How to Turn a Boring Blog into Something Special

List building is one of the things you hear and read about everyday in blogging and content marketing. Email marketing in itself is a whole lot of work put together. Many successful bloggers have succeeded to build a large list for their businesses and that works with a lot of attraction.

Well, the size of your email list isn’t always a point. The quality and relevance are the most important factors. These go a long way to affect your bounce rate which is a corner stone in email marketing. We will be talking about this a bit below but let me quickly brush out a few reasons to start building a list for your blog if that’s not being done now.

Why you need an email list for your blog

Many bloggers blog for different reasons. However, there are things we all need to succeed. These include a growing and engaging community and targeted traffic that converts.

Once someone visits your blog for the first time, you have the chance to convert that first timer reader into a repeat visitor. One of the most effective ways to do this is to capture him into your list.

Your email list basically is an ever-green source of targeted traffic. You can always turn to it and be sure to increase your page views.

Many of my faithful customers are found on my list. This makes it an interesting source of passive  income. Your email list is a huge part of your marketplace that can be tapped into any time of the day.

Whether you are blogging to make money or just for the fun of it, if you care about keeping your readers and reaching out to them at will, start building your list right this moment.

Email Bounces can really hurt your email marketing

An email bounce occurs when your message is returned to you the sender because it cannot be delivered. Note that messages being caught into SPAM is completely a different thing. This has to do with your Inbox Placement Rate. Though Email Deliverability rate is a big game that should be treated apart, we want to deal with messages that are rejected by the destination email server.

Now, this has an impact on your sending reputation. The higher the reputation score, the more likely  ISPs (Internet Server Providers) will deliver your emails to the inboxes of recipients.

The more your email bounce rate, the lower your reputation and the more the chances of your sender ID getting blacklisted.

Recommended: 10 Email Marketing Do’s and Don’ts for Bloggers

But What causes Email Bounces

A bounce will take place for the single reason that the destination server rejects the message. What are some of the reasons for this rejection?

1 – The destination email address doesn’t exist

This is one of the most common reasons for high email bounce rates. You send a message to an address that either doesn’t exist on the server or the domain name is not found. This generally is referred to a Hard Bounce, when an email is permanently bounced back to the sender because the email address is invalid or not found.

Why does an email hard bounce happen?

• There is a spelling error in the address: contatc@domainname.com instead of contact@domainname.com
• The email submitted to your list is completely never created – junk email
• The contact address was completely deleted by the administrator for some internal reasons.
• The domain name does not exist (maybe it’s expired, error in spelling, parked, etc)

2 – The destination email address is valid but something isn’t right

A Soft, temporal Bounce will take place in this case. The destination address is valid but the server returns the message to sender for a couple of reasons:

• User has reached the email quota limit. Simply put, the inbox is full
• Email too large for recipient’s inbox
• Server was temporally down when message hit

Given that soft bounces are temporal, you may not need to worry so much about this. Their impact on your marketing may not be as harsh.

However, Hard Bounces should be taken with a serious attention. Continuous bounces are a bad signal and the email marketing systems are smart enough to figure this out.

3 tips to Reduce your email bounce rate and boost conversion

Ok now you know what email bounce rate is and why you should start building your own list. These are some quick tips to reduce your bounce rate and improve your marketing experience:

1 – Make sure only on valid addresses are submitted to your list

In my opinion, this is something that’s quite easy to handle. First, allow your readers submit their contacts by themselves through a lead capture form.

Use the double opt-in facility provided by many email marketing tools. This will make sure that the contact submitted by the reader is valid. An invalid address will never find its way through the double opt-in validation wall.

The way this works is very simple…

When the reader submits the email to your list, your tool will place it in an inactive mode. At the same time, a validity tracking link is messaged to the address. If this link is clicked within the activation period, that will simply mean the address is able to receive mails, making it valid.

Not using the double opt-in checking method is simply allowing readers to submit junk emails to your list. Looking the negative effects of bounces, this isn’t something I think you’d be comfortable with.

2 – Constantly clean up your list

While the double opt-in validation method makes sure you only allow valid addresses on your list, there are chances that some of these addresses get dropped of with time. You must therefore be able to clean up and get rid of these invalid subscribers.

There are two ways to do it:

1 – Manually filter out and delete contacts that have not opened your campaign during a specific period. Generally, I do remove contacts that have been ideal for half a year.

2 – Use a tool that will scan through your list and check for invalid addresses. I personally use Norbert’s email verification tool for my 5k list on MailerLite.

3 – Avoid using Email Extractors

A quick way to hurt your blog’s email list is to use an email scraper. First, harvesting emails in this way is illegal in many countries. You don’t have the consent of the owners to mail them.

This will bring another set of problems:

1. High unsubscription rate
2. Your campaigns will be marked as spam by many of these illegally gotten subscribers.

These two actions will trigger red flags and place you at a permanently suspicious position with many marketing platforms.

Conclusion

I hope these three tips are helpful as you strive to build a profitable email list for your blog. Drop a comment and let me know what you think about.