Hello all,
I have a bunch of questions related to emails, and am totally "punching above my weight" so please bear with me through this likely long post.
1. In reviewing responses to emails, I have noticed that a LOT of patrons who are being included in the email extraction do not have eaddresses on file. As you might assume, our response rate is lower because these folks cannot open the email if they didn't get it. Is there a way that we should be creating extractions for emarketing that ONLY include patrons with eaddresses?
2. We've recently discovered a number of patron email addresses were inactivated due to a series of soft bounces. The affected emails were all included in a flurry of Giving Tuesday related extractions. Our code related to "soft bounces" is set to inactivate after 5 and has been in place for a decade, but has apparently just now become an issue.
3. We are hearing from a handful of our patrons that eblasts are arriving to them as blank emails. There is a subject line, but the body of the email is blank. Any guidance as to how to help these patrons with a setting that they likely have changed on their end?
Is there any chance that all of these things are related some how (with a new Tess/TNEW/Wordfly setting maybe?) or have we just uncovered a bunch of unrelated things at the same time?
Thanks for any guidance you might be able to provide...
Lesley
Hi Lesley,With regards to the first question, we have a suppression in all our Email Marketing Extractions, which might help. As standard we have a suppression of Primary EAddress Does Not Have Yes - which suppresses anyone who doesn't have a primary email and means we don't pull any people through who don't have an email address. We tend to only have one email address on file per account, which is marked as Primary (and don't use Households)This may work for you, but if you're using households or also emailing people's non-primary emails using Contact Point Purposes, then this won't be the solution.
Caryl
For 1, I have always ended up having a suppression segment in my extractions that removes people without email addresses (or phone numbers, if I'm pulling telemarketing leads). Mine is basically a dynamic list looking at a dynamic list, but I'm sure there's a more efficient way to do that.
For 3, I would take a look at the emails for those people and see if there's any similarities - it might help you troubleshoot. At a former org, we had a lot of trouble with Gmail clipping our emails which resulted in emails that just cut off weirdly in the middle. In that instance, the problem was really on resolvable by us re-designing our emails to be smaller.
Hi Caryl, and happy new year!
Thanks for the suggestion. That does bring up another "best practice" conversation that we're having about whether emails should live on the individual or HH records. My philanthropy friends want it to be on the household, so they can invite all members of the HH (by name) to events. I argue that an email address belongs to a person, not the HH...
For 1), we have a custom list criteria element for that. It is called simply "Has Email" and links to a local view (LVS_HAS_EMAIL). It is a View with two very simple columns, the customer_no and an email value of either "Yes" or "No". Accounts with no e-mail address or ONLY inactive e-mail addresses get "No", accounts with one or more active e-mail addresses get "Yes". And that is really all there is to it, but it works quite well.
For the first issue, the standard feature to handle this is in the Communication Management section of the extraction header. There you'll see a dropdown called "Contact Point Category" with options for Email Address, Phone, and Postal Address. This essentially establishes what communication method you are using for this extraction overall. To the right is a checkbox called "Only select constituents if they have this contact point category." Selecting Email Address in the dropdown and checking the box will remove any constituents who don't have emails.
This acts like a virtual suppression segment, and suppresses constituents before any segments you've configured. The effect is visible in the Segment Contents tool, where the segment of these constituents is labeled "(Contact Point Category) (suppression)."
This is also visible in the Suppression Report, where "(Contact Point Category)" identifies any constituent counts that were suppressed from segments based on this setting.
Michael Flaherty-Wilcox Does that still work if you are not using contact point purposes?
Yes it does. "Contact Point Category" simply refers to the method of communication - Phone, Email Address, or Postal Address. If you are using Contact Point Purposes, you can the next dropdown for that. But if you aren't, you simply leave it blank.
You learn something new every day!
I can echo the earlier responses and perhaps add a bit else:
1. We use the standard feature that Michael Flaherty-Wilcox mentions, plus have a suppression segment that queries whether the email address is like %@%. I don't remember precisely what we have built, but our DBA added it for me back in the day when I discovered I was pulling a lot of things that weren't usable addresses and I didn't want them showing up in any counts.
1B--However.... the way you wrote this question also flags something else for me. I'm purely conjecturing here so apologies if misleading at all, but you may want to also double check how you're doing statistics for the response reports. Because WordFly immediately provides reports on response rates and it can be a bit of a climb to get the same using Extractions, we use WF as the statistics source for open and click response rates. WordFly ought to be not importing email-less records, so they wouldn't be skewing your response rates.
2--I suspect this mostly has to do with your own Tessitura code, but I think the WordFly support team should be able to give you good guidance about best practices and probably even what part of Tessitura to go poke at, if you need that detail of expertise.
3--I'm not familiar with this, but a few things pop into my mind--confirm the Text version is in place; double check what setting is on the constituent account about receiving HTML (I don't believe this should have ANY relevance to WordFly, but it does matter for things like confirmations, so might as well look at a few accounts to see if it suggests anything). In general though, ask the WordFly folks. And +1 to the earlier suggestion about looking to see if it's any particular ESP or so on.
Also--I hugely support Caryl's strategy of not using households. IMHO, it's a big oversight that email contact data logged at a Household level trickles down to repeat on the individuals within. In terms of email marketing, this is effectively creating duplicates and triplicates. I know there are technical ways to improve things, but right now, I've got inconsistent Permission statuses because WordFly sends an Unsubscribe to Tessitura and updates one record, but then there are several others. It also often messes with the Salutation, if you're doing data merging. Although I'm sure there are also some great counterpoints, my belief is that email addresses should live on Individuals only but the query can be of the Household and then swap in all the members.
Hi! Did you ever resolve your blank email issues? We're having them, too, and Wordfly has not been super helpful. Are the patrons involved using a specific email provider? Today, we are looking at two Roadrunner accounts and one Hotmail account.
Hi Ann. Nope, we are still having issues. Ours seem to be with charter.net (aka Spectrum) emails.
Wordfly says it's not their issue - and I know you'll be surprised to hear this - Charter says it's not them.