Segments & the importance of ALWAYS being selective

Nucleus has been uniquely designed to help you gather data that will specifically help you to best manage your campaign & affiliated goals. By utilizing our tools and features properly, you will be able to reach your most valuable supporters in the most efficient manner.

With that in mind, I would like to take some time to review the usefulness in one of CN’s oldest & most useful features: Segments.

Our system compiles the data you have provided upon initial setup of your account & any additional information we have been able to collect, through recipient engagement patterns & landing page responses. From here, you have the decision as to whether or not you’d like to apply this information. This is where segments come into play…

Segments allow us to reach our desired demographic, location, and biggest supporters with ease.

Let’s discuss how…

If you are planning on hosting an event in a specific region, does it make sense to send invitations to residents who live hours away? Not really.

If you are holding a public speech for a candidate in New Jersey, would you ask residents of California to attend? Definitely not.

Our segment feature allows you to create an audience of one (or more) select state(s) & it even allows you to limit your audience range to a specific zip code or radius. See below for some examples:

Through the years, we’ve made plenty of improvements and updates to our batching system & with that, I think it’s time for a little review session…

First, we’ll review how to set-up a batch. Then, we are going to review our Nucleus-recommended scaling technique. And lastly, we’ll put your skills to work and run through some examples. Let’s begin!

Set-Up

At the top, we have our selections concerning ‘batch size.’ While I do occasionally see a reason to utilize the ‘percentage’ or ‘remainder’ function (hence its existence), I find that the ‘fixed’ batch size is easiest to manage when warming a new domain, so I recommend taking that route. Below your selection, you can identify the exact volume of recipients you’d like to send to.

Your ’schedule’ is used to determine how each individual batch will be initiated. I generally base this decision off personal comfort and need.

Manual entails the individual sending of each campaign by a user following the campaign launch.

Start means the batches will begin with the start of the campaign – this is likely the easiest option for users.

Delayed would allow you to set times for the batches to be released following the launch of the campaign.

In our ‘reoccurring’ section, you can implement a reoccurrence of batches. I generally do not recommend using the ‘repeat’ selection while warming a new domain/IP as this can affect our reputation, but when it is utilized, I recommend not exceeding more than one send in a 24-hour period.

In order for the batch to send, you will have to set your ‘Status’ to ‘ready’ as it is automatically placed in ‘draft.’

Finally, you can select the email servers that you’d like to include or exclude from your batch. I find that it is easiest to have an individual batch for every server; this allows you to monitor deliverability in the most efficient manner possible.

For more information, contact our team for training or insight and visit your Nucleus Resource Library!

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By Julia, Deliverability Expert

If you’ve encountered the same block multiple times, it’s possible you’ve also encountered the reality that not every block will be mitigated…no matter how nicely we ask the servers & affiliated blocklists to do so.

Trust me – if it were up to us at Campaign Nucleus to unblock you, you’d be unblocked, like, yesterday. But, unfortunately, we do not have that power so we are at the mercy of the servers when it comes to avoiding and resolving blocks.

The majority of blocklists understand that “accidents” happen & are usually reasonable and hasty when resolving blocks… the first time. With that, they start to become a bit annoyed and less responsive when we continue getting blocked and submitting request after request for resolution.

The truth of the matter is: the servers blocked you for a reason & they will continue to do so until you resolve the issue that is triggering the block.

If you are continually hitting the same block, it’s possible you may need to adjust some of your practices to ultimately fix the issue.

The servers are dominantly looking at 2 things when deciding whether to block a domain and/or IP.

1. Your audience

Ask yourself:

• Did my recipient list opt-in to receive these emails? Disinterested recipients often lead to spikes in server complaints which hurt domain/IP reputation significantly.
• How did I gather these emails? Sometimes people of opposing values intentionally submit spam trap emails to opponent newsletters to cause issues with your messages delivering. The same can be true of expired emails as they can be reverted to spam traps – be careful of emails that were gathered many years before.
• Am I engaging my audience with my copy so that they are positively responding to my emails? Recipients not engaging with emails can lead to poor reputations, as well.

1. Your content

Ask yourself:

• Am I pushing too hard on controversial topics? While we are free to speak our values, sometime being super aggressive in our content can lead to an increase in user complaints.
• Is my picture to content ratio appropriate? Too many pictures without enough text can appear “spammy” to servers.
• Do I sound like a salesperson? Using phrases that over-promise or guarantee any level of success sometimes register as “spammy” due to the likely deceitful nature of the message.

At Nucleus, we do our best to avoid the grasp of censorship & will always support your content to the fullest. With that in mind, some things are out of our control and we hope the above information will help you to navigate the difficulties that we must maneuver to find the most success in sending our emails.

For more information, visit your Nucleus Resource Library

A tale of how hard work (eventually) pays off

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

When we are in a court of law, we are hopefully paying regards to the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.”

Well… when it comes to servers responding to your sending domains and IPs, it is quite the opposite. You must prove your domain to be worthy of delivering to your recipients without an existing precedent… sometimes before you can effectively deliver at all.

Now that the campaigning cycle is coming to another end, this is a great opportunity to work toward preparing your domains and IPs for the most success when the cycle begins picking up again. I think the most important take-away here is: PREPARE your sending domain BEFORE YOU NEED to send with it.

I want to take a few minutes to review how pre-emptively preparing your sending domains can be beneficial to you in months to come.

It takes TIME to scale your domain up to your full sending volume. By getting an early start you are able to avoid rushing the warming process, which could cause you to have blocks and trouble with deliverability.

Even after you’ve scaled to full sending volume, it takes TIME for a server to trust you. Servers are constantly watching how their recipients are engaging with your emails & designated a reputation to your domain/IP based off that response. The only way to continuously improve your reputation, especially on Google and similar servers, is for your audience to be consistently positively engaging with your emails. This means the same users repeatedly engaging with your emails, so sending to only new recipients constantly is actually very poor practice.

And it takes TIME for your audience to recognize and engage with your content. This is a great opportunity to focus less on ads and asks, and more on branding and informational content. It can be extremely valuable to produce very non-controversial content that includes little to no ‘call to actions.’ This type of content generally performs much better in the eyes of the server so it can help you to build your reputation up a bit so you have a buffer when you do want to send more hard-hitting content.

Many of the questions I regularly receive are concerning how quickly we can fully scale a domain & the truth is… there are so many things at play when you are preparing a new domain/IP for sending that the best thing you can do is get a head start. There are very few issues I’ve seen not be able to solved with a little time and persistence.

For more information be sure to contact our team for training or insight and visit your Nucleus Resource Library!

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