamminess” in your campaigns and automation emails prior to sending them out to your contacts.

While a high score doesn’t necessarily mean your email is spam (just like a low score does not guarantee inbox placement), Spam Check is a great tool to get insights in order to improve your mailing.

We run a Spam Check for every campaign and automation email you create. If Spam Check did not see any issues with your content, you will see “Passed” with a green checkmark.

If Spam Check did come across any issues with your content, you’ll be presented with a number score as well as a list of issues you may want to fix.

Day 13 - Task of the Day:

Remember, a well-crafted email that lands in the inbox has the potential to become a powerful tool for nurturing customer relationships and driving business growth. Take some time to work through the items above (assess email deliverability, verify your sender reputation, and test emails for spam traps) to ensure a successful BFCM campaign!