BOUNCED Emails = GOLD! ➕ YOU on Netflix, Martha Stewart New Show, Golden Bachelor Update! Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 318

Foreign. Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold and I want to talk about bounced email addresses and why we're all sleeping on them. We're not paying attention to them. And they could either be what's holding back your business, or it could be the secret to you getting new business.

You're like, what is he talking about? This is boring. This is going to be technical. No, it is not. All right.

Every time you hit send on an email campaign on if you care, if you're a consumer marketer or a business marketer, when you hit send on an email campaign, there is a percentage of emails that you send to that bounce, which means they don't get to the person. They actually don't get there. They bounce back. And without getting technical, there's basically two types of bounces that occur.

There's hard bounces and there's soft bounces. Now, a hard bounce means you got an invalid email address. It's just wrong. It's not a viable email address. The other one are soft bounces.

This is when you send to somebody, maybe their inbox is full. There are temporary server issues. It doesn't mean it's a bad address. It means it just couldn't get delivered. Who cares? That's boring.

Why does this all matter? It matters because there's gold in these bounced address files. Okay, so let me explain to you why there's gold there.

So when you hit send, and now you've sent out to a hundred thousand people, okay? Or maybe 10,000 people. Whatever you send to. And then you go into your email tracking report with whatever platform you use, all right?

And in that report, it'll say how many people got delivered and opened and clicked and whatever. And then should also say how many people bounced, which were basically your undeliverable emails. And what do we all normally do?

Like, oh, okay, great, we had this many people bounce. Who cares? Now, the reason you should care is a fewfold.

First off, on the business side, your bounced email addresses are lost opportunities, and it is critical that you dig into that data. What do I mean? So let's say you send out that campaign. And you're a business to business marketer. And we'll get into consumer in a second.

You're a business to business marketer. Okay. And you see, oh wow, we sent out this campaign and we had 342 people. Their email addresses bounced. They were undeliverable. What do you do?

What most people do is they just remove those addresses and they go, well, we don't want to send to them again because that's bad. And they move on with their lives. But that's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

You should take the bounced email addresses and you need to dig into them. Number one, you want to look at who bounced. Are these key contacts of yours?

Are these people that are your primary contact at a company that are no longer there? Have you just lost the person that you email with all the time because they switched jobs, they got fired, something happened, There's a story there.

And if you're not looking at the bounce data, you don't know the story. But more important than that, what you want to be doing is taking the company names, right?

So you take the people who bounced and then you create a company name string of all of the people at the companies. Forget about the actual person.

You take the companies, you take their domains, you make a company name string and then you take that and you turn it into your account based marketing file. These companies that these people's email address just bounced from that are no longer deliverable, you now have less contacts at those companies.

Maybe you now have no contacts at those companies and they were the right companies for you.

And those that account file of your bounced email addresses is what you should be using for your targeting, for your remarketing campaigns, for your, for where you are trying to find new contacts because you now have less contacts there.

If you're not using your bounce data to drive your prospecting efforts, you are wasting time and money because these are the right companies and now you've lost the person at those companies. So in general, bounce data, there's a lot there to dig into overall. How do you know if you're, if you have a deliverability problem?

Your bounce rate, the percentage of emails bouncing, is a big indicator. Huge.

If you have an email deliverability problem, you really, whether you're a consumer marketer or business marketer, you should not be seeing a bounce rate over 5%. If it's over 5%, that is really bad.

It should actually, if you're a regular sender to your database, you send it weekly or at least Every other week it should be under 2%. And the reason it should be that low is you need to be removing hard bounces from your sends.

The easiest way to have a deliverability problem, the easiest way to go to the spam folder or junk folder is if you are not removing hard bounces after they occur.

Meaning that you send out to that hundred thousand, you get, you know, 300 hard bounces, and then the next time you hit send, you don't remove those hard bounces before you hit send.

The reason that's a problem is when you send out an email and an email address hard bounces, okay, what that is, it's annoying to the email infrastructures that you are sending to because there's a lot of processing work for them to be able to identify whether or not an email address is deliverable. And they don't like processing hard bounces. So they'll view you as a, a poor sender, somebody that doesn't care about list hygiene.

And that is one of the key reasons that you'll wind up going to the spam and junk folder because it looks like you don't care. And that's bad.

Now, on the consumer side, besides for monitoring that, okay, besides for monitoring that, what you also always want to do, you want to eyeball your bounces, okay? Depending on how large your file is, you, you want to always keep an eye on, is your bounce rate going up or down or staying pretty static?

If all of a sudden your bounce rate was 2% and now your bounce rate jumps up to like 8% or 9% or something like that, you have a problem.

And a lot of times for consumer marketers, what they don't realize is they might have, they might be doing something with a new partner, a new vendor, a new whatever, and they include new tracking code in some of the emails they send out. Maybe they'll include some sort of affiliate link in the emails that they're sending out.

Basically, you're inserting a new third party URL to a random website, a random thing, a random whatever, okay?

And you don't know it, but that URL, that affiliate link, that partner tracking code that you've put in there so you could do some sort of cool heat map or whatever it is that you're testing.

Now, that new thing that you've added to the mix within your email send is causing you to have deliverability problems, causing you to not be able to get into people's inboxes. It's causing more soft bounces to occur. So overall, we can't sleep on bounced email addresses. They're not just, oh, they're not deliverable anymore.

Who cares? There is gold, right? There is gold in your bounced email addresses.

And it's also a big indicator on if you may or may not have a problem or you may have onboarded somebody that has a problem, and that also is a problem. All right, that was really boring. I feel like that was boring. What are you going to do? Sometimes I'm boring. Let's get into.

Since you didn't ask, which is the ridiculous portion of this podcast, which hopefully is not boring. So what's going on? Of course, I got to break down tv, the TV that is coming out.

I watch horrible tv, but there's some good stuff coming out, and I'm fired up. Okay, so what's coming out? Well, right now you can go on Netflix, which I'm going to be doing this weekend. The new season of you is out.

You is that show. It's in season five with Pen Badgley, the guy that was on Gossip Girl a million years ago. He's like a killer. I didn't ruin it for you.

He's been a killer for four years. But if you've never watched you, this is a great show. Little disturbing, but I'm telling you, it is worth your time.

I've been watching a little bit of the new Jon Hamm show on Apple, your friends and neighbors. It's all right. He's an idiot. Not Jon Hamm. The character's an idiot. So I don't know how much I care about that. I did see. Did you see this?

They announced the new Golden Bachelor. I'm not kidding. The Golden Bachelor is gonna be coming back. Not this week, but soon.

And they announced the new Golden Bachelor, which I'm happy about. And this is not like an ageism thing or whatever, but the last Golden Bachelor was, I think, 70 or 71.

And this dude's 66, which I think is a little bit better because it was a little, like much seeing, I don't know, like, people my parents age making out and stuff. That was a bit much for me. So him being slightly younger is. Is pretty cool.

And then the other thing that's coming out next week is Love Hotel, which can be on Bravo. This is going to be great. They're taking a lot of the. The different women from the Real Housewife show.

Some of my favorite people, like Luann, Countess Luann, a bunch of others. And it's like this reality dating show at this fancy hotel.

This sounds tremendous, but the show I'm most excited for that's coming out in just a few days on the 28th. Okay. On NBC is something called yes, Chef. Why is it exciting? It is a cooking contest show. And who is the host? Martha Stewart. Are you kidding me?

Martha is the goat. I love Martha. She is amazing. This is my flex. Are you ready for me to make sue to pretend I'm cool? I had the opportunity to interview Martha Stewart.

She was so awesome. And behind the scenes, she was very, very awesome. She actually gave me her email address. She goes, you want to stay in contact? Here's my email.

I didn't know what to do with it. I only emailed her once. I said, hi, Martha, it's Jay. Hope you're doing well. She goes, I'm doing great. Thank you.

I just had nothing else to say, but she's like the greatest, nicest, most awesome human. So I will definitely be watching. Yes, Chef. And listen, I appreciate you being here. You're awesome. Leave this thing a review.

And more importantly than anything, watch all of this TV stuff. I'm not even going to give you a call to action. Go and register for this or do this thing or, or whatever other nonsense.

Just watch all this garbage TV because it's more important than seeing your friends. It is your friends. Come on. They're annoying. Watching garbage TV will never be wrong. All right, thanks for being here. Later. You did it.

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