What is the difference between a hard and soft bounce?
Simply a hard bounce is a permanent error sent by the receiving server. This could be a “User unknown”. These should be excluded to ensure there is no future blocking issues from ISP’s. However to confuse the issue there are times when a hard bounce is not a permanent error but something like a “Content rejected as potential spam” or Mailbox is full” message. While both should not technically be sent as a hard bounce in reality they do so set a threshold of at least two bounces before an address gets excluded to minimise the likelihood of valid addresses being suppressed.

Is an out of office auto-reply a bounce?
No. An out of office automated message is a reply so therefore this means the message has actually been delivered. Increasingly corporate IT departments are using this function to inform senders that a person no longer works for the organisation.

What is a good open or click-thru rate?
At the time of writing we would say the industry average is between 15% to 20% for opens. Click-thru’s vary a lot more depending on the relevancy of content, the attractiveness of the offer and even depends on whether your content is included within the body of the message or requires the recipient to click-thru on a link to visit the website.

What do I need to do to get past spam filters?
Nowadays it is more than just being on a whitelist or avoiding certain phrases. These are still important but here is a mini-checklist:
•Use a spam scoring tool
•Test the email utilising an inbox seeding service to see if the likes of Hotmail, Yahoo etc will deliver to the inbox or junk
•Use this seeding service before, during and after the send as results will change
•Remove bounces and unsubscribes promptly
•Ensure your email service provider unsubscribes anyone reporting your email as spam
•Work with your email service provider to ensure all technical aspects (SPF records, sub-domains etc) are correctly set-up and configured

Why should I send a text version?
There are two main reasons:
•On average 5% of a list cannot read HTML messages
•Including a text version helps reduce spam scores

Why include a hosted web-based version?
Some recipients may get a mangled version of the HTML. In addition they may not know how to turn on images on their email client. Therefore it can be easier to view this in their browser. Maxemail makes it easy to include a personalised web-based version of the email. All you need to do is include a simple merge tag and Maxemail will do the rest. Recipients clicking on this will then see an identical version of what they received complete with all personalisation and dynamic content.

What is the main factor in achieving a successful email marketing campaign?
Our opinion is making the email as relevant as possible is most important. Too many people run “load & blast” style email marketing which is based upon the idea that the more I send, the more revenue I will generate as some of the emails are bound to stick! The trouble is because email is a relatively inexpensive delivery mechanism the ROI on these type of campaigns is still good. Over time though these lists will become less and less responsive as recipients become fed up of receiving irrelevant messages.

What is the main factor in achieving a successful email marketing campaign?
Our opinion is making the email as relevant as possible is most important. Too many people run “load & blast” style email marketing which is based upon the idea that the more I send, the more revenue I will generate as some of the emails are bound to stick! The trouble is because email is a relatively inexpensive delivery mechanism the ROI on these type of campaigns is still good. Over time though these lists will become less and less responsive as recipients become fed up of receiving irrelevant messages.