By Owen Gaudion | Apr 29, 2015 2 min read

What do typos cost you?

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Ahead of the Database and Email Marketing clinic that Website Success is holding tomorrow, today's blog is about one aspect of email marketing that affects us all; emails not getting through to the intended recipients.

If you are spending valuable time and effort in crafting your email campaign, you need to do all you can to make sure it gets read.

In previous blogs we have discussed the importance of subject lines that are both engaging and spam filter-friendly, the first hurdle in getting your email opened.

We have talked about email body content, such as including offers that people cannot get elsewhere, and making content short, to the point and interesting.

And there has been advice regarding the use of a preference centre so that you are giving your audience what it wants to receive and at the frequency of the individual's choice.

But there is one more issue that is critical... having clean email addresses!

This is perhaps the most basic of all the points on your email campaign checklist, but often overlooked. How often do you clean your data? Is part of your email marketing strategy to look at hard bounces to see if an incorrectly spelt email address is the source of the bounce? If not it should be, and it certainly is here, at Website Success.

For the novices among you, here is a quick run down of bounce types:

A soft bounce is a temporary delivery failure - the mailbox is full, the server is down, or the message is too large. This type of error can be ignored as future emails to that recipient may get through.

A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure - the recipient's email address is invalid or no longer in use. These bounces need investigation. It may be a "genuine" bounce whereby the domain name (the bit after the @) no longer exists, or no longer has registered mail servers, but it can also be down to a typo, a simple spelling mistake. Can you afford to ignore the possibility of your email not getting through because the email address is spelt incorrectly?

Data acquisition is harder to come by these days, and with discussion of new legislation on the horizon, this isn't going to improve for marketeers. So looking after the data you do have - essentially email addresses for email marketing - is not only cost-effective but also vital.

For more tips on how to make your email marketing successful, book onto one of our seminars or get in touch to see how we can help your business. Call us on 01243 888555. We have a friendly team of experts at Website Success on hand to assist with your digital marketing and website needs.