Increase E-Mail Delivery Rates for E-Mail Blasts from your CRM
Before you setup any ESP (Email service provider) for your CRM, you must setup your DKIM and SPF records. You may be asking, “What in the heck does that mean ?”. I will very briefly explain it; then, cite some resources.
ESP (E-mail Service Providers) such as Swiftpage (now Act!), MailChimp or Constant Contact send e-mails using their servers on your behalf. Your clients’ ISPs and spam filters will detect the ESP’s sending the email. However, some clients’ filters are setup to reject this because a hacker could use the same technique to spam you as well.
So an industry consortium created the SPF and the DKIM record. The SPF and DKIM records gets added to your DNS settings so other ISPs know that your ESP is actually legit when sending emails on your behalf.
Here are some links for a couple providers.
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
- Act! Marketing Automation
- Zoho CRM
- Zoho Campaigns
- Benchmark One (Hatchbuck)
Once this is setup, this is another step closer to avoiding the junk box.
If you don’t know what a DNS record is; then, work with your I.T. contractor to set this up. When we work with our clients, we partner with your I.T. contractor to update this.
Swiftpage E-Marketing To Be Discontinued
Swiftpage E-Marketing will be discontinued on June 30th, 2018.
Re-engage Inactive Clients and Prospects Using CRM & Email
I found a good article on re-connecting with inactive clients and prospects, and it resonates with me because it’s a common request among my clients to use their CRM and tie it to an ESP (E-Mail Service Provider) to reactivate dormant prospects and customers. By the way, it costs 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing client and the lifetime value is 10 times greater.
We’d like to believe one email blast with the same message to all contacts solves the problem; however, the author believes a win-back campaign requires precise messaging per market segment. Also, it should be rolled out incrementally so if you do get a high bounce rate, it’s easier to clean up for subsequent mailings. Acceptable hard bounce rates are less than 5% per campaign before ESPs take notice.
How are you engaging your inactive prospects and clients ?
The first thing we’d do is determine if your bounces and opt outs are in separate spreadsheets, and consolidate that in the CRM. Then filter the CRM’s to ensure they no longer get emails. In our practice, we hired a client retention specialist to call clients in addition to email. To help her out, I created a one click report that finds our clients sorted by account size. It takes her about 1 minute to find out who needs to be called.
