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.

Separating your Marketing Database into Active/Inactive

One of the most important goals of Lead Nurturing is to maintain permission to stay in front of your audience with your communications. Data from Marketing Sherpa on content relevance and unsubscribes has shown that many prospects will not necessarily click on an unsubscribe link when they lose interest in your messaging. However, far worse, they may become emotionally unsubscribed, reflexively ignoring and deleting your messages as they arrive.

If you continue a rapid pace of marketing to this emotionally unsubscribed segment, they may at some point click the “this is spam” button, causing you a significant deliverability headache, even if they had originally subscribed legitimately.

The first step in avoiding this situation is to identify the inactive members of your database.

To do this within Eloqua is very easy. Using an Inactivity filter, you can look for contacts who are showing less than a certain amount of activity. A recommended technique is to build a group called “Inactive Contacts”. By looking for contacts who have had no clickthroughs, no web visits, no form submits, and less than a few email opens in the past few months (preview panes may still render an open for someone reflexively deleting your email in a few email clients), you can define a group of inactive contacts.

It’s recommended to regenerate this group every month or quarter in order to ensure that you capture any newly inactive contacts, or allow any contacts showing a resurgence of interest to leave the group.

With this group defined, you can then suppress them against regular email distributions, in order to ensure that they are not communicated to more than they would appreciate. Depending on their level of disengagement, you can target them with special re-engagement offers, or campaigns using other media types such as direct mail or a calling campaign.

The critical point, however, is to identify and monitor the inactive segment of your database. By understanding its size and any trends in its growth, you can begin to understand how your messaging is resonating with your audience, and adjust accordingly.