What went wrong?

Controllable factors edition.

At the end of the day, there are many factors that we cannot predict or control when sending emails to a high volume of recipients – some examples of this includes if a server blocks you or if you land into an inbox or spam-box.

BUT… you can use “context clues” to help identify potential causes and use controllable factors to attempt to resolve.

Once you have sent your email, there are usually 3 statistics we look into to gauge our success: deliverability rate, open rate, click rate.

And the only true way to test how something will perform is to send it.

A low deliverability rate generally means that we have hit a server block & this is a less controllable factor.

This is a good time to reach out to your Campaign Nucleus team to look into ways of resolving and mitigating any blocks.

A low open rate can mean that are delivering to the server but landing more so in spam and promotional inboxes instead of our primary inboxes & this is a less controllable factor.

BUTTTT it can also mean…

Your recipients are not engaged with your subject line & this is a controllable factor.

This is a good time to make sure we are not using any offensive or triggering terms & to try testing a few different subject lines.

If you see some improvement in your open rate with the new subject lines, you can assume that your audience and the servers preferred this subject line to the other.

If our deliverability and open rate look good, we can go a step further & look into our click rate (which generally leads to ultimate conversions) to get a better idea of how our email content is performing. If we are seeing a high open rate followed by low click rates, it is generally indicative of our recipients not being engaged with the content after clicking into the email.

This is a great opportunity to test different copy & marketing techniques in your emails. If our click rate increases when we use other copy, we can assume that our recipients respond better to that type of content & should use it more moving forward to drive better conversions.

Of course, every once in a while, the stars align and we are presented with high deliverability rates, high open rates, and high click rates - & this means you have a very good email on your hands.

While the servers will never truly confirm or deny reasons for blocking your messages and placing them in spam & your recipients will likely not give you advice on marketing to them better, we can use these three statistics to help to send the best and most effective emails to our recipient list.

For more information regarding how to best understand the email statistics our platform offers, be sure to contact our team!

Running a campaign or organization with a lean team and limited time? You’re not alone—and you’re exactly who Campaign Nucleus was built for. Whether you're a local nonprofit, a first-time candidate, or an advocacy group with a tight budget, you don’t need a large staff or an IT department to run a professional, data-driven operation. Here at Nucleus we are dedicated to bringing Presidential level technology to all campaigns and organizations.

An Interface That Just Makes Sense

No steep learning curves here. Campaign Nucleus was designed with customer usability in mind. From setting up your first email to launching a full fundraising campaign, the interface is intuitive and user-friendly.

And if you ever get stuck, you’re covered with:

· Step-by-step video tutorials and a comprehensive knowledge base

· Live onboarding and ongoing training including webinar series

All Your Tools. One Login. Zero Headaches.

Juggling five different platforms? That’s a thing of the past. With Campaign Nucleus, everything you need lives in one place:

· Email and Texting outreach

· Event management and ticketing

· Volunteer coordination

· Fundraising and donor tracking

Fewer tools mean fewer things to break, fewer logins to remember, and less budget going to disconnected platforms.

Smart Automations Save You Time

Time is your most precious resource. Campaign Nucleus helps you protect it with built-in automations:

· Welcome new supporters automatically

· Trigger follow-up emails based on actions taken

· Create custom automations for all departments

You set the rules once—then let the platform do the heavy lifting while you focus on connecting with your community.

Built for Growth

Just because you’re small now doesn’t mean you plan to stay that way. Campaign Nucleus grows with you, offering the power and scalability used by national campaigns—without the bloat or cost.

Whether you're reaching 500 people or 500,000, you can feel confident that the platform can handle it.

Final Thought

Tech shouldn’t just be for big players. At Campaign Nucleus, we believe the tools to change minds and move people should be accessible, affordable, and easy to use.

If you’re a small team with a big mission, we’ve got your back.

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

“I don't want no scrub, a scrub is an email that can't get no love from me.”

Here at Campaign Nucleus, we want to make it as easy as possible for our users to produce the most successful email content possible. With that our team has done some research and put together some information we’ve found helpful in creating our own emails.

Let’s start simple – what are the things that every recipient is going to notice about your email?

1. Your sender
2. Your subject line
3. Your content

Now let’s talk about how we can utilize all 3 of these factors to create the MOST TOP NOTCH EMAIL possible!!

Sender:

When you see an email in your inbox, what is the first thing you see? Likely, the sender’s name. Are you more likely to open an email that appears to be sent from a specific person or one that declares a corporation. Likely, a specific name.

Well, your audience feels the same. This means you can improve your user engagement simply by using a more personalized sender, such as a team member, to make your communications seem more “human”and less “AI generated.”

For example, an email being sent from Julia from Nucleus may perform a bit better than one being sent from the Biden Administration (although that may have more than one reason for performing poorly…).\

With that, consistency is also always key – it’s a good habit to keep one sender and domain affiliated with each type of content being sent.

Subject Line:

Following the sender, you likely immediately notice the subject line affiliated with the email.

When it comes to subject line, there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• Topic – always make sure your subject line sticks to the point. No one wants to open an email that has nothing to do with the subject line… it appears deceiving

• Length – your subject line length can actually drive your engagement. Short subject lines (below 50 characters) & longer subject lines (above 70 characters) actually have been found to receive more engagement than average-length subject lines.
  

Content:

The last thing the recipient will see but generally the most important portion of the email for them to see.

There are lots of considerations to be made when designing our content & every audience type responds differently to different copy types.

We encourage individuality in your sends but here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Be concise – the average human has a reading attention span that ranges from 10-15 seconds… that isn’t very long.

• Consider your call to action – it’s good practice to include multiple links within the email & our system makes it easy to determine where your audience is engaging the most within your email.
  

• Always check variables – we want to make sure we do not address our recipients as “Hello %recipient.first%.”

• Make your email readable – this includes but is not limited to:
  • Having a nice layout – easy to read & pictures should never outweigh text
  • Using color and branding wisely
  • Ensuring pictures are high enough quality that they engage your audience (although too much data can slow your email load time & that isn’t great either)

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

OR

Fail or Pass

By Julia, Deliverability Expert

A saga of bounces and deferrals

As many of you are aware, we track the amount of fails each email encounters while it is attempting to send to your list of recipients. And, as some of you can attest, this can lead to some rather overwhelming statistics.

Before we get ourselves too worked up over a few failed email sends, let’s get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.

Our system, like many others of a similar nature, recognizes 2 types of failures:

Let’s think of soft fails as ‘deferrals’ – an email can defer multiple times & still ultimately go through. These can signify an impending block or simply be how that server delivers emails with a high volume of recipients.

Some servers, such as Verizon & Comcast, slowly deliver their messages so it can actually be common for them to have thousands of soft fails without having any hard fails. In some cases, a few messages may “time out.” This is still not necessarily a hard block.

Think of it as a waiting room with hundreds of people – they are either going to wait their turn (send) or they are going to get impatient and leave (time out).

Let’s think of hard fails as ‘bounces’ – an email can only bounce once. It either signifies a bad/invalid email, a server block, or the final soft fail.

It is important to look into these errors especially. Invalid emails should ALWAYS be removed from a recipient list; Server blocks always need appropriate attention and, when necessary, mitigation; and too many soft fails that permanently bounce means that we may be sending at too high of a volume.

Oftentimes, soft fails can be used proactively while hard fails generally require us to work reactively & learning how to best respond to both is key to successful email marketing. It is crucial to have an understanding of these types of errors because the quicker we respond to factors affecting our deliverability, the less damage they are able to cause.