List Hygiene Gives Triggered Email a Bigger Kick

Triggered email is one of the hottest trends in email marketing. Indeed, Epsilon in its latest “Q4 2011 Email Trends and Benchmarks” tells marketers that incorporating real-time triggered messaging into your email programs “is critically important” to achieving success.

Open rates for triggered emails, Epsilon reports, are 96% higher than “business-as-usual” emails, and click rates are 125% higher. Epsilon says its findings are based on more than 51 billion triggered emails sent from January 2010 to December 2011 across multiple industries.

Although triggered email has been yielding exceptional results for a number of years, the triggers themselves have tended to be less immediate in nature-sending a customer a birthday greeting, or sending a note after a certain amount of time has passed since a transaction.

The new generation of triggered email is based on social media triggers, which are more immediate, and their impact is exponentially greater.

As eWayDirect CEO Neil Rosen explains, social media email marketing “is about triggering emails to subscribers when they view one of your YouTube videos, re-tweet one of your tweets, visit your Facebook page, or blog, or company message board-or in general interact with your company on any social media site where your company has a presence.”

The payoff, says Rosen, is big, with emails triggered by social media delivering results “far beyond those of standard email campaigns.” You will, he says, achieve a 100% to 200% increase in clicks and opens.

While the opportunity is tremendous, too many companies risk letting a significant portion of these revenues slip away because of undeliverable email addresses. With 20% to 30% of a company’s email addresses being invalid at any one time, the triggered emails sent to these addresses will bounce or be intercepted as spam.

Thus, to fully capitalize on the revenue-generating opportunities triggered email presents, a clean email list is more imperative than ever. The answer is email list hygiene. You can optimize your email list and your rate of success through a regular regimen of list hygiene that includes email validation, email correction, and Email Change of Address (ECOA) routines.

As SilverPop’s survey findings showed, the top email marketing performers continuously work to reduce their bounce rates and receive the benefits thereof, and this is most likely due to their being “more vigilant about verifying email addresses before adding them to the database and about doing list hygiene to remove undeliverable addresses.”