Bounce Rate

Definition: The percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox, known as a “bounce”

How to Use: Use this metric to uncover potential problems with your email list. There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces. Soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message to soft bounces. Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. Instead, you should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender’s reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your organization look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP.

Delivery Rate

Definition: The percentage of emails that were actually delivered to recipients’ inboxes, calculated by subtracting hard and soft bounces from the gross number of emails sent, then dividing that number by gross emails sent

How to Use: Your delivery rate sets the stage for email success or failure. To have any chance of engaging a customer or prospect with an email campaign, that message has to get
delivered to their inbox. Look for a delivery rate of 95% or higher. If your delivery rate is slipping over time, you may have problems with your list (e.g. too many invalid addresses). If one particular campaign has a lower than average delivery rate, examine the subject line and content of that message. Perhaps there was some element that may have been flagged as spam by corporate firewalls or major ISPs, causing many more message than usual to be blocked.

List Growth Rate

Definition: A measurement of how fast your email list is growing. Calculate your growth rate by subtracting opt-outs and hard bounces from the number of new email subscribers gained in a given month. Then, divide that number by the original list size.

How to Use: Email list growth rate is important because a healthy email marketing program needs to be continually refreshed with new names. Many of the addresses on your email list will naturally “go bad” over time, as people change jobs, switch ISPs or email programs, or just forget their passwords and create new accounts. According to the popular marketing resource MarketingSherpa, the natural churn rate of an email list can be 25% annually or higher, which is why you must continually work to add new contacts to your email database.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Definition: The proportion of the audience who clicked on one more links contained in an email message

How to Use: Organizations can calculate CTR either by dividing unique clicks by the number of emails delivered, or by dividing total clicks – including multiple clicks by the same recipient – by the number of emails delivered. Either method works, as long as you use the same approach consistently.

Monitoring email CTR is a cornerstone of email marketing analytics, because the CTR indicates whether the message was relevant and the offer compelling enough to encourage recipients to action. But CTR can vary widely by the type of message sent. For example, email newsletters often have higher CTRs than promotional messages, and transactional messages – such as emailed purchase receipts – often have the highest CTR of all the messages your business sends. For that reason, it’s best to benchmark your CTRs according to the different types of emails you send.

Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

Definition: The percentage of recipients who clicked on a “share this” button to post email
content to a social network and/or who clicked on the “forward to a friend” button

How to Use: Sharing rates are another indicator of the value and relevance of your email messages. For example, if your subscribers find your email newsletter articles compelling enough to share with their peers, you’ve likely hit on a hot topic for your audience. Likewise, email offers that get shared or forwarded outside of your own house list can end up being your best performing campaigns, because you’ve drastically increased the reach of that
message by tapping into the viral nature of your subscribers’ social networks. Watch your sharing rates carefully to discover which types of articles and offers tend to get shared the most, and use that knowledge when planning future campaigns.

Conversion Rate

Definition: The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed a desired action, such as filling out a lead generation form or purchasing a product

How to Use: Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of an email campaign’s effectiveness. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. However, conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, such as the quality of your landing page.

For example, if a campaign underperforms based on your targeted conversion rate, take a close look at the landing page you linked to for reasons why recipients who clicked on a link might not have completed the process. You may find the landing page’s headline or copy needs improvement, or that a registration form or checkout process was too confusing or clunky, causing many visitors to abandon the process.

Measuring conversion rate requires integration between your email platform and your web analytics. You can perform this integration by creating unique tracking URLs for your email links that identify the source of the click as coming from a specific email campaign.

Revenue Per Email Sent

Definition: A measure of the ROI of a particular email campaign, calculated by dividing the total revenue generated from the campaign by the number of emails sent

How to Use: This metric is ideal for ecommerce marketers who generate a lot of direct sales from email campaigns. Again, it requires integration between your ESP and your ecommerce or web analytics platform. If you are already tracking conversion rates, you also can collect the order value for each conversion to perform this calculation.

Unreliable Email Metrics

Open Rate: Open rate is a metric that many marketers use to measure the success of their campaigns, but it’s an unreliable gauge for several reasons. Most importantly, an email is only counted as ‘opened’ if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message, and a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports on your true numbers.

Unsubscribe Rate: As with open rates, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.

Only 25% of your leads are sales-ready. In addition, a whopping 50% of your leads are qualified but not ready to buy from you.

So, what do you do with those qualified but reticent leads to turn them into customers? Lead nurturing, of course!

1.) Emails That Educate
If you send only one lead nurturing email, the educational email is the one to choose. Educating your prospects is a crucial step in closing a sale, and one of the easiest ways to shorten your sales cycle. Use lead intelligence to display your value, and teach them about the things they want to know based on their on- and off-site behaviors. What did they download already? What pages on your site do they visit most frequently? What are they tweeting about, and at whom? If you’ve had a conversation with them, what are their pain points? Focus on one topic per email, and educate them over time as they move through your sales cycle. Remember, these emails shouldn’t be overtly salesey, but should correspond to your product and service offerings that solve their problems.

2.) Emails That Get You Two Connected
The more ways through which you and your prospect are connected, the better chance you have of closing the sale. Send lead nurturing emails that invite them to subscribe to your blog, connect on LinkedIn, follow each other on Twitter, and any other places you both live in the web. The more interconnected you are, the more you become a part of your prospect’s daily life and increase the opportunities to impress them with your content, solutions, and brand.

3.) Emails That Offer Your Offers
You’ve created content and built a sales force — make use of it in your lead nurturing! Give your prospects a chance to reconvert by sending offers that correspond to their stage in the sales cycle. For example, prospects that just subscribed to your blog are probably in the top of your sales funnel; you need to figure out which topics they’re interested in, and if they even have the potential to become a customer. So don’t send them, say, a free trial offer. Instead, take a look at their site behavior, see what topics interested them most, and nurture them with offers related to that subject matter. As they become more engaged with you and your website, you can use that information to send more targeted offers that move them further down the sales funnel.

4.) Emails That Help Them Improve
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, everyone’s looking for something that will make them better. Better at their job. Better at their hobbies. Better as a person. Send lead nurturing emails that speak to these personal goals. Position these emails around showing ROI, convincing their boss of something, getting promoted, impressing friends and family, losing weight, or whatever it is that motivates your prospects every day. Asserting yourself as someone who can make their lives better makes you their ally and helps establish the trust you need to turn them into a customer.

5.) Emails That Re-Engage
If prospects have fallen off the map — either they click through your emails less frequently, or they aren’t responding to your sales team as much — send them something to re-engage them with your company. People love giving feedback, so ask your subscribers for feedback on things like email frequency, content quality, and subject matter to see if there’s something you can alter to better suit their needs. Best case scenario: you get the knowledge you need to better customize your prospect’s emails. Worst case scenario: your prospect either doesn’t respond or opts out of your emails, acting as a list scrubbing mechanism that only helps your email marketing efforts by weeding out leads who wouldn’t have been a good fit for your products/services anyway.

6.) Emails That Are Personal
Every lead nurturing email should be personalized — that is, tailored to your prospects’ actions and behaviors — but some of them should also be personal. Not all lead nurturing emails have to be automated; think outside of the lead nurturing track and consider when an email from you, a member of your sales team, your founder, or even an engineer or support rep, might help you close your sale. This is particularly helpful near the end of the sales cycle to help address any of the issues that have been plaguing the prospect.

1. Establish Your Hypotheses
   Take yourself back to high school science class, and channel your favorite lab partner. It’s important to determine what specific results you expect to see from these tests so you can identify success.  For example, you might hypothesize that increasing your email send frequency from once a week to three times a week will increase your click-through rate by 35%, or perhaps it will increase the number of “wheat bread” leads that move to the prospecting stage as a result of your nurturing by 15%. Or perhaps you have an unnervingly high opt-out rate, and you think decreasing your email send rate from daily to every other day will also decrease your number of unsubscribes. You can (and should!) create more than one hypothesis to make the most out of these tests, and be extremely specific with the terms of your hypothesis.
2. Choose a List Segment
   Think of this as your sample size. Since your email list is already segmented (right?), select one segment that you will test, and ensure it is sizable enough to provide meaningful data. Make sure the list segment you select also aligns with the hypotheses you are testing. For example, if you are testing for an increased offer click-through rate targeted toward prospects, it isn’t wise to test on a customer list segment. Instead, you might decide to choose a sample (a sample, not the entire list) from your blog subscriber list that is not only sizable enough to provide meaningful data, but is also used to receiving emails with offers from you.
3. Establish Baseline Metrics
   Now that you know what you want to test and on whom, you can establish your current performance metrics for that sample. This step is crucial, because you need something against which to measure the results of your test. Note the email marketing metrics you’ll need in order to determine success in your test such as your open rate, deliverability rate, unsubscribe rate, and click-through rate for that particular sample.  And don’t be afraid to expand your scope beyond traditional email marketing metrics to website performance metrics. For example, if you were to use the hypothesis of increasing an offer’s click-through rate, you would also be interested to know how many of the email recipients not only clicked through the email offer, but also completed the form required to obtain their offer.
4. Create and Schedule Your Test Emails
   Create a handful of test emails to rotate through the list sample, following your regular email marketing best practices. Now is not the time to experiment with creative new subject lines, test a new sender in the “from” field, or create a new email template. These types of content changes can skew your results, and should be reserved for a separate set of tests.  Once you’ve created the emails, schedule them for the sending frequency you outlined in your hypothesis. For tests that exceed a week in duration, be sure to select the same days and times so as not to add another variable to the equation, as time of day and day of week has been known to skew results. Again, this is an important test to perform, but reserve it for another time.
5. Measure and Analyze Results
   Measure your results against the hypotheses you established in the beginning and the baseline results you recorded. You should monitor results frequently throughout the experiment, too, so you can respond to any dramatic swings that may crop up because of your change in emailing frequency.  Are the results you’re seeing positive? Do they confirm the hypotheses you’ve outlined? Do they allow you to increase your email send even more to see positive gains to your bottom line without sacrificing things like the size or quality of your list? Or is a decrease in sending what’s in order? Now that you have a new baseline for success, iterate off of it by beginning a new email test, whether for frequency, template design, subject line, message copy, offer content, or any other host of items you can test to make your email marketing more effective.

1. A Clear, Concise, and Attention-Grabbing Subject Line: Before your email subscribers even read your email, the first thing they’ll see if the email’s subject line. Likely, your email is sitting in your prospects’ inboxes alongside a ton of other emails, many of which will be from other vendors and companies just like you. Therefore, it’s very important that you make it stand out with clear, eye-catching subject line. Keep it brief, but use your space wisely, and try to describe the offer you’re giving them within the email as clearly and concisely as possible. Avoid trigger words that can easily land you in senders’ SPAM box.
2. A Real, Live, Human Sender: In communication between real people, the “From” address is someone’s name. Experiment with how you customize your email’s sender name, and consider making it come from a real, living, breathing member of your marketing team to make your email messages more personal. Try a test to determine which format of your sender name contributes to the best open rate (e.g. First Name Last Name vs. First Name Last Name, Company Name vs. Company Name).
3. Obvious Branding Elements: There shouldn’t be any question to your subscribers about where your email is coming from. Create and utilize an email template with consisting branding elements. Include your logo! Use your company’s branding colors. Omitting branding elements suggests a lack of professionalism and security.
4. Personalization: While research shows that one third of marketers believe that personalized marketing campaigns are highly effective, the majority of marketers aren’t including any personalization elements in their campaigns. Email marketing (especially lead nurturing) offers a great opportunity to leverage the power of personalization. You can use data about your database to segment them into groups and send them more personalized content offers based on their behavior and wants/needs. At the very least, use your data to personalize the greeting in your email. Furthermore, as we mentioned earlier, make your email come from a real person within your organization. Consider including their picture and signing off the email with their nickname.
5. Offer Context: Before you give your email recipients the opportunity to access your offer, set the stage for why what you’re offering is valuable to them. Keep it brief, use compelling language, and consider incorporating statistics to emphasize importance. Add a link or two for your offer within this section, too.
6. Obvious & Focused Call-to-Action (CTA): Include a prominent CTA for your offer. Make your CTA’s text specific about what action the reader must take to receive the offer (in this example, “Download”) and create a sense of urgency (e.g. “Now,” “Today,” etc.). Avoid vague language like “Submit,” and try to tie the CTA to the offer itself (e.g. for a live webinar, you must say “Register For the Webinar Now” or “Reserve Your Seat Today”).
7. Explanation/Value of Offer: Clearly highlight what email recipients will get out of downloading your ebook or registering for your webinar. Use bullet points to break up the text and emphasize key takeaways. Demonstrate the value of the offer.
8. Social Sharing Buttons/Links: Include social sharing links on every email you send to further expand the reach of your email content. If readers find the content within your email valuable and feel compelled to share it with their social media connections, now they can easily do so! This will help you reach a wider range of potential leads with very little effort.
9. Image: Break up text with a professional-looking image. Try matching this image with the content of your offer. So, if you’re offering an ebook, include a picture of the cover page. If you’re offering a webinar, include a screenshot of the cover slide in your presentation.
10. Additional Product-Based Offer: Maybe some of your email subscribers are ready for a more product-focused offer like a free trial of your product or a personal consultation. Use the real estate in your P.S. as an opportunity to tie your main content offer to a more middle-of-the funnel offer.
11. Social Media Follow Buttons/Links: Grow your social media reach by giving recipients opportunities to subscribe to your updates in social media, too. Add social media follow buttons to encourage subscribers to follow you on Twitter, ‘Like’ your Facebook page, subscribe to your YouTube channel, or follow your company updates on LinkedIn.
12. Link to Privacy Policy: As the web evolved into an even more social and public platform, concerns about privacy continue to get raised. Give your email subscribers peace of mind and a sense of security by including a link to your company’s privacy policy.
13. Unsubscribe Link: ALWAYS include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email marketing messages. Neglecting to do so will put you in violation of CAN-SPAM regulations, cost you quite a bit of your valuable marketing budget, and severely damage your company’s credibility.

• Mistake #1: Blatant Lack of Permission – Companies still try to get around the permission issues in search for the quick buck. That’s a big mistake.
• Mistake #2: Utterly Deficient Segmentation – Content relevancy is the number one issue for the email marketer. Without segmentation, you have no real relevancy.
• Mistake #3: Lame ‘Welcome’ Messages – We still receive far too many lame welcome messages. What a wasted marketing opportunity.
• Mistake #4: Frequency Decisions Made for the Wrong Reason – Marketers are in a constant battle on the matter of frequency.
• Mistake #5: Institution-to-One Messaging – The debate on how to personalize company emails is ongoing. It’s all about testing.
• Mistake #6: No Real Interactivity – Interactivity is not only for social media. Email was once the relationship building medium, and it still can be.
• Mistake #7: Deliverability: Content, Formatting & Lack of Self-Advocacy – If anything, deliverability is even a bigger issue than it was a few years ago.
• Mistake #8: Designing Images That Appear as Red Xs – Getting HTML images to appear for those who have images turned off still requires that they turn the images on. It’s the text vs. HTML debate.
• Mistake #9: Disregarding Your BlackBerry and Mobile Readers – The number of mobile readers has exploded since 2008. Thank you iPhone and Android. It’s more important than ever to make your email mobile reader friendly.
• Mistake #10: Repeating Ad Types – Banner blindness in email newsletters is more prevalent than ever.
• Mistake #11: Collecting Bad Response Rates – You need good analysis to determine the effectiveness of your email. That’s always been the case.
• Mistake #12: Relying on Email Only – This last mistake of relying on email only was written during the dawn of the social media revolution. It’s the only one that feels a bit dated, but it’s still worth noting that relying on just one tactic alone is never a good plan.

The Sender Score is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email source and is used by ISPs and receivers to determine inbox placement. Just like a credit score is used by financial institutions to decide whether (or not) to extend favorable credit, receivers use the Sender Score, to determine whether (or not) to let email through. The data that is used to compile the score is called reputation metrics. Senders with good reputation metrics earn high scores and usually, high inbox placement because they are considered to have a good email sending reputation.

WHAT IS A GOOD SENDER SCORE?

Sender Scores range from 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst, and 100 is the best possible score. The best email senders regularly maintain a Sender Score above 70 and as a result, these senders have good email sending reputations. Anything below 70 should be cause for alarm. However, even if you have a score of 70 or above, you should still be wary of two key things.

Just like mortgage criteria vary from lender to lender, different ISPs use reputation metrics in different ways. So what may be acceptable at one ISP may not be acceptable at another.

The Sender Score can change with each campaign. So no matter how high (or low) the score is, senders should regularly monitor their deliverability so they can fix and prevent problems before they impact their revenue stream

WHY DO I NEED TO WORRY ABOUT EMAIL DELIVERABILTY?

Any business that deploys mail needs to monitor their Sender Score on a regular basis to help make their email programs more successful. Email technology providers like you also have some culpability in email deliverability, especially when it comes to infrastructure issues and shared IPs. The Sender Score is an indicator of email deliverability problems so you can use it internally to monitor your senders and your IPs and use it to educate your clients on email deliverability and best practices. You can even turn email deliverability into a fruitful revenue stream for your business by offering them full-scale email deliverability tools and services by becoming a Return Path partner.

Return Path is global market leader in email deliverability, reputation and response providing tools and services that take senders beyond the score to maximize email revenue. Our deliverability monitoring suite provides complete visibility into the inbox so you know where your email is going. Our whitelisting services fast track mail to over 1.3 billion inboxes worldwide including Hotmail, MSN and Yahoo! In fact, Return Path Certification is the industry’s largest and most trusted whitelist. To learn more about how to resell our tools and services to your customers, or to walk through your report, please feel free contact us today.

Customer retention is one of the hardest and most important things to get right in business. New customers are exciting. They cause sales bells to ring. But your existing customers, the ones who have made the decision to stick by you, need some careful attention too.

1. The Useful Reminder – Be careful not to make your reminders a negative experience by adding any pressure or pinning any blame on the consumer. “Up for renewal” might be a better approach. The most important part of the useful reminder email is that it is USEFUL. Emails reminding customers to come back to the website or shop again without any behavioral or environmental trigger are no better than blanket mass emails. Email me about yet another sale when I’m not ready to buy, and you will likely be ignored. Remind me that I’m about to run out of toilet paper and give me a coupon, and I’ll be right over.
2. The Sincere Thank You – Customers have a tremendous number of options when it comes to selecting the companies with which they want to do business. According to a much-cited report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, acquiring a new customer can cost six to seven times more than retaining an existing customer. Showing the customer you’re glad to have them is not a new practice. More and more, however, “customer appreciation days” won’t cut it. Keep customers engaged by periodically sending them personalized emails that reflect their experiences with your brand and the channels they most often use. Thank them on days that are specific to them — a one year anniversary as a customer, a birthday — or surprise them with a targeted thank you and offer when they are least expecting it.
3. The Social Media High-Five – Sites using social tools to build community among users have one of the most effective tools available for keeping users engaged. It’s nearly impossible to ignore that “you’ve been tagged” notification. But even the most active of social media pages can’t keep up retention without the use of targeted emails. As you assess your site, think of ways to integrate social features and provide email updates that will keep your audience interested and coming back.

You may not realize but you’re sitting on a mountain of great, established content that could be quickly turned into a trove of powerful newsletter emails.

Remember that not every one of your site’s visitors will have read every piece of content (it’s very rare) and even your most loyal member of your community has barely scratched the surface of what you’ve previously covered; for this reason, you’ll be able to mine your content in the following ways:

• Dig through the Archives – Go back through your archives or pay close attention to which of your posts/articles have received the most amount of action (social media, traffic, etc). Look at which content pieces have worked before and which that has been passed over by your community (that you wish they read). Compile a list of your ‘best of’ and export your content to its own folder which you’ll later use to build upon your email newsletter.
• Find Synchronization – Look at your content and see what syncs with one another; try to find common ground between topics which can easily become a chain of great emails for your subscribers. You get bonus points, in my book, if you’ve already created a series of posts.
• Find those frequently asked questions – Don’t forget to look through your comments and replies from your previous posts because they too may hold many great ideas for your email newsletter. Pick out great responses from yourself and your commenter’s which can be used as a base for your emails.
• Expand on the Alternatives – Consider creating videos or audio recordings of your content (these give a fresh approach to each piece as you get to add little rifts and rants about each topic). Private Label Rights (PLR) content can also be used as a foundation if you don’t have much time to work on your newsletter regularly. You may compile lists and roundups such as resources, tutorials or interview questions; the possibilities are endless once you are aware of this mountain of content.

With newsletters, you have two choices: text and html. Within each formats, you can include additional links for multimedia but for the most part you’re going to be using text (duh). Your blog content may be formatted in a way that doesn’t quite fit that of emails; people are very busy and email can quickly turn to junk if they are too lengthy or unorganized.

Here are some quick tips for building effective emails with existing content:

• Headlines that stick – Work intently on your headline; it’s the most important item in emails. Without a great headline, your emails aren’t going to be opened. Use the best of your ability to create witty, informative or quips that spark curiosity of the recipient.
• K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple (Stupid), don’t overload your reader with lengthy memoirs and ramblings; keep it short and to the point, don’t have your readers guessing what you’re talking about.
• Structure matters – Break up your existing content into sections much like how you most likely have them now with headings but edit down to the very basic information. Structure your emails so people can skim and jump around.
• Lead out – Always include a call-to-action (like in sales copy) to let people know what you want them to do after reading your email. Your call-to-action doesn’t have to be anything big or send people through loops but utilize your contact with the other person to at least get them to share the content with others or click on one of your links.
• Don’t forget the P.S.! – People often jump right to the bottom as they scan your email; don’t forget to craft a great P.S. that’s equivalent of everything you’ve talked about in your email all bundled into one sentence (or two).
• Turn a gigantic tutorial into multiple emails that is delivered once a day until it’s complete. Simple, right?
• Learn, Test, Optimize, Repeat

Optimize your email to get people through each topic without any hiccups. Get right into the meat of the email, optimize your email copy so it resonates and creates a fire for them to open the next.

The last place you want to see your emails is in the spam folder. Deliverability becomes a critical element of a successful email marketing campaign. Take the following steps to help ensure your email gets to whom you are sending it to:

Check Your Copy for Spam-Triggering Words

Make sure your subject line and body of email don’t include any keywords that can trigger spam alerts. Some Email Service Providers (ESPs) help you identify these phrases with features such as Content Detective, SpamAssassin and ContentChecker. Avoid spam-triggering words is to keep your emails out of the box.

Suppress Against Hard Bounces

Are you keeping track of the percentage of hard bounces you get? You need to be. If that number is rising, bring it up with your ESP. Since hard bounced can really hurt your reputation, you will have to clean your list regularly.

Increase Engagement Levels

Mail clients have started tying the engagement levels of your email subscribers to your reputation as a sender. In response to this, you will need to keep your recipients highly engaged in order to appear reputable in the eyes of Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc. Do your recipients click on emails or do they delete them? Do they mark them as spam? What action do they take?

Set Expectations in the Welcome Email

Greet the newcomers when they sign up for your newsletter or other types of email communication. In the welcome email, set some expectations explaining why that person is receiving your messages, how often they are going to be sent out and from whom exactly. These details will help you build a relationship that goes a long way.

Don’t Forget Branding

Branding is vital to how emails are being read and how recipients understand them. It helps people make the connection and say, “This is the real thing, not just a third-party email.”

Use a Preference Center

If a recipient wants to update her email address, does she have an easy way to do that? Provide her/him with a preference center, in which s/he can make that selection and tell you what the best email is to be contacted at.

Track Your Complaint Feedback Loop

You are probably tracking hard bounces and soft bounces. But do you know how many people clicked on the “This Is Spam” button? First, look into that and understand how many of these complaints you are getting.  Remove the subscribers who have complained.

When was the last time you had an expert review your meta tags for relevancy and how competitive they are?

Have your key search phrases changes recently with new search behavior and/or changes in your industry? If you have not checked in the past 90 days, you are overdue.

Are you getting plenty of quality content added to your site on a regular basis?

How about internal and external links? Internal links help the search engines index your site, identify primary keywords and can increase the page rank of linked pages. External links or links leading to pages outside your website do a couple of things. Like internal links, external links help the search engines identify important keywords.  Let me know if you need help establishing more internal and external links.