Getting email notifications that your email campaign is not working as expected is not exactly a good feeling. Especially when, after a quick glance at the stats, you realize that you’re just not meeting the targets you had in mind when designing the campaign. This, however, is rarely a straightforward case, and it typically comes with a whole bunch of extra work on your end to figure out what is wrong.
The Email Testing Process
Letting a tiny slice of your audience try out your product/service before releasing it to the entire world is one of the most effective marketing tactics around. Although it’s not practical for everyone, it allows you to find out all the little issues with the product or service that you might have overlooked.
Pro-actively testing your email marketing campaigns means taking the time to build a small sample of your audience and actively engaging with them via email to make sure everything is working as expected. This approach has a number of advantages. Not only do you get to identify any hiccups before your wider audience is exposed to them (meaning you can work out any kinks before a huge launch), but you can also use the data to further optimize your campaigns going forward. For example, you might want to re-target the audience that you previously reached with a different approach or try out a new tactic to see if it works better for your particular scenario.
Now, this isn’t something that can happen overnight, especially if you’re launching a new product or service and need to get organic search traffic and website visitors to grow your business. Nonetheless, it’s still an excellent idea to get in the habit of testing out your campaigns before sending them to your entire audience. That way, when something weird happens you’ll at least have a chance of fixing it before a major crisis.
The Importance Of Double-Optin
Double-optin campaigns are when a user confirms their email address both before and after receiving your email. This ensures that you have both a legitimate and active interest in receiving emails from the company. It also means that you have a legitimate reason to store their email address, as they’ll be getting valuable content from your brand.
Depending on your needs, you might want to go for single-optin campaigns, where the user confirms their email address after receiving the first part of the campaign. This type of setup could be totally safe and legitimate, but you have to weigh this against the fact that the user won’t be getting as much value out of the content as they would if they’d actively participated in the content creation process. Opting in after the fact might also make it more difficult to track the success of your campaign (i.e., how many people are actually opening your emails), as they didn’t have a chance to provide feedback during the initial stages of the campaign.
A Few Tips On How to Prevent This
As the name would suggest, AWeber’s Invalid Data option serves as a notification when your email testing process discovers an issue with one of your campaigns. You won’t necessarily need to go through this step in order to launch a successful email marketing campaign, but it’s good practice to check for these errors before hitting the send button. So here are a few tips on how to prevent this:
- Before sending your campaign, test it on a trial basis using a small group of non-essential email addresses. In the event of an error, you’ll have the opportunity to correct it before your wider audience is exposed to it.
- When possible, use a double opt-in process where a user confirms both their email address and provides additional information (i.e., name, demographic data, or company) before being placed on any mailing list. This way you can be sure that both the email address and the personal data you collect are legitimate and won’t be used by anyone else. If a user provides a name but doesn’t include an email address, it’s usually a good idea to have them re-submit it along with the confirmation email.
- Check for unusual activity when you’re receiving notifications from AWeber. If you notice that your email campaigns are being sent to a large number of non-active addresses or ones that you don’t recognize, it could be a sign that your ISP is filtering your mail. Make sure you’re not accidentally blocking legitimate emails by adding @yourdomainname.com to the safe sender’s list.