The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

What to Do About Tracking Data

Once you understand how tracking works, you can analyze the data and improve your strategy. As with any data analysis, you need to make sure you are paying attention without overanalyzing so you spend more time improving your strategy and less time steeped in numbers.

The following sections tell you how to analyze and take action on the tracking data supplied by your ESP by applying Constant Contact’s perspective to the information available to you through tracking reports.

HANDLING INDIVIDUAL BOUNCED AND BLOCKED EMAILS

In Chapter 11, I discussed the measures you can take on an aggregate level to improve your email delivery in general, but you also need to take action on the bounce and block data related to specific emails.

Tracking bounced and blocked emails after sending is important so you can determine which customers or prospects were unable to receive your message for certain technical reasons.

When an email address is nonexistent, or no longer valid:

• It’s called a “hard bounce.” The email is either misspelled or the user has changed his or her address.

When an email is undeliverable because the server was down, the mailbox was full, or the email blocked:

• It’s called a “soft bounce” because these events could be temporary.

When your bounce report tells you that an email address is nonexistent, or no longer valid:

• You can check for obvious misspellings. For example, an email address that ends in “@hotmail.comm.” can be easily ...