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
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.
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.