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 set up other types of AB tests, such as on send time, best subject line, CTA, or a combination of all.
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 | Mar 26, 2021 | Help
BigMailer is a platform designed and built for managing multiple brands, which benefits digital marketing agencies, email marketing consultants, franchises, multi-location businesses, and large companies that own multiple brands.
Some email marketing service providers offer “sub-accounts” feature where standalone accounts are linked together and can be accessed with a single login. In this type of setup you login once and can switch between accounts, typically via dropdown in the header.
What is a Brand?
You can think of a brand as a business entity with its own unsubscribe page. So in cases of franchises or multiple locations, each owner or location would become its own brand. The lists can not be shared across brands and billing is based on unique contacts under each brand. A user can be assigned access to multiple brands.
BigMailer allows you to add unlimited brands and users at no extra cost. You have a brand dashboard as a starting point with engagement summary.
You invite new users to your account and assign brand access and a role – administrator, brand manager, or campaign manager.
Brand Names
The brand name is typically the name of the business or the domain name of a website. In cases of multiple locations but same business name it’s best to follow the same naming convention to avoid confusion – location name, or “[main brand] – [location]”.
The brand name is displayed in plain text on the Unsubscribe page unless a logo is uploaded, in which case only the logo is shown and no text. If you don’t upload the logo it’s best to have the brand name label in BigMailer to include actual brand name and not just a location. Below is an example of BigMailer unsubscribe page with logo and custom message types.
Custom Message Types
Custom message types help manage subscription preferences for your subscribers and can retain more subscribers on your list compared to a single global unsubscribe from a brand.
You can create custom message types under each brand by clicking on the brand name in the header and selecting “Message Types” from the menu. You will not be able to edit message types once you create them, so put some thought into the names before you add them.
Ideally, message types would indicate mailing frequency, if you have a set schedule, for example:
- Weekly Newsletter
- Monthly Product Updates
- Daily Digest
- Company Announcements (Quarterly)
- Occasional Offers From Our Partners
You can specify a message type when you create a new campaign and BigMailer keeps track of the subscription preferences.
by Lilia | Dec 16, 2020 | Email Marketing
You may have heard by now that Google services have experienced major outages on Dec 14 and 15.
Not only Gmail users had difficulties logging into their accounts, but emails sent to Gmail accounts have been rejected by google with:
“code”: “550”,
“extCode”: “5.1.1”,
“message”: “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient’s email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”
This means that if you had been sending emails to Gmail addresses during the outage you likely had a high bounce rate for your Gmail addresses and possibly your campaigns and accounts overall. Since BigMailer pauses campaigns with high bounce rate you may have received notifications about your campaigns being paused due to high bounce rate.
You should review engagement by domain report on any campaigns you sent on Monday-Tuesday.
You might see a high hard bounce rate for Gmail.com domain:
If your Amazon SES account got suspended you should reply to the email you received from Amazon and explain that most of the bounces were erroneous from Gmail due to outage (if this is in fact the case). A screenshot of the report, like the example above, and a link to this post may help with a faster resolution and account re-instatement.
While the original issue is outside of our control and influence we are monitoring situation and exploring ways we can rectify it by possibly reseting the bounce status on the affected addresses.
We will post an update once we take any action on this situation. If you need a faster advisory on rectifying this yourself please reach out to us via live chat once you log into your BigMailer account.
UPDATE Dec 17: BigMailer had addressed this issue by reseting the hard bounce status for affected contacts.
UPDATE Jan 6: Most marketers are not even aware of the issue as per the poll we ran on Twitter.
by Lilia | Jun 27, 2020 | Help
What is Segmentation and Why Use It?
Email list segmentation is a technique that email marketers use to send highly targeted emails by dividing their list up into smaller groups, or “segments.” The goal of segmentation is to provide more relevant content to your email recipients.
You want your marketing campaign to be as precise as possible so the right message can hit the right people at exactly the right time. For this, email segmentation is an absolute must.
How to Segment Your Email Lists
In BigMailer, you can segment your campaigns on:
- Your custom fields. For example, last order date or subscription status.
- Pre-defined fields like DateAdded and Email, specifically email domain (e.g. gmail.com or yahoo.com).
- Campaign engagement – sends, opens, clicks on a specific campaign or any campaigns in a given time period.
Here are some examples of segmentation rules you can use in BigMailer with screenshots:
DateAdded – this value is added when a contact is added to BigMailer:
Campaign engagement – sent/not a specific campaign:
Campaign engagement – opens on a specific campaign or any in a given time period:
Campaign engagement – clicks on a specific campaign or any in a given time period:
You can combine your inline conditions and your pre-defined segments with either ANY or ALL rule.
If you’re reading this, that means you’re serious about creating the most targeted email campaigns possible. And we are here to help.
Before you’re able to segment your audience, you need to get their emails and collect relevant data. Using BigMailer webforms to collect your subscriber data gives you a few advantages. For example, we automatically capture your user’s IP address (but we don’t save or store it) and convert it to non-PII data points (country, state, city, zip code, and latitude and longitude), which allows you to target your audience by location.
Need ideas on how to leverage segmentation? Check out this article – 50 ways to segment your list from OptinMonster.
Want to learn more about email marketing? Head over to our email marketing automation or email deliverability guides.
Happy email marketing!
