Get your Email marketing delivered

Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Spam, Uncategorized, e-mail marketing No Responses »
Apr 292009

E-mail marketing delivery tips for successful e-mail marketing campaigns from the CEO of AWeber Email Marketing Tom Kulzer. Make sure your customers get the message by following Tom’s advice:

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

    Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

    Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

    Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

  • http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
  • http://www.bondedsender.com
  • http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

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Posted by Admin at 11:09 Tagged with: , , ,

Is twitter spam really a problem?

Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Just a thought, Social Media, Spam, Twitter 3 Responses »
May 082008

I’ve been using Twitter in earnest for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say it’s genuinely surprised me. At first I was sceptical. What possible value can you squeeze into a 140 character post? Plenty, as it turns out.

But the real value of twitter (and I guess other micro-blogging/short message broadcast services like Jaiku and Pownce) isn’t about individual messages — it’s about the cumulative stream of messages: what that reveals about you and the people you’re connected with. I love it.

In the short time I’ve been using Twitter I’ve realised that it really can add tremendous value in lots of ways:

Some of twitters strengths

  • you to feel more connected and in touch with the people around you
  • it helps strengthen your relationships with the people you already know
  • it’s a great way to hook up with like-minded people you don’t know
  • you can follow thought-leaders and innovators in your field, see what’s on their minds, and gain tremendous insight from that
  • it puts your finger on the beating pulse of your industry — if it’s happening people are talking about it on twitter, and linking to valuable resources on the web
  • it’s a great way to harness groundswell to promote new products and services through social media (as witnessed recently with @patphelans remarkable Twitterfone launch) — see Pat’s Twitterfone launch summary on his blog.

I’m sure there are plenty more. Of course it’s also a big distraction and potential time waster… but I’m working on that :-) .

But now the subject of Twitter Spam has reared its head, with the publication of a new Twitter Black List.

Which begs the question, is spam really going to be a problem on a service that’s fundamentally based around opt-in? You only see the tweets of people you choose to follow, and you can opt back out again at any time if they start posting lots of spammy tweets. From my admittedly limited experience you don’t need a blacklist to spot potential twitter spammers — you just need a soupcon of common sense.

When someone on twitter follows you, resist the guilt reflex to follow them back, and check their profile and their twitter-stream to see if they have anything interesting to say. If they do, great, if not… or if you see a lot of spammy links, don’t follow them… simple.

Where’s the problem?

Danny Sullivan posted a terrific summary of the twitter spam issue over on his Daggle blog recently. It’s definitely worth a read.

One thing in Danny’s summary — about Twitter’s @replies confused me a bit though.

Danny says:

@replies. By default, you will only see messages from people who call you out using your name (like @dannysullivan) if you are following them. This means you’re initially safe from unwanted messages — no one you don’t know can show up in your Twitter stream. But some change the default to see @replies from anyone. I do — and it’s a great way to meet new people you aren’t following. If they say something interesting, catch my attention somehow — I’m like great! A new person to follow. But it also means potentially, people you don’t know can get into your Twitter replies tab or if you use a tool like Twhirl (love it, recommend it!), then they’re potentially even more in your face. Yeah, there’s a “spam” potential there, and hopefully it won’t grow. If someone is abusive, you can block them individually. See this on Twitter for more about @replies.

Now, I interpret the Twitter Support page on @replies a little differently from Danny. I think the @reply settings on your Twitter profile relate to @replies SENT TO OTHER PEOPLE by the people you follow. The options are:

  • You receive @replies sent from the people you follow only if they’re sent to other people you also follow. (this is the twitter default setting)
  • You receive @replies sent from the people you follow to any user regardless of whether you follow them or not. (this is my preferred setting and a great way to find new and interesting people connected to the people you’re already following)
  • You don’t receive any @replies sent by the people you follow to anyone other than yourself.

You will ALWAYS receive @replies directed at your particular username from anybody (i.e anyone who types in @yourusername), regardless of your settings and regardless of whether you follow them or not. Your Twitter @reply settings will dictate whether you see replies sent from the people you follow to other people… if you follow that!

To test this I just created a new user (not following anybody and not followed by anybody) and sent an @reply to my main account. It got through perfectly, as did the reply I sent back in return.

So — is the fact that ANYBODY can @reply anybody else, without the “Follow” opt in a good thing, or a potential loophole that spammers could exploit in the future… comments please!

Posted by Admin at 11:04
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