It’s one of those things that like the email subject line, can be a bit of a second thought in your email campaign construction.  But this can have damaging effects on your long-term email deliverability if not looked after. 

I’ll quickly explain what exactly I mean by list hygiene.  You’re sending out a newsletter to roughly 20,000 people.  Some of these people have been signed up to your list since 2005.  The only thing is, your email marketing lapsed for a little while and you haven’t sent out an email in 6 months.  But you’ve decided that the Christmas period is a great opportunity to start again. 

So your Christmas campaign starts to go out, but you haven’t set-up a proper email bouncing address.  The email bounces for no longer valid email addresses flood into your inbox and instead of removing them from your mailing list, you just delete the notification email.   

This is now leaving your list ‘unclean’ and can be very dangerous as you are running the risk of one of those addresses becoming a “spam trap”.  There is a full article on spam traps here but in short spam traps are set up by main email hosting companies such as hotmail or yahoo.  These are addresses that have been set up and not used, and haven’t had their details given to any companies so that any marketing emails sent to that address can be singled out as illegal emailing and the companies doing it can be blacklisted. 

The problem is that hotmail and yahoo also use accounts that used to be live but have since become inactive and been deleted.  This is where your ‘unclean’ list can come and bite you.  If you happen to have one of these once inactive, now spam trap email addresses in your list you could be heading for the blacklist.  This could mean that you would be blocked by one of the major email hosts such as hotmail, which for some companies is a large proportion of their list.  In turn you will see your deliverability rates severly decrease and that will lead to poor open rates and click-through rates. 

At this point your whole email list is then in trouble. You will probably have to resort to drastic matters such as sending out a re-permission email to get all legitimate names and recreating your email list from scratch.  This will of course mean losing a lot of legitimate email addresses as people will not bother to sign up again. 

So the moral of the story is…. 

Don’t be lazy when it comes to processing bounce addresses.  That list needs to be clean so that you can build up a legitimate and successful email campaign and avoid falling into a spam trap. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

I know how daunting it can be to walk into a new subject and try to get to grips with it all straight away. It always seems like the more you read up on it, the more you realise you know absolutely nothing and end up with your head spinning from so much information. And in all honesty a lot of it you don’t really need to know straight away. What you need is to get the basics without being swamped with a load of information that’ll sidetrack you from your primary objectives.

Luckily for you I’ve decided to compose a no-nonsense start up guide to help you along the way.

What kind of email campaign are you trying to construct?

This is probably the best starting point for your campaign. Will it be a sales campaign? A brand building campaign? An informative newsletter? By stating what you intend to do at the beginning will help you to keep track of how the campaign should be designed.

Subscribers

The success of your campaign depends on the quality of recipients you have. If you are a company that has bought your mailing list from a company then you can’t expect high open rates.I always recommend that if you want high open rates and high returns from your campaign, one of the best ways to do this is to have your own self-built, double opt-in recipient list. If you have the latter, then you are more likely to get a far greater ROI from your campaign. This though can’t be taken lightly, your self-built list will be a lot less effective if you are not regular with your emails immediately afterwards.People need to start being contacted as soon as they sign up. If this doesn’t happen and you leave it a month or so before contacting them, you run the risk of people forgetting about signing up to you and not opening your emails (or worse, marking you as spam).

Email Content

Make sure the content of your email is legitimate sounding. As the email filters advance in stopping spammers, so do the spammers evolve in getting round the problems. What has started to happen now is that perfectly normal words are being brought up as spam by the filters. This means you have to be inventive in the wording you use and work around these filters. As a legitimate company though, this shouldn’t be a problem as long as you stick to these golden rules.

Avoid Spammy words such as free, click here, free shipping, Bonus, Discount, Saving…. There are many more words but you get the idea. If you want a guide on what not to put in, just check your personal bulk folder and have a look!

DON’T SHOUT in your emails. Using excessive amounts of capital letters in a newsletter is bad news. This will trigger the filters straight away and people are getting wise to this and will consider your email to be trying to sell them things instead of letting them know that you have products available which may interest them.

Don’t get too excited!!!!! Don’t start throwing exclamation marks all over the shop. This is very much like the last point with shouting. Spam filters will pick this up straight away and people are once again wise to it and will turn off as soon as they see anything spammy like that.

Email Design

A well designed email campaign will do wonders for your open rates and revenue returned. A poorly designed campaign will reflect badly upon the image of a company and can cheapen the brand itself, causing a lot of harm to the image of your company. This is where you have to be really careful because no matter how good the message is inside, people will judge the design of your email as it is the first thing they will notice. This is put into better perspective if you think that there will be many other companies doing exactly the same as you; and if your email branding is inferior to theirs, you will be losing out on custom just because of peoples perception of your company.
 

Another really good tip is to create an email template using good HTML coding. By this I mean don’t use programs such as Word to create your campaign. When you copy and paste text from word it attaches a lot of hidden script behind it that gets embedded into the HTML coding. Spam filters don’t like this and will trash your email straight away as a lot of spammers use this process.If you are to construct a HTML email for your campaign, you need to make sure that you have a good balance between image and text. This also means that you can’t just create a pdf file and paste that into the email. You need there to be a higher ratio of text to image. If you’re not sure how much is acceptable, then keep trialing your email through online filters. Set yourself up a hotmail, yahoo and gmail account and send your email through to it. If it’s getting in the spam folders, you have some work to do.I’ll give you an example of what a good email campaign should look like. The example is a newsletter from St George’s Bristol (a concert venue). This newsletter is easily identifiable to the brand of St George’s, which helps the recipient to recognise the email and will be more inclined to open it. On top of that, the quality of the email is high. The general layout is simple and not overcrowded, whilst also looking fresh and modern.The content has been written with the original principle of the campaign in mind. It has informed the recipients of upcoming events and news from the venue, and in turn offered a non-aggressive sales campaign that will not have subscribers reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Learning from your results 

Unless you are the greatest email marketer the world has ever seen and got a 100% open and follow-up rate from your first campaign, you will need to see what you can do to improve.   

Poor Open Rates 

Several factors can cause there to be poor open rates.  You will need to analyse your campaign to see which might be hindering you. 

Quality of subscriber – If you are using a bought email list you shouldn’t be expecting high open rates at all.  Anything more than a 20% open rate should be considered a very good campaign for you.  If you have a self-built list, you need to ask yourself if you have been frequent and consistent in your mail outs to your recipients.  If not, the recipients may have forgotten about you or lost interest in your company. 

Email Content – You may be experiencing an open-rate issue because the content of your email is being flagged by spam filters.  This would mean that your recipients may not even see your message let alone decide whether they want to open it or not.  Make sure you’re not using words which may get caught in a spam filter.  If you’re unsure of what is spammy and what’s not, you can always get a spam check of your email through several companies on the Internet. 

Subject Line – Though normally considered an afterthought in an email campaign, this can be the deciding factor on whether the recipient opens the email or not.  The subject line is the first bit of information the recipient gets to before even judging the design and content so make sure it is good! 

Poor Click-Through Rate 

If your opens are high enough but click-throughs not so, you have to ask yourself if you are expecting high click-through rates.  If the campaign is basically a newsletter then you don’t really need high click through rates.  If your campaign is a promotions campaign you have to look at the layout and see if that’s causing you problems.  Maybe the layout isn’t allowing the campaign to be noticed easy enough.  Alternatively, the campaign might just not be appealing enough to your customers. 

Whatever your results are, you need to keep them for future reference.  Try and get a grasp as to why they might not have worked and don’t be scared to be thorough and drastic if things aren’t improving. Also don’t forget to take into consideration external factors such as seasonal trends.  All these things will help you to shape up your campaign for years to come.  

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

As we continue our ongoing challenge of figuring out what exactly triggers spam filters we came across a few new ones and some ridiculous rules that the spam filters have. 

Web safe colours

Spam filters seem to have a certain issue with colours that go out of the pre-set 216 colours that were set as ‘web safe’ all those years ago when computers only supported 256 colours.  Why this is the case still is slightly baffling, but best to be safe about it.  I found this colour chart that will help you keep in the boundaries  

http://www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/makapage/pics/net216-2.gif . 

Web safe fonts

Keeping along the same lines as the previous point made, web safe fonts also apply to keeping the filters happy.  Once again, a quick search on google brought up a chart for you to view of acceptable fonts.  I think this might rank higher in importance than the web safe colours as you also have the added worry of the inbox converting your well chosen, and nicely suited fonts, to the dreaded times new roman format and completely ruining the look of your newsletter.  And we can’t be having that….

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/img/Font-list-WinXP-Firefox-ClearType.png 

Wording

Remember, just because you haven’t used the word in a spammy context doesn’t mean that the spam filters will understand the context of it.  A prime example of this would be recently I was checking a newsletter we had created for spam problems and the system brought up that certain spam filters were marking the newsletter as pornography.  It turned out that a date in the newsletter (1918) had been caught by the spam filters as being pornographic (18). 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

It’s starting to become a much more prominent subject in the email marketing world, and for certain companies could very well improve your campaign greatly if you consider the mobile recipient.   

The problem for your company is whether you should be considering the mobile recipient or not.  At the moment the mobile market isn’t big enough to be across the whole general public so some companies may not need to consider it just yet, but for some it could greatly increase the success of the campaign. 

The companies that will most probably benefit the greatest will be the business 2 business (b2b) companies.  If you think of all the people that cannot leave their work emails alone when they’re out, you can suddenly see a hidden market.   

The problem with your email now is that a lot of the PDA’s and phones don’t receive emails in HTML format, meaning that you’re email will just come up with a load of HTML code on their phone.  That could mean disaster for your email campaign as not only have you not managed to grab their attention on their phone, but they have also marked the message as read by opening it on their phone; meaning that you will completely lose your potential customer. 

To counter this problem, insert a “view text version of the email here” link at the top of the email to allow the mobile recipient to read your message. 

Another idea that could work effectively would be with the new coining of Bacn emails.  If you haven’t heard of this click here to read more about what this is.  Basically, Bacn is messages that sites such as Myspace or Facebook would send with notifications of new messages etc. 

There has been questions raised on how this can be capitalised on as people find the emails unimportant and Mark Brownlow has stated already that it is down to the email marketers to make the mail engaging and valuable to the customer.

 I think there might already be a certain audience that find this mail engaging.  As around 75% of companies in the UK have blocked sites such as Myspace and a large amount have blocked free email sites such as Hotmail, you will see people resorting to using Mobile Internet to check their messages; opening up an opportunity for email marketing.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

You have spent ages writing a well worded, perfectly designed email campaign.  You sit back, proudly, and marvel at your work.  But then you notice you’ve forgotten to put in a subject line for the campaign.  You take a second and then write the first thing that comes into your head…”New low prices on our [insert product name here]!”…Congratulations. You have just managed to ruin your email campaign.  You might as well have just mashed your face into the keyboard and sent that out instead, it wouldn’t have made any difference as no-one will read it. 

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

So how do we get through the spam filters?  Well the first thing to say is DON’T SPAM!  Hopefully at this point the people that are left reading this are legitimate companies who are honestly trying to contact their customers.  The fact that you’re a legitimate company already has you off to a good start and if you just adopt the principles I outlined in my previous blog “The Checklist Before your Campaign”, you’ll already have the foundations in place for a successful campaign.  The basics are in place, so now you have to understand how the spam filters work.  This way you can keep to the rules set by the filters and get your email into those inboxes.  For a basis of this explanation I’m going to dissect the hotmail filter to see how it works. 

Hotmail has a multi-level spam filter in place to ensure it provides a high level of security against spammers.   The first level is the Blacklist check.  Hotmail will check against its own and 3^rd party blacklists to see if your IP and sender domain have been labelled as blacklisted. 

How do I make sure I don’t end up on the Blacklist?

Well the first thing to do is check and make sure you’re not on there already.  DNS Stuff can be checked to see if your IP has been blacklisted.  If though, you’re signed up to a mailing program like mailingmanager, you need to check for their name on the blacklist.  We personally check to see if we have been blacklisted on a daily basis.   Okay, so you’re not on the blacklist.  Now it is time to implement prevention of going onto the blacklist.  As I already mentioned in my previous blog “The Checklist Before your Campaign” you need to have an unsubscribe link in there.  Another handy thing is to set up feedback loops with the main providers.  Hotmails’ feedback loop information is here.  The feedback loop allows you to receive complaints about spam from the recipients on your list.  The best course of action is to delete these users from your mailing list, which in turn will lower your complaint rate and should eventually make you eligible for the whitelist program (we’ll come across that later).  Once again, if you’re signed up to a mailing program you won’t have to worry about this as the system should have one set up for you and will delete subscribers accordingly. 

Hotmail also runs a volume filter at the same time.  Basically, like every major email provider, if you send too many emails at one time, the filter will be triggered and you run the risk of having your email junked or rejected.  You can find a more in-depth explanation of volume filters here. 

How do I stop my email being caught in the volume filter?

The best thing you can do is limit the amount of emails you send out per hour/day.  Best thing to do is stagger your email per hour to an acceptable level.  I know this means you won’t get as instant results as you previously did but at least you’re increasing your chances of deliverability and ultimately, higher open rates.  At mailingmanager we stagger the high volume customers send-out on their behalf already and is probably common practice with mailing program providers. 

Once it has passed through these filters it will then check against the IP whitelist to see if the sender is on it whilst the sender domain is checked against Sender Score and safe-lists.  If it is accepted as a part of the whitelist for the email provider it will be allowed to go to the inbox. 

How do I get on the whitelist?

To get on the whitelist of an email provider you must adhere to the rules that it lays down to the sender.  Hotmails whitelist rules are here.  Basically, you are judged on sender history, email reputation and complaint levels.  As long as you have followed my previous instructions you should be in a position to apply to whitelists. If you are not on a whitelist or safelist another filter will then check against verifying filters that assess the validity of the email.  This is becoming an ever more determining factor in whether your email will get delivered into the inbox. 

How do I verify my IP and Sender Domain?

As a legitimate company this isn’t a problem.  Just make sure your email has SPF, Domain Key and Sender ID records in your email.  These records allow the email providers to verify that you are who you say you are and protect you from MTA’s who could send out emails using your domain and damaging your email reputation.  So not only does it help your deliverability but can also protect your companies reputation.  Once again, if you’re already a mailingmanager customer, you will already have these in place as part of our service (and to keep our reputation in check!). 

Then comes the final part of the check.  The spam filters will check your message for common spammy words and phrases, poor html coding, over-use of images (see my blog “Design vs The Spam Filters” for more details).  How much this filter matters is utterly dependant on previous filters and how your email reputation has been rated. 

So to Quickly summarise….

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your bounce handling.

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your feedback loop.

Manage a consistent email campaign, that if has a large list, is staggered in its sending.

Apply to SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys for email verification.

Providing all the above are upheld, apply for email providers whitelist/safelist. And finally…. 

Send me a thank you email and money for helping you. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk  

The Checklist for a Good Email Campaign  I was reading a blog on the EEC by Jeanniey Mullen earlier which brought up an interesting checklist for a successful campaign.  This, it has to be said is the foundations of a good campaign, and a lot of work will still have to be done, but as long as you have these basics then you are putting yourself in a good position for a successful campaign. 

“1. An opt-in list. Wherever you have your list stored, make sure you have access to the original source of permission.

2. The “from” name you want to use.

3. The “reply to” email address that someone will check (or, if you are a company that cannot check these messages for security reasons—ex. pharmacy companies—a strong disclaimer that replies will not be read).

4. A really good subject line—not something catchy, but something that creates trust and interest in opening the email.

5. Links that work inside the content even if images are blocked. Yes, yes, you need to worry about the content, the layout and the coding, but as an absolute must-have, make sure the links work.

6. An opt-out link with a mailing address.

7. A strong reporting system on the backend to track bounces, opens and clicks.” 

I think this is well worth looking back to whenever you’re about to put out your new campaign. www.mailingmanager.co.uk

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Christmas is coming…. 

tel: 01604 790007 email: info@mailingmanager.co.ukweb: www.mailingmanager.co.uk 

I just realised I hadn’t actually introduced this blog.  Basically, I’m writing primarily for the users of our systems, to try and help them improve their campaigns.  Though that doesn’t mean anyone else can’t help themselves! 

Basically, I’m going to trawl through the blogs and articles each day and write up on the topics that are being raised.  I’ll link through to each article i read so if you want to read more you can see the full story.  I understand that a lot of you aren’t going to have the time (or patience) to read through all these things so I’ll just highlight the points made and then show you how you can integrate the findings into your own campaigns.

Also, if you want me to look into a certain subject regarding email marketing, just contact me at alex@ihm.co.uk and i’ll look into writing something about it.