Last time, I articulated the importance of deciphering your email marketing list to understand who exactly is on it.
And to be clear, I am certainly not advocating to sift through the list on a name-by-name basis. Rather, we are trying to ascertain which email clients and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) – e.g., the Gmails, Yahoos, and Outlook.coms – are on your list.
Follow your email marketing efforts closely… and with ease
The goal of this practical primer is to understand how to take a surgical approach to see if and where a problem may reside. The reason why this is so important is because a 3% drop in the open rate could be the result of one of your email clients, let’s say, Yahoo Mail!, placing all of your email marketing efforts into the spam box. Obviously, this is what we’re trying to avoid.
However, without dissecting your list, chances are you’ll never know. This is what I refer to as an email marketing problem getting swept under the rug. Now you can look into your email marketing service provider for stats, but to be honest, not every email service provider has stats that shows this. Therefore, I will show you how to break things out methodically, so that you may work on your major ISPs on an individualized basis.
Let’s get to the bottom of this!
To get to the bottom of this, you need to follow this gameplan. The first thing you’ll need to do is export your email marketing list. You can either decide to download the entire list, or, keep things simple and just export your most engaged users from a recent newsletter blast.
Then open the file in Excel. For this exercise, the only relevant data needed is the email address.
Next, parse out the data in the email address field. To do this, highlight the column and go to the Text to Columns option, which is in the Data tab. Keep it on the Delimited option, select Other, and add in the @ symbol as the delimiter. This will break off the email client from the email address. Afterward, name the new column ISP.
Now that this step is done it’s time to throw this it all into a pivot table. When it’s in the pivot table, bring over the data from the email client and you’ll see the exact breakdown. It is important to note that you’ll probably have hundreds – if not thousands – of custom domains. Collectively, cluster them into an Other Domains category.
Finally, we can see the exact breakdown of an email marketing list by email client/domain. This will help us decide which email clients we need to test. I recommend that any email client that is over 8-10% of your list gets tested with a dedicated newsletter. That is, let’s say in the example above, we should have a specific, targeted campaign for the top 5 ISPs.
By doing this, we’ll be able to pinpoint if – and more importantly where – there is a problem with deliverability with surgical precision.
