by Lilia | May 12, 2023 | Announcements, Email Marketing, Features
Many of our customers have been waiting for AB testing and it’s finally live and can be used on our free plan. You can use subject line AB testing on Bulk/Marketing Campaign type only, not on automations or transactional campaigns.
What Is an A/B Test Campaign?
An A/B test campaign is a campaign with 2 or more versions being tested on one dimension – typically subject line or send time. A multi-variate test is a test with more than 1 dimension, for example if you are testing 2 different subject lines with 2 different versions of your message body you have 4 total versions and a multi-variate test, to determine the best combination of subject line and message body.
Why Use AB Tests?
AB tests can help you optimize your campaign engagement, by determining best time or subject line to use. If you have a large list (over 50k) you can test a subject line on 20k and then use the best one on the rest of your list, improving your engagement overall.
You can setup AB test to determine:
- Ideal send time for your brand or list – test early on, then use that knowledge forever!
- Best subject line
- Best converting CTA in your email body
Besides producing better results (sales, conversions), higher engagement helps improve your future inboxing.
How to Setup an A/B or A/B/C Test on a Subject Line
Create your bulk/marketing campaign the same way you usually do, for example by copying and modifying your older campaign.
Determine how many variations do you want to test and click on the A/B Test button next to the subject line label:
AB testing is only available on bulk campaigns, not on transactional or automations. You can test up to 3 subject lines on a single campaign
TIP: You would need a good list size or high engagement to get statistically significant results.
A winner is selected at least 2 hours (or later) after campaign is sent, to allow for meaningful data collection, so you will only see raw data for the first 2 hours after a campaign is sent.
The winner is chosen based on open rate.
That’s it. If you are a BigMailer customer you can reach out for assistance with this or anything else via chat 7 days a week.
If you want to AB test on send time, please refer to this article for detailed instructions.
Not a BigMailer customer? Why not try BigMailer for free, with no features locked? We are sure you will love it.
by Lilia | Mar 22, 2023 | Uncategorized
We are excited to announce that landing pages are now live. Many of our customers have been asking for an easier way to build landing pages with forms and it’s now possible!
You can build your own landing pages from scratch, or use some of our library pages. We are starting with a few page templates in our library, but will be adding more in the coming weeks and months. Need something specific you don’t see? Reach out via chat and request a template.
So what can you do with BigMailer hosted landing pages?
Many things! Let’s review them all:
1. You can setup landing pages hosted either on a) BigMailer domain bigweb.site, or b) a custom site domain that you own.
2. Host 1 landing page in the root of your domain, e.g. host your homepage. So if you don’t have a website, you can set up a coming soon page to load as your homepage and host 1-2 other pages for a mini-site, even on our free plan! On paid plans, you can have 5-20 pages, depending on the plan.
3. Use landing pages with or without email/data collection forms. Most of our library templates have a simple form, typically an email signup, but those are optional.
4. See landing pages stats – visits, clicks, form conversions. Landing pages are stored under Campaigns, so you will see aggregate stats in the campaign dashboard and detailed stats on campaign report, just like email campaigns.
5. Upload and use images hosted on BigMailer or use images from your website. This is no different from how you managed email templates. The advantage of calling images from your site is that anyone who already visited your site will have those images cached in their browser, so the landing page will load for them much faster. This is especially useful for heavy graphics or product images.
6. User forms to collect emails or other data. You can now run polls or surveys for your existing contacts or prospects and store their answers or preferences in your custom fields, which you can then use to segment and personalize your email campaigns. An email field is required on all forms.
NOTE: To create a form with custom fields you need to create any new fields first, before you can add them to a form.
TIP: Use Full Screen mode to build, edit, and preview your pages at full width.
Can I use landing pages on a free plan?
You can host up to 3 landing pages for free, including a page in the root of your domain. You can host landing pages on BigMailer domain or your own.
What about pre-made page templates?
Yes! We added some page templates into the library – agency page, webinar/event signup, promo page, personal page, and more. We plan to keep adding more on ongoing basis and welcome your feedback and requests.
How to Create a New Landing Page
To create a landing page, go to Campaigns tab in the top navigation, then click Create and select Landing Pages campaign type.
Once you have pages under your campaigns, you can copy them to create new ones, just like with email campaigns.
To get started, please refer to this help article for managing landing pages, it has more detailed instructions with screenshots and video.
Got feedback or need to make a request? Reach out to us via chat, we would love to hear from you.
Not a BigMailer customer yet? Get started for free.
by Lilia | Feb 20, 2023 | Announcements, Email Marketing
Many customers who sent campaigns on Feb 20 reported high complaint rates. Upon further review of engagement by domain reports we are able to confirm that the complaint rates went up significantly for these email domains – hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, msn.com, live.com, live.co.uk
Why did this happen?
It appears there was a change in the Hotmail algorithm that determines what email go to spam folder vs. inbox. As a result, 3 things happened:
- A very high volume of spam is been seen in the Inbox.
- Regular senders inboxed more of their emails than they did historically, seeing higher open rates and as a result higher complaint rates.
- Some subscribers had to mass move emails to Spam folder or marked large batches of emails as Spam, likely marking some emails as spam without high intent.
What should you do?
Consider using segmentation and exclude high complaining domains in the next 1-2 days to lower your overall complaint rates, whether you are using Amazon SES and worried about suspension or just want to avoid getting caught in the crossfires.
As always, to keep complaint rate low, follow these email deliverability best practices:
- Make your unsubscribe link east to see/find, don’t make the text small
- Consider lowering your frequency if your complaint rates are high.
To ensure you maintain high deliverability and inboxing follow best practices. If you think you already do, please review this article on advanced deliverability and inboxing tips.
If you are a BigMailer customer and need assistance or would like an audit of your account please reach out to us via chat.
We will be posting updates here if you want to know when this issue gets resolved.
by Lilia | Feb 12, 2023 | Email Marketing, Guides
UPDATE: Subject line AB testing is now live. You can use this article to setup other type of AB tests, for example on send time.
What Is an A/B Test Campaign?
An A/B test campaign is a campaign with 2 or more versions being tested on one dimension – typically subject line or send time. A multi-variate test is a test with more than 1 dimension, for example if you are testing 2 different subject lines with 2 different versions of your message body you have 4 total versions and a multi-variate test, to determine the best combination of subject line and message body.
Why Use AB Tests?
AB tests can help you optimize your campaign engagement, by determining best time or subject line to use. If you have a large list (over 50k) you can test a subject line on 20k and use the best one on the rest of your list, improving your engagement overall.
You can setup AB test to determine:
- Ideal send time for your brand or list – test early on, then use that knowledge forever!
- Best subject line
- Best converting CTA in your email body
- A combination or all of the above!
Besides producing better results (sales, conversions), higher engagement helps improve your future inboxing.
How to Setup an A/B or A/B/C Test
Step 1: Setup up your A/B or A/B/C segments
Determine how many variations do you want to test – that’s how many segments you need to split your list into. We suggest to define reusable segments using “starts with” condition on one of your custom fields, for example first name.
Then, create a segment that’s basically “not A” to ensure you don’t make a mistake with rule overlap. The example below shows a segment C that’s basically doesn’t match ether A or B, and segment B would be setup similar to A but with different rules.
TIP: Make sure each segment has at least 10,000 contacts in it, so your experiment results are statistically significant.
Step 2: Setup your campaign variations.
Create your bulk/promo campaign, then create copies with your variation – subject line, preview, or message body. Assign a different segment to each campaign, see example in the screenshot below.
If you are testing on send time, then your campaigns will be identical, but will just be scheduled to send at different times.
Note: The example above is for a B2C list that’s 60%+ Gmail, so those landed in Promotions tab.
TIP: You could create a test using small parts of a larger list, then use the results for the remainder of your list.
Step 3: Start Testing (almost)
Reach out via chat and request to update your account to allow you to send more than 1 campaign at a time, if you want to test on content and send your campaigns at the same time. By default, accounts have 1 queue and campaigns go out sequentially. If you are on an Agency plan, you already have ability to send concurrent campaigns.
That’s it. If you are a BigMailer customer you can reach out for assistance with this or anything else via chat 7 days a week.
Not a BigMailer customer? Why not try BigMailer for free, with no features locked? We are sure you will love it.
by Lilia | Jan 12, 2023 | Email Marketing, Provider Comparison
Email deliverability has been a hot topic for marketers for quite some time. With mailbox providers getting more aggressive about their spam blocking and filters, inbox placement has become a priority issue for many marketers to address. To protect their email deliverability, marketers need to implement email verification as part of the pre-campaign routine. In this article, we are comparing a few email verification service providers to help you find the one that will keep your email list clean.
Why Verify Your Email List?
Email deliverability is a complex topic, but it comes down to 3 things:
- Sender reputation, this includes sender email/domain as well as IP address it sends from.
- List and content quality.
So deliverability is strongly correlated to your sender reputation and hard bounce rate is one of the factors affecting it. With high hard bounce rates sender reputation takes a hit. If you don’t implement any actions to reduce your bounce rate it can negatively impact your inbox placement. Your domain might get marked as SPAM by Internet Service Providers, which can result in your emails being delivered to the SPAM folder, and even lead to getting your domain appear on blacklists.
Risk of Account Suspension with Your ESP
An average email list decays at a rate of 2% per month for B2C lists and 3% for B2B lists. So if an email list hasn’t been engaged in more than 3-4 months it can have more than a 10% bounce rate on the first bulk campaign. A bounce rate over 10% can result in getting an account suspended on many email platforms, in addition to causing long-term damage to your sender reputation.
About Catch_all and Accept_all emails
Email verification will also prevent you from sending your campaign to disposable (aka temporary) emails as well as emails that domains set up as catch_all. Disposable emails are often used by spammers and fraudsters. Once created they usually are valid for around 48hrs, and later become invalid emails that will generate hard bounce. Catch_all also known as Accept_all emails, is an address that is specified to receive all messages that are addressed to an incorrect email address for a domain. The risk with such emails is that it might seem to be valid, however, it could still generate a hard bounce. By using email verification you will be able to establish which of the addresses are set up as catch_all, but you won’t learn if it is deliverable or not. The decision to message such addresses should be based on the overall quality of your list.
Email Bounces and Cost
There is of course a budget factor – email verification can save you money. Sending your campaign to undeliverable or risky addresses via your ESP’s or marketing platform can generate extra costs, with no chance of generating any return on investment (ROI).
Verification Process and Results
In a typical verification process you upload a CSV file and once validation is complete you see stats on the results and options to download your verified list. Most verification services produce at least these 4 statuses:
- Deliverable – these emails are safe to send to
- Undeliverable – these addresses no longer exist and should not be sent to
- Risky – these emails are likely to result in a high bounce rate (often catch-all addresses)
- Unknown – these emails couldn’t be verified so may result in high bounce rate.
If your email verification provider allows it, you should download Deliverable, Risky, and Unknown as separate lists and upload them as separate lists into your email marketing platform. If you are starting fresh with a new service provider you should ONLY send your 1st campaign to Deliverable addresses only, to ensure the lowest possible bounce rate. This is because many providers move you onto a shared IP pool tier that correlates to your 1st campaign or campaigns sent in the first 1-2 days.
On average, email lists identified as Risky or Unknown by email verification providers result in 30% bounce rate, so they should be slowly added into large bulk campaigns overtime, to finalize verification through sending.
While bounce rate below 10% will not result in you getting banned from an email marketing platform your goal should be to keep bounce rate below 3% for best email deliverability.
Choosing an Email Verification Service
There are a lot of email verification services available, and it might be overwhelming when searching for the right one for the first time. There are several methods used by providers to verify emails so there is a small variation in results and accuracy. We find that the difference in accuracy is fairly small – around 2% – while the cost can vary x2-5.
For this comparison article, we are focusing more on affordable providers we have evaluated as potential partners. BigMailer is a very affordable email marketing platform, so it was important for us to continue to offer our customers great value when integrating a 3rd party email validation service.
Other factors that we considered besides cost are: security and GDRP compliance, availability of robust APIs to process large data sets, possibility to run a test prior to purchase, and finally the team behind the service and support.
Below are the services we had reviewed and ranking factors we have checked for this article:
Last Updated: Mar 14 2022
As we were evaluating prospecting partners 2 services stood out (and we got you extra discount with both):
Bouncer
Bouncer has easy-to-use UI and very flexible data download options, making it our favorite. You even get options on what columns to keep or add to your final verification results, which can simplify your workflows post verification. These options are especially helpful for large list owners, since large data files can become a blocker for importing a list into an email marketing platform.
Bouncer offers you an option to run a free bounce rate estimate, which helps you decide if you need to verify your list. The estimate only takes a few min to generate and can be incredibly useful.
Bouncer team and servers are located in Europe so this can appeal to organizations in the EU region. Bouncer file upload limit is 500,000 emails or 30MB in file size. Get a 10% discount with this link.
Emailable
Emailable offers good verification speed on large lists and 1500 free validation credits to BigMailer customers via this link only. Emailable file upload limit is 1 million emails and 100MB in file size, which can be useful for large list owners.
We also like Emailable Deliverability Monitor service – $149/month for up to 50 domains/IPs with 12-hr checks.
Both providers have de-duplication but they act on it differently:
- Emailable automatically de-dupes your list but doesn’t display the info on results so it can be confusing why your output list is smaller than the list you uploaded.
- Bouncer automatically de-dupes and displays the stats.
Neither service is offering ability to identify spam traps, a feature very few providers offer at a higher than usual verification cost.
About Spam Traps
Spam traps are used to identify and monitor spam email by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), anti-spam organizations, and blocklist operators. They are email addresses (also called honeypots) used to identify senders who aren’t following email best practices. If you either purchase your email lists or scrape email addresses from the web there is a good chance you have a lot of spam traps on your list.
Learn more about avoiding, identifying and removing spam traps in our article on spam traps. If you are a BigMailer customer you can reach out to us to help you determine if this is an issue for you and what provider would be best for removing spam traps from your list. Not a BigMailer customer? Get started with a free account.
Happy email marketing!
