Case Study: Mailshake Bounce Rate Reduction from 10% to 2% [in 3 Weeks]

The Background

Even a highly successful campaign can go stale if you use it for too long. Reason: Because using the same sequence for too long can make the mail servers realize that you are overdoing it.

This is what happened to us when we noticed

1. We started getting this error ⤵️
2. We also noticed that one of our long-running SEO outreach campaigns’ bounce rate had shot up to 10%.

This initially sounded strange…

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Bounce Rate Reduction from 10% to 2% With 7 Changes

Studying what causes the error code (that you saw above) along with speaking to Mailshake Helpdesk gave us tons to work on.

These are the changes we made:

1. We added more personalization to our pitch sequence
   
   1. First Name of the Recipient Mentioned [already used]
   2. Company Name Mentioned [New personalization]
   3. (We are still figuring out what more personalization can we add)
      
2. We changed the number of emails in the sequence from 4 to 3.
   1. 4 is too much. Especially if you are not analyzing what actions the recipient took after receiving the initial emails.
   2. We are using a traditional (more unsophisticated) email sequence whereby the second, and third emails are sent irrespective of what actions the recipient does or doesn’t take. (This may change in future; more on that in a later section).
      
3. We added more catchy subject lines

Subject-line along with your name and your headshot is the first 3 things the recipients see when they receive your email.

Yes, you read that right.

Keeping this in mind we decide to review, update, and improve our subject lines.

Resources Used

1. CoSchedule’s Email Headline Analyser
   • [ ] Try the tool
     
   • [ ] Try to get a score of 60 or 70+
     
   • [ ] Follow the guidelines provided by the tool above
     
     • [ ] For instance, if you’ve used the word FREE it will ask you to avoid using this word as it’s typically used by commercial product pushers in a spammy way.
       
   • [ ] Study the Power Words Guide by Co-Schedule
     
2. Add Emoticons
   Use emoticons like 🤩, ✅, 🤔, 😂,👏🏻 and others in your emails to make your email more prominent.
   
   ALERT: Some email providers remove emoticons. Hence, use them only in the very start or end of email subjectline.
   
3. We changed the content of each email by about 50% by
   • changing some phrases
   • removing some repetition
   • shortening some items
   • moving some items from the email body to the signature
   • Adding (more) Wit to Our Emails
     • If doing outreach for legal niche, find what jokes people use for lawyers. ALERT: Handle with care though. The jokes should normally poke fun at you; and not the recipients. A lawyer would probably not appreciate you poking fun at their profession.
     • Charm Offensive’s Email Templates (very funny)
       
4. We drastically reduced the links that we had added in each email. Previously we had added as many as 5 links (Twitter, LinkedIn, a case study link, a podcast link, and so on).

This can cause the mail servers to suspect you are spamming even when that’s not what you are doing.

Now we stuck to adding just 2 or fewer.

5. We shortened, simplified, and updated the signature massively so that it’s easier to read.

6. We started getting leads in a new industry niche (legal).

7. We were previously using Hunter’s email verification only. Now we started to use Mailshake’s Viola Norbert email verification as well.

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Results

New Campaign

We set up a new campaign (the pitch was pretty much the same). The only 2 changes

• [ ] This campaign was targeting the legal niche only.
• [ ] All new leads which were not part of the older campaign already were added to this new campaign.

💡 This campaign has a bounce rate of 2% within a few weeks and we believe it will start to go down even more as we continue.

Old Campaign

This was a huge list.

So in a sense, the damage had already been done.

Hence, our expectation was that any potential bounce rate reduction would take a very long time.

But we were in for a nice surprise. ⤵️

💡 Within 2 weeks, the bounce rate went from 10% to 5% in only 2 weeks.

Ideas for the Near Future

IDEA # 1: Better Lead Prospecting

Our team often complains about these 3 issues:

• finding leads takes a lot of time
• a large list of raw leads sourced from Ahrefs results in only a handful of RFO (ready for outreach) leads
• quality Hot leads (sites that do not ask for money, are legit/credible, and have high-quality content, and high DR, decent traffic, no massive traffic drop) are extremely rare

And their issues might be fully valid.

On top of that, we also suspect that doing more research on how to find better leads (and faster) so as to continue to

• Reduce Our Bounce Rate
• Increase Our Response Rate ➡️ Hot Leads ➡️ Quality Backlinks

IDEA # 2: Personalization Using Adding Funny and Ego-Boosting Nicknames

💡 Briefly speaking using adjectives for both the person and their profession is a good way to be funny and/or boost the ego of the recipient.

For instance:

• Appealing to Fabulous Finlay’s Editorial Genius
  • Fabulous = Adjective for the Person
  • Genius = Adjective for the person’s profession (and the person too)
• Attention: For the Eyes of Walter – The Marketing Wizard only </aside>

[The rest of this section needs some review/update by Irfan; may be done later/ or we’ll move it to a separate doc all together]

• Mailing Content Editors?
  • Here is a email subject-line we came up with
    • Appealing to Fabulous Finlay’s Editorial Genius
    • The formula used to come up with it is
    • Appealing to the [Adjective-Personal] [First Name]’s [Profession][Adjective-Professional/General]
  • Finding Adjective-Personal
    • Find 3 adjectives that start with the word J with the Random Word Generator tool.
      • Jealous ❌ bad/negative
      • Jazzy ❌ irrelevant (unless we are working on a list of jazz magazine editors)
      • Judicious ✅ Quite relevant as most editors MUST be very judicious and being called Judicious is something they would be proud of
  • Finding Adjective-Professional/General
    • use the same above tool and come up with a useful adjective
    • we went with Editorial Genius but there are tons of other opportunities
  • To find an adjective which is something that Editors are proud of we want to use an adjective that
  • Since Judicious is highly relevant for editors and most editors would love to be called that we will add a custom tag column for adjective and add Judicious in them all. This will be used for all editors.
  • Thus the email subject-line will become
  <aside> 💡 Appealing to Judicious Jenna’s Editorial Genius </aside>
• Mailing Walter who works in the marketing department? using the above formula we can come up with something like: <aside> 💡 Attention: For the Eyes of Walter – The Marketing Wizard only </aside>

💡 Only Marketing Maestros Receive This Email Congrats Walter You Marketing Wizard

The second line above will appear in the email preview – this is the line that appears with the email

IDEA # 3: Clicks-Based Email Campaigns

As we already mentioned, so far our email sequence continues to be sent without taking into account what actions (e.g. if the recipient clicked on our website link from the signature) are or aren’t taken by the recipient.

In future we might select the action-based sequencing.

1. So for instance, email # 2 of the sequence will only be sent to recipients who opened email # 1
2. And email # 3 will only be sent to recipients who clicked a link within the email

IDEA # 4: Implementing Some Technical Checks

[These were suggested by Hamna and Irfan is to do them. Hamna kindly add its specifics here along with relevant links etc]

Idea # 5: Personalized Image Using Automated AI

Imaging your target lead are all sent the same image. But on that image their first name, or their company name is added automatically.

This is now possible. More on this here in the Hyperise guide.

Idea # 6: Personalised Video Using Automated AI

If you send a personalized video to someone in email via, say Loom, their changes of responding to you becomes massive.

For instance, someone sent me a video where they had opened my LinkedIn profile and they were going thorough it while talking to me.

There are now many tools available online.

One such tool is Videoform.

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