Mailworkz: E-Marketing Blog

Make sure you include a call to action. This must be in easy-to-read font in the top half of your message. If you want your potential customers to take any kind of action, this info must be easily accessible, as you cannot rely on them to scroll down and search.

Getting and Confirming Permission

Receiving permission from your subscribers is the backbone of successful email-marketing. Once you have capturted an opt-in, it is in your best interest to confirm with a follow up email to ensure your list only contains recipients that want to receive your emails. This would be considered a double opt-in, which in the end, will deliver better results for all involved.

Personalize and Segment your list
Personalization and segmentation are very important keys to your email marketing success and are not widely used. Your subscribers inboxes are receiving an increasing amount of emails and you must compete. Emails that include; personalized subject lines, salutations, offers, follow-ups, etc will stand out from the pack. Start off by personalizing the message with their “First name”, then you can move on to sending different emails to different segments of your list.
Each step can take your email marketing success further.

2. Ask your subscriber’s to add you to their Address Book Or Safe Senders List.
As email marketers, we spend a considerable amount of time building relationships with ISPs and maximizing our email campaigns to get our emails placed in our customers/clients Inbox. Unfortunately, this work is often derailed because the final destination, the e-mail client (Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), have filters that can filter your email into the junk folder or not deliver it at all. To get to the Inbox, it’s important to have your email address or sender domain added to their safe list.

Stay tuned for step 3 next week.

1. Send emails that have value and are relevent. Your customers/clients are looking to you to provide the information they requested and offer them some value. The days of bulk email sending for the sake of sending are over. Capture as much data as you can from your customers, maybe in a survey for example. Then as time goes on, you will be able to send more qualified information, which will inturn increase your chances of your emails actually reaching your customers.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

A popular cry from nearly all of our customers. You have decided to embark on an email campaign, but you need targeted addresses to contact. What do you do?

Do not buy lists? You perhaps have seen these?

You know the ones, “Buy 10 million addresses for only $149″. Using these lists will only have you labeled as a Spammer. These addresses are suspect, in fact, over 70% are bogus or duplicated, and the rest certainly have not asked to receive “your” message. Furthermore, software or ISP’s are not made to handle the load of that many email address, much less the “in error” returns?

You could “rent” email lists from submission services, but these can be costly, usually 20 to 30 cents per email.

What do you do? Use these next 8 ideas to get the ideas flowing and build your own targeted list.

Emails of customers who want to receive your message potential customers that you can communicate with over and over.

1. Your Website – ask people to signup for your newsletter, guest book, ezine, contest. Don’t forget to put this on every page. A free tool like EzlistZ http://www.ezlistz.com can make this easy for you.

2. Direct Mail – Send out postcards to potential clients.

On these ask people to not only visit your site, but sign up to receive valuable information, products etc. Companies like Web Card can help you with this.

3. Telemarketing – Use telemarketing agents to contact your potential customers. Have them ask for email addresses. Give them a reason to do so. Perhaps a contest, coupons, free trial, information.

4. Use Brokers – Ask brokers or other sites with heavy traffic to post a signup for your information or service. Most will charge between 10 – 15 cents per email, but these are yours to keep.

5. Door-to-Door – One of our tourism customers found this quite effective - they hired students to go door to door asking for email addresses in return for information that they might be interested in.

6. Online Contest – Online contests are often a very effective way of getting email addresses. Make the email address a requirement of entry. There are a number of companies that will manage all aspects of your online contest. One is Raffle http://www.raffle.ca/

7. Bricks and Mortar – For those of you with physical stores, don’t forget to ask for email addresses at every turn. Ask at checkout, send surveys, run contests etc.

8. Your Communication Material – Don’t just put your URL on your communications. Ask people to go to your site and signup. Put this on business cards, order forms, survey forms and signature files.

There are many more techniques that will help you build your lists hopefully these will get your ideas flowing. Although building a qualified list will take time, in the end this is the best, most cost effective and profitable route to take.

Email Message Deliverability

There are a number of issues, that might affect how many of your email messages are actually being received by your recipients. Spam filters, ISP’s are all doing their best to keep unwanted emails from our in boxes. The unfortunate reality is that many legitimate and wanted marketing messages are falsely flagged.

Here are a couple of tips and references that will increase the likelihood of your messages reaching your customers.

1. Avoid non-delivery to AOL recipients - For delivering to AOL you need to make sure your SMTP service’s domain can be verified using a reverse DNS lookup. Check with your Webmaster or Host Provider. For more information on this topic check out:
   1. http://www.dnsstuff.com/info/revdns.htm and
   2. http://ezine-tips.com/articles/resources/20010817.shtml

   
   If you still are having issues delivering your message with your software, please consider our Broadc@st send service. Our delivery system has the reverse DNS lookup verification in place.

2. Avoid AOL 9.0 and MS 2003 image filter issues - America Online (AOL) has recently released the newest version of its product, AOL 9.0. AOL is anticipating that 30 -50% of their current customers will upgrade to 9.0 before year end. To protect it’s users from receiving SPAM, AOL has put some measures in place that will affect how your message is received by your AOL subscribers. All graphics will be blocked from being displayed in HTML emails, as well links will be deactivated for any new message sent to an AOL 9.0 inbox. When an email is received in AOL 9.0, users will have to click a link at the top of each message (Show Images & Enable Links) to view any graphics within your email. If this action is not taken, images and links will not be displayed or enabled.

   This is the default setting for AOL 9.0, however, the email recipient does have the ability to add the sender’s From Address into their address book which AOL classifies as People I Know. Once this has been done, all emails received from this address in the future will automatically have images and links showing correctly.

   What do we suggest you do to ensure that your message is displayed properly?

   Your recipients must add you to their address book as a sender they recognize and approve. You should add a line to the top of your email which states something like this… “Attention AOL 9.0 users - please add fromaddress@company.com to your address book so that you can see all of our message”. Alternatively you can use the override feature in Broadc@st to only send a text version of the message to AOL clients. For more information on this issue visit: http://library.marketingsherpa.com/barrier.cfm?CID=2455%20

   MS 2003 will also filter the images. For more information visit: http://ktdcommunications.com/communications/katydid_023.htm

3. Be knowledgeable about where you are being blocked - Use a product like Black List Monitor to find out where you might be black listed. If you are black listed, ISPs who check these lists may not deliver your message to the recipient. You need to know where you are black listed and how to get delisted. AOL rejects up to 80% of the messages it receives. As many as 30% of your messages may not be delivered if you are Black Listed. Black List Monitor http://www.blacklistmonitor.com/ can tell you where and when you are listed and provide tips on getting delisted.

4. Avoid being dumped into SPAM or Bulk Filters.
   • Use a product like Broadc@st that conforms to standard protocols for message delivery.

   • If you are sending a newsletter place the word “newsletter” and a date including month in the subject line. This reduces your SPAM score.

   • Ensure that each message contains an unsubscribe statement that links to a valid URL or a valid Mailto: link. However do not use the words “to unsubscribe” as these are now getting filtered. Use something like “to leave”.

   • Do not include .exe or attachments in your message.

   • Do not purchase lists.

   • Do not rent lists that are not double-opt-in.

   • Remind people of their relationship with you. Tell them in the message the email address that they used when they subscribed.

   • Include a correct reply email address and telephone contact information in each email.

   • Avoid sending long text articles.

   • Do not send HTML messages without Text alternatives. This can be accomplished in Broadc@st by using the “Both” options and creating both a text and HTML version.

   • Avoid sending messages with a large number of hotlinks

   • Do not use BCC distribution methods with over 10 names per email. Use a product like Broadc@st which creates an individual message for each email.

   • Watch your email lists, heavy B2C distribution to @aol.com, @hotmail.com. @msn.com etc may be flagged.

   • Avoid using words or phases that trigger spam filters. For more information on trigger words also visit: http://www.doctorebiz.com/06/021106b.htm and http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm

   • Check out the common tests that filters like Outlook and SpamAssassin use to filter your emails and try to avoid.
     • outlook filters
     • SpamAssassin tests

   • Routinely check http://www.spamcop.net/ to see if you have been blacklisted unfairly. Send an email to have this rectified. They are quite responsive. To check their list enter: http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml?111.111.111.11 (where 111.111.111.11 is the IP address of your sending SMTP.)

   • Sending your delivery in small batches of 500 or less might avoid filtration. - This can be accomplished easily by modifying your delivery options within Broadc@st.
     
     
   • A practical guide on avoiding SPAM filters can also be found from Marketing Sherpa.