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
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.