With a large influx of new email marketers this year, we are bound to see a lot of people jumping into this without truly knowing what’s required.  The check list seems to consist of insuring that they have a working unsubscribe link in their email.

Obviously if you are new to this, take a look at these basic starting up posts:

5 Tips to making your campaign start successfully

Email Design Essentials

Now back to the question in hand, Spam…

I think when people that have just come into email marketing  they tend to think of Spam as just a way of stopping their email getting into the recipients inbox.

What that is referring to is the rules set out by the Spam filters and is only half of the Spam spectrum.  In this post I’m going to attempt to cover every aspect of spam (or more realistically, all that I can think of).   

Why have I received a Spam complaint?

A question that you’ll most likely come across during your email marketing life.  Usually the answer boils down to one of these:

The recipient doesn’t remember asking for your mail or when they signed up.

The usual cause of this is using old email address lists or your mails have been too infrequent. 

This is why most email marketing experts will say keep your mails regular.  Now we don’t mean it has to be religiously regular.  This can cause you to send out a pointless email which is just as damaging as not sending out emails for a prolonged period; I will though, come to that in a minute.

The other reason for this is could be that you’re using a purchased list.  In which case, the answer is very simple as to why they don’t remember signing up for your mails.

A good way to prevent this is to remind them of the address they used to sign up with and the date you subscribed.  Personalisation of the email as well can restore faith that they did once sign up for this email.  This can at least prevent them from thinking it is spam and if they no longer want the email, they can go for the unsubscribe link instead of the report spam button.

Your emails aren’t interesting

Something I have already brushed upon, uninteresting emails can cause Spam complaints.  Yes you’re email is legitimate and they did sign up but recipients don’t have to abide by the laws and can still report it as spam if they feel it is not interesting as it can sometimes be an easier process.

The solution for this are pretty straight forward: be interesting.  Though we will always say be regular, don’t be regular for the sake of it.  Have some interesting content or offer in there to keep it engaging.  That way, not only will that campaign be interesting and produce some returns but it will encourage future opens; a win-win situation.

The Unsubscribe process is hard/annoying

I’ve found that some companies are just annoying with their unsubscribe process.  There are still quite a few companies that feel offended by unsubscribes and feel that it is a sign of a poor campaign etc. so actually hide the unsubscribe away.  This just isn’t the case – an unsubscribe can be just that the recipient is no longer in need of what you offer.  Unsubscribes can also act as valuable research into what makes appeals to your subscribers.  Hiding away that link will do nothing but annoy your subscriber and do much more damage than just letting them go.

Another annoying unsubscribe trick is when companies sell on your address to affiliates.  Let’s say you enter a competition and the company that collects your address decides to send emails to you from affiliates.  You don’t want these emails and attempt to unsubscribe.  The problem is, you’re only unsubscribing from that one off campaign from that affiliate and so still receive a barrage of pointless emails – By the third email, niceties are over – can’t. click. report. spam. button. quick. enough.

It’s simple, don’t make it hard to unsubscribe.  Unsubscribes don’t have to be the end anyway.  Read my post on positive unsubscribe processes and turn that unsubscribe into an opportunity.

Also, if you ask for you subscribers to unsubscribe by replying by email; make sure you honour it.

You’re Sending too Frequently

The point has become even more relevant this year as people turn towards email marketing as the most cost-effective direct marketing method.  Someone needs to meet the sales quota and instantly thinks about “blasting” another email to hit their targets.  Soon the emails have such poor content and become uninteresting that the user either switches off forever or gets annoyed and hits spam (especially if you take your time with previous unsubscribe requests).

The solution to this is to always try and keep to a set frequency and only rarely increase your send if you really have something important to say or offer.

Why has it gone into the Junk Folder?

This is slightly more predictable as there is a general set of rules to abide by but once again, you can’t account for companies personal spam rules.

Spam Keywords

Certain words will trigger a spam filter to mark it as potentially unsolicited email.  These words actually get assigned different scores based on the likelihood of the email being spammy and these scores add up throughout your email.  If you end up clocking up a high score throughout your email, it will end up junked.

To avoid this, don’t use too many spammy words!  Mailingmanager offers in its system a pre-mail spam keyword check that will run through your mail and highlight the spam keywords for you.  Just get that score low and you stand a much higher chance of inbox delivery.

Image to Text Ratio

Some emails won’t be delivered due to the massive amount of images in them.  This is because when Spam filters tightened a while ago on spam keywords, spammers chose to insert all the content that was getting blocked into images to avoid the content filters.

Avoid using images too much.  You can usually push your branding without having images everywhere.  We always advise you do this anyway as many clients now have images blocked as standard and by having your message as text, you can still guarantee you get your message across despite image blocking.

Reputation

The reputation of your sending server can play a massive part in the delivery of your email; in particular, in the B2C area of email marketing.  Many of the major online email clients (hotmail, yahoo etc) will check the originating source of the email and then decide where to deliver it.  A high scoring reputation will give the email a very high chance of delivery and vice versa.

Maintaining a good IP reputation is a big subject on its own but in short you must ensure that:

Lists are well maintained and cleaned

Unsubscribe requests are honoured

Of course one of the major advantages of using an ESP such as mailingmanager is that you don’t have to worry about any of this; we do it all for you.

Poor Coding

You just wouldn’t believe the amount of times I go through this with customers – and I pin all the blame on Microsoft for this.  Poor coding can cause deliverability problems as the filters reject bad coding (the sign of a spammer).

Why is it the sign of a spammer?  Because most true spammers do not care for html and instead go for creating their emails in programs such as Microsoft Word, which inserts all this non-valid html rubbish into their coding when creating an html page in there.

A lot of newbies to email marketing will tend to use Word to create the content of their campaign and then paste it over to their email from there.  The problem with that is it also transfers over some of this rubbish code with it so that it keeps the same fonts and sizes, which in turn hurts the deliverability chances of that email.

Best thing to do in this situation (as you’ve guessed) is to not use Word to create your content.  Programs such as notepad will work perfectly in creating content offline and then paste into your email and do the fonts within the campaign itself.

Common Mistakes

CAPITAL LETTERS in the subject header

There’s really no need to do this anyway as it makes your mail look unprofessional.  People in a bid to stand out in the inbox of their recipients put the whole subject header in capital letters.  Instead of grabbing their attention it has the complete opposite effect as the recipient will only ever view it if they look at the junk folder.

!!!

Yes we get it, you have a cracker of a sale on.  There’s more effective, more original, and less spammy methods to grab their attention than exclamation marks throughout the email and subject line.

The Clumsy Mistakes

There are a few slips that sometimes people don’t realise they’re doing or are just forgotten when creating a campaign that are worth remembering when sending out campaigns.

“Dear xxxx”

Spam filters flag this and give it a reasonably high score if you put Dear as the opening sentence to your campaign.  Try doing “Hi” “Hey” “Good Morning” etc. instead.

Text part doesn’t match html content

This is one of those lazy mistakes that can give your email quite a high spam score.  You’ve created your email and asked for it to be multi-part but instead of creating the text version, you’ve left it as the standard “your email can’t view this email, view it here online”.  The filters don’t like this.  Luckily for the lazy ones, mailingmanager has an auto text content creator within the system so use that to create an easy text version of your campaign.

Being too Spam word free

I have to put my hands up and say I only ready this a week or so ago and it was new to me then.  I also can’t for the life of me remember where exactly I read it so I apologise for not linking through the original article.

Apparently having an email that has zero spam keywords in is also bad and raises the alarm in the spam filters.  So whilst watching your spam keywords, make sure you don’t go over the top.

“Test” subject header

Obviously this will never go out to your customers but when you’re testing your campaigns, avoid using the subject line “test” as you may find yourself baffled as to why your email is going into the junk folder.

Sending tests to multiple people within the same company

So you’ve finished your email and you want to send it to everyone in your department to see what they think.  One or two get it but the rest either don’t or it takes ages for them to receive it.  The problem you’ve experienced is that your companies Spam filter has flagged your test as a Spam attack.  Try to keep it to only a couple and test across addresses.  This also helps you look at the rendering at the same time – handy!

Well there it is.  I must personally apologise for how long this ended up being as I really wasn’t planning for this kind of length but there you go.

I’m sure I’ve misseda few things out so please add on to this or even better, if you’ve wrote a post on the subject, put a link to the article in the comment box – even if you’re a competitor, I’ll accept the post.

As I read up on the latest report about subject lines (find it here) I thought I might as well look through my own inbox and see what I liked and didn’t like and why.

I never sign myself up to receive email newsletters just so I can analyse them, so my response to these newsletters will be from a prospective consumers perspective.

Maharishi - Maharishi Easy Summer 2008: Brick Lane Store now open

I am always a bit disappointed with Maharishi.  The dphmi site has some great clothes on it but the emails they send out have absolutely no consideration put into them.

Okay, so this was never really going to grab my attention that much, I don’t live in London so don’t really care about a new store opening, so I can’t really judge whether this would grab the people of London a bit more than me.  I opened the email just now anyway to see what was going on (for the sake of this blog) and found something that I might have been slightly interested in…..a 70% off sale!!!

Who exactly thought that wasn’t worthy of subject line status?

I also noticed that they have repeated their company name in the subject line which is always a no-no and pointless.

Could’ve probably fit “up to 70% off” in that space….

Chemical Records – Biggest Ever Chemical Clothing Sale – You heard it here first!

I like this subject line, a lot.  If you’re looking to buy some clothes and you see the words “Biggest Ever Sale” you’re probably inclined to at least have a look. 

Couple that with the “You heard it here first” gives it a certain sense of urgency.  It’s like you’ve been let in on a secret that everyone will know about soon, so you’ve got to hurry to get those bargains.  I can also see there subscriber base becoming more attentive to future messages because of a campaign such as this.

Like the easily led person I am, I purchased from them.  I regret nothing.

Urban Industry – The Massive Urban Industry Store Summer Sale in now on

A rival of Chemical Records, Urban Industry also decided to launch their sale at the same time.  Though it will attract interest, when put in comparison to the Chemical Records subject it seems a lot less attractive.

Apart from that everything seems fi……wait a second, they’ve misspelt is in the header.  Woops…..

eBuyer –  HP 530 2gb memory Laptop only £269.97 @ebuyer.com

I’m actually looking into the possibility of buying a new laptop so this was going to interest me.  Still though, I will stay objective in analysing the header.

I’ll start off with the small gripe of having the companies name in the subject line after having it in the send from name…right that’s the bad stuff over with…

I like the fact they are putting the price in.  I think if there is a sale on or you are aiming at the price orientated market (and in these financial climates, who isn’t?), then price will entice more recipients to have a look.

As you may have guessed, i’m on a budget and the fact they have put a small bit of specification (also a selling point), interested me further and made me go and have a look through onto the site. I didn’t purchase (which is the ultimate goal of these) but that’s only becuase i’m half serious about a laptop. If I was more serious about going through with it, there’s a very good chance it would be through ebuyer.

When analysing your companies’ latest email campaigns performance you have a number of factors to look at that will determine how much of a success it has been.  The obvious indicator of ultimate campaign success is the recipients actually going back to your company and purchasing from you.  But that really is the final link in the email marketing campaign.

So, to diagnose how your campaign is doing you must assess what your statistics tell you.

The first step is to look at your open rates.  Even if you’re getting decent traffic through to your site, you could still be receiving low open rates.  This could be for a number of reasons which you will have to ask yourself.  One of the main reasons for poor open rates is the list quality.  It may be that you have purchased or rented a list and therefore you will not have the same level of interest as a company that have self-built their list.  It could also be down to the age of your list, maybe you’ve had the same list for a long time and haven’t actually cleaned up the list from inactive or uninterested subscribers (find good articles on list hygiene here, here and here).

It could also be attributed to the subject line; something that I have previously outlined as a major factor in why open rates can be low.  If you don’t have a subject line that stands out from the other bulk of emails that are in your recipients inbox, you can’t expect high open rates.  This will become increasingly important in 2008 as more companies start to turn to email marketing (find useful articles and the do’s and don’ts on subject lines here, here, here and here).

Maybe, it is in fact your deliverability.  If you are not incredibly vigilant with your reputation monitoring, then you could be falling foul of your email dropping into the dreaded junk folder, or worse, not even getting to the recipient at all.  This subject is vast and can’t really be summarised in this article as there are so many factors to take into consideration (sender reputation articles here ,here and here).  If you take the time, read as many articles on my blog as possible, most of them are based around deliverability and improving sending reputation.

If open rates isn’t your problem, it’s time to start looking at click through rates.  Basically, your campaign is being delivered and recipients are opening your newsletter but for some reason they are not going to your call to action.

Okay, so for those of you who are only making newsletters that are there to inform, this isn’t as much of a problem, it is more for the promotional campaigners out there.

The problem could lie within your email design.  If you have a poorly designed and amateurish looking email, your recipients are unlikely to take you very seriously.  They will have seen hundreds and thousands of below average emails, and they’ve predominantly been spam.  When they open yours, you only have a few seconds to make an impression on them and if it looks vaguely like spam, your email will be closed and never be looked at again.

Maybe your email isn’t spammy looking, but in fact wonderment to the human eye; a masterclass in HTML design.  Problem is, you’ve not being pay attention to the email marketing world for several months and haven’t noticed that ISP’s have different rules regarding how emails will now render in their browsers. Silly you.  Your once amazing email looks like a whole lot of grey with some words sporadically dotted around the place.  Who’s going to even bother with that as far as first impressions go?  It’s time to move on from that age of image heavy emails into the brave new world of HTML lite.  Try to keep your companies branding and layouts professional but cut down on the imagery and embrace background colours to keep the email looking bright.

Another issue that could hinder your click throughs is the layout of your campaign.  If you’re looking to get recipients to click through to your site somewhere, make sure it is clearly obvious where they need to click, it needs to stand out.

Also making sure that the subject line corresponds with the email content is vital too.  If they’ve opened your email from reading the subject line, and found that the content is different or is misleading, you’ll lose your click throughs.  Once again, make sure everything is clear and accessible (read a blog on this here).

Finally, I go back to email design for one more piece of advice.  There is still a lot of scepticism around online shopping, it’s getting better but there are still areas that are concerned about transferring their bank information over the internet (article here).  It is your duty to try and ease those fears.  The best thing to do is offer your customers an all-over branding of all communications with them.  Try to match your newsletter to your website, and in particular, the landing page that they will be directed to from the email.  This way confidence can be instilled in your communications and actual money conversions will increase (find articles on landing pages here and here).   

After another busy week at mailingmanager towers, we were left wondering what we should base this week’s newsletter on.  “Why don’t we do something different and offer them advice on how to better their email campaign?” one bright spark said.  And here it is…. 

Don’t just hard sell to them 

Though obviously you want to sell your products by using email marketing, if you only sell you will find that users will start to switch off.  If you offer a bit more than just what products you have, you will see a constant reader base that will come to expect your email and will be more receptive to your messages.  By doing this you’re laying the foundations for a successful, long-term campaign. 

Let the customer get to know you 

So you’re no longer just hard selling to them, good.  But hold off from giving yourself that well deserved pat on the back just yet, there’s still some work to do.  Try to introduce your company’s personality into your newsletters.  Don’t just write in a formal manner and state facts; be friendly.  This will bring you closer to the customer as you will go beyond just visual branding and customers will be able to relate to the company on a whole. 

Be Consistent   

The last thing you want to do is let the customer forget about you and your company.  If you leave massive gaps in between your campaigns your recipients will have either lost interest in your product or will have forgotten that they signed up for your newsletter in the first place.  Either way, it will lead to a higher complaint rate which will have an adverse effect on your sending reputation, and ultimately deliverability.   

Make it more interactive 

If you want to keep your recipients attention, try to do it by having different forms of interaction in the newsletter.  Small things such as a quick survey can keep their minds focused on the whole newsletter opposed to a quick skim read.  This will also allow you to grab some much needed information about your service or your customers habits that can help to shape future campaigns.  “How do I get them to fill out the survey?” I hear you ask. Read on….. 

Give them something 

Everyone loves free stuff, and people will be much more inclined to spend a couple of minutes filling out a questionnaire if they have a golden carrot of “prizes” at the end of the questionnaire.  Also if you keep offering prizes as a regular feature (perhaps not every issue), then you are guaranteed of repeat opens.Another helpful tip is to include the winner of any prize in the next newsletter.  Not only does it validate that people can win your prizes, but also adds extra content to your newsletter.  And you can be sure of some positive comments about your company from the winner. 

Keep it short 

No-one wants a newsletter to scroll down for what seems like an eternity, so try to keep your message short and clear.  If you have articles for your newsletter, just put an extract of it in your newsletter and then link back to your site for the whole article.  Doing this not only keeps your newsletter short, but also drives recipients to your website.  What’s even more useful is that you will also be inadvertently adding content to your site, which will get picked up in the search engines, and improve your ranking. 

Matching Design with web site branding 

With parts of the population still unsure about trusting e-commerce, you must do everything to alleviate their fears.  With one of the most recent scams being phishing, the recipients will be wary about trusting newsletters that may or may not be from the actual company.  One of the best ways to maintain trust in the newsletter is to have it branded to match your website.  Not only does it maintain trust in the validity of the sender but also that you are a professional company.  Branding is always important. 

Subject Line Tweaking 

Though I have gone on about this in my blog quite a few times, I cannot stress how important a decent subject line is.  If you’re receiving low open rates you have to look at why, and if you’re not receiving massive amounts of bounce emails, then the problem is probably stemming from your subject line.  I have posted a couple of blogs on subject lines here and here. 

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