November 2022 Webinar - Email Best Practices & Re-engagement

This is a recording of our live session on November 14, 2022. In this 30-minute webinar, we dive into email best practices and cover the basics of creating a re-engagement campaign. 

We had some fantastic questions asked during the session. Here's a summary of our responses:

1. How do you ensure non-openers are removed from your active mailing list? 

Great question! I recommend you create a suppression audience with the “last email opened date” field. Configure this to be greater than the # of months you send that re-engagement email out to non-openers. For example, in the webinar I configured my re-engagement audience to look at anyone whose last email open date was exactly 10 months ago. For my suppression audience, I want anyone whose last open date is greater than 10 months ago. Then, when you send your emails, you can select that suppression audience from the drop-down in the first step. Want a quick video walk-through? Please click here.

2. How often does Ascent360 perform data hygiene?

Another great question! Data hygiene and matching happens every night for new/incoming records. This is why there is an overnight delay for ingesting yesterday’s data into the CDP (customer data platform, AKA Ascent360’s platform). We also perform a bounce of physical addresses against the NCOA database periodically to keep updated addresses fresh.

The hygiene we do on emails is pretty basic – i.e. we’ll fix “gmail.cmo” to “gmail.com” and will weed out any obviously fake emails (i.e. test@test.com) but we don’t actively verify that emails are real. This is something we partner with a specialized vendor for – and is available as a paid service. It’s recommended to do this at least once a year. If you’d like more info on this, let us know! (Create a ticket from within the Ascent360 platform or email support@ascent360.com, which opens a ticket for you).

Love technical details? Here is an article that goes over data hygiene and matching. 😊

3. Is there a way to view a deliverability score for our email list?

Currently, there is not. You can look at previously-sent emails to determine the deliverability rate for those. Navigate to Emails > Reports. Here you’ll see a count and % of the bounced emails. We are considering adding more deliverability metrics to the platform and will keep you updated!

4. Where is the unsubscribe link displayed in the email builder?

The unsub/opt-out link is not displayed in the email builder, however, when you send a test or LIVE email it looks like this:

This is a “1-Click Opt-out” meaning the recipient doesn’t need to fill anything else out after clicking. They’re automatically placed on a suppression list.

Note: If you’re an advanced user and want to add a custom opt-out form, see this article for details. (I highly recommend asking our help desk to verify your work if you do end up utilizing this functionality).

5. How do you calculate an audience count? 

In Audience Builder, click the refresh button on the right panel. Click here for a 2-min video 😊