Identifying Bounceback Hotspots with Analytics

(Guest post from Rob Heerdegen, one of our top Product Specialists in the EMEA region)

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I love reporting! I'm one of those analytical geeks who just can't help but prove how right was my assumption. Sound familiar? This will be right up your alley.

Eloqua is home to thousands of great reports. And then when you combine some of those reports with our segmentation and activity based filters, WOW, you have analytics that keep you and your marketers busy for days!

A client I work closely with in the Financial Industry here in London, UK, was eager to find different use cases for these new filters. Email deliverability is always a hot topic for them. With marketers around the world, they very much leverage Eloqua's decentralised flexibility but put in monitoring tools (proactive and reactive) to keep tabs on the health of the global marketing efforts, centrally.

Here was ONE way they could leverage these filters to be more on top of issues of email deliverability or subscription health by understanding exactly where any issues (such as a high number of bouncebacks) were taking place.

(1) Show me my Data! Building a contact view

Create, or have your administrators create, a contact view, to isolate the field(s) of interest from all of your segmentation fields. See only what you want and need!



(2) Find me all my bouncebacks (or unsubscribes) in the last X days/months by Country... OR Geo region... OR etc.

Country, Geo.Region, Email Address Domain, Job Title (normalised I hope!), etc.

Simply create a new contact filter, with a single criteria 'Bounceback' (or Subscription) and set the time range for something practical, in the past 1 month.




(3) Build me my report!

Go to Reporting and search 'Field Completeness'. Find the report 'Contact Field Completeness by Contact Filter'.

Chose your filter, pick your view, and run!

Drill down on each of the major segments (e.g. Country, Email Domain, Region, etc.) to get the breakdown. Add these reports to a dashboard, or to an email update report!




Quick tip! Want to keep your finger on any hot leads turning cold? Copy your bounceback filter just created and add a contact segmentation field 'Lead Status' = HOT (or whatever your naming convention is) to find and be alerted instantly to any changes to email status of 'HOT' leads.

Soft bounces, full inboxes, and email marketing myths debunked

If you are doing a fair bit of email marketing, you may want to read the post on Deliverability.com discussing the myth that soft bounces are caused by a full inboxes:

http://blog.deliverability.com/2009/02/think-that-soft-bounces-are-caused-by-a-full-inbox-then-think-again.html

The post talks about how full inboxes are not the problem, and often soft bounces are early warning signs of deliverability problems or blocking.

The great thing is that Eloqua now provides the depth of insight into bounceback reporting that you'll need to dig into those issues and understand your situation better.

In the reporting console a quick search for "Bounceback" shows you a selection of key reports that you can use for understanding your bouncebacks better. For any given email, batch, or email group, you can use the "Bounceback History" report to show you a detailed breakdown of your bouncebacks. Individual recipients who bounced, the error code, and the message that came with the bounce. This gives you the insights you need into what is happening (list, content, IP address, etc) and how you might want to work to resolve it.

The Contact Bounceback and Unsubscribe report shows similar data, in aggregate, against the associated contacts. This of course, allows you to work with that contact data either within Eloqua, or by exporting to a spreadsheet, and attempt to resolve any issues that you detect.



The Bounceback History Statistics report shows you, at a high level, what types of errors you are seeing from your email marketing efforts, in order to identify high level trends. If you are seeing high levels of spam notifications, or unknown users, you will need to look into your lists or practices to better understand how you can improve your deliverability rates.



Deliverability is something to continuously watch, manage, and improve. I wrote a bit about the general topic here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/02/all-you-never-cared-to-know-about.html on the Digital Body Language blog to give you a sense of the overall approaches. Now with deeper bounceback reporting within Eloqua, you can better manage and monitor your own deliverability success.