‘Sending Email’ Articles

It may sound like a no-brainer, but the most important part of your email is the content. Email was created to easily transmit written correspondence. It’s a digital replacement for a physical letter. Just as with snail mail, email has evolved and changed. The original purpose, a simple text correspondence, is sometimes lost amidst complicated layouts, unnecessary images, and other marketing trends.

To improve the overall quality of email campaigns, marketers need to return to the basics. That isn’t to say that all advertisers should abandon pictures and flashy layouts, for some companies that works. Still, the primary focus should always be on messaging and content. This is especially true for those new to the industry.

The email marketing business today is more competitive than ever. A great deal of bad email has been sent out and users are more savvy and skeptical than ever before. While this means that content is held to a higher standard, it also makes good content that much more welcome.

Being successful in email marketing today isn’t as simple as slapping together a message and pushing it out thoughtlessly to a list. Recipients demand quality and value from email, now more than ever. Unfortunately, many marketers have responded to these demands with gimmicks and marketing fluff, rather than improving their content.

In our 15+ years of experience, we have seen many beautifully designed emails fall on their faces because they do not offer anything interesting to the recipients. We’ve seen beautiful, organically collected, highly interested list members turn on their senders in an instant. These phenomenon are not rare unfortunately and could be avoided if marketers put more effort and thought into campaigns. Keep in mind that the dangers involved in email marketing are inversely related to how many times you mail to a recipient. The more often they receive a useless email, the more likely they are to click the unsubscribe button, or even worse, mark the message as spam.

If you’re going to spend your money on sending out an email campaign, make the content worth the price! Do you homework and create some AWESOME content, otherwise your email campaign won’t do you any good and could quickly turn against you. There is a ton of information on the web about how to create a good email campaign, and we offer a lot of wisdom and advice on this very blog, but no one can learn to be a great marketer from one advice blog or “10 great tips!” write up.

If you care about your business and really want to make the plunge, take some time to study the subject. More importantly, create something that you’re proud to send. Review it; ask for the opinions of your colleges; send it to your spouse and kids and ask them what they think. Email marketing can be a very powerful tool. With the right amount of time and support, an email campaign can be the leading charge and most profitable portion of your marketing efforts.

As for us? We’re always here to provide you with the best database management, statistic tracking and sending tools possible. We’re also happy to consult with you on design and content ideas if you run into a road block. We want you to be a successful email marketer. As your business grows, so does ours!

Many individuals make the mistake of lumping together the definitions of junk email and bounces. Knowing the difference is an important part of understanding email campaigns and statistics. It will also allow you to understand what you may need to change to improve the visibility of your email.

As we’ve mentioned in many of our previous posts, email marketing can be a difficult and unfamiliar venue. There are many nuances that need to be understood and several complex technological issues that play into the results. We do our best to simplify these issues for our customers and largely we have success. One of the things however, that many Admail.net users don’t quite understand, is the difference between bounces and junk mail.

Junk mail is a filter that is set up within a recipient’s email client. Anything that reaches the junk mail folder has been delivered, but has been filtered into a folder because it appears to be “junk.” This can happen for many reasons. The tricky thing about junk mail is that it is largely defined by the user themselves. In many email clients, junk folders are setup by the user to filter based on their own qualifications. Some custom filters learn by watching what the user’s actions and others have a default setting as to what they block but can be modified. In either case, junk is largely filtered due to email content. The best way to attempt to avoid the filter is to adopt common sense best practices such as avoiding common spam language. Unfortunately, there is no 100% sure way to stay out of everyone’s junk mail folder.

Bounces, on the other hand, are the result of an email server rejecting a message and sending an error code back to us. Depending on the specific error code that we receive, a bounce is either marked as a hard or a soft bounce. Bounces can result from a variety of things ranging from content to ip reputation and many other things in between. You will likely see many bounces on a bad/old list. Email addresses that are no longer active will return a hard bounce and come back as non-deliverables. Soft bounces are recorded and after several are made inactive.

Hopefully this clears up some common misconceptions. If you have any additional questions, please contact us!

Email marketing is not an easy form of marketing. It requires a unique knowledge set and a gread deal of hard work in order to achieve success.

The most common method of creating a marketing email today is to have a designer, who is familiar with HTML, create an email from scratch. Designers with a large HTML skill set and vast knowledge of the email marketing world can create beautiful and functional designs. Of course, this method can be costly and difficult for small companies or for those who just want to test the waters of email marketing. That’s why at Admail.net we provide our customers with several ways to create their email.

If you would like to have a designer create your email using HTML, that is still possible. We allow for the direct input of HTML code into our system. Beware however, HTML for email is not the same as HTML for the web. HTML for email is limited in many ways by the email clients that receive it. You’ll want to be intimately aware of the differences between HTML in a browser and HTML in email. Email clients simply aren’t designed to be as efficient and up-to-date translators of HTML as browsers are. Knowing the limitations, along with testing of your email before sending it out, is crucial.

For our many clients who aren’t going to be using HTML code to create their emails, we have created our Email Builder 2.0 system. It is designed to give our users most of the benefits of creating an email using HTML without the drawback of having to learn the complicated language. Once an email is created in Email Builder, it is also much easier to edit and can be updated, for the most part, by anyone with basic word processor experience. As with anything, there are always trade offs. No HTML editor is 100% perfect and in some instances you won’t be able to do as many complicated things as you could if you wrote HTML from scratch.

Being aware of the limitations of email marketing is a necessity. If you ever have any questions about your campaigns, please call us and we will be happy to guide you. In our 15+ years we’ve seen and dealt with pretty much everything under the sun. We’re here to help you get the most out of your email marketing.

At Admail.net, we feel that it is our responsibility to aid our customers in navigating the complicated rules of email marketing while educating them about the possible dangers and pitfalls.

Many of our customers use Admail because they are unsure about the technical and legal aspects of email marketing. While we are always available for consultation, and do our best to get information out to our customers, there are still quite a few common misconceptions about the industry and a multitude of misunderstandings. Understanding the industry and the possible issues that may arise will serve to maximize your ROI and minimize your marketing headaches. Today we’re going to address some of the issues email marketers face.

CAN SPAM is a federal law with penalties and you are responsible for understanding and following it.

The CAN SPAM act was put in place by the federal trade commission with hopes of regulating the sending of unsolicited material over the web. It’s no joke, each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000. Luckily, the FTC goes out of their way to make it perfectly clear what needs to be done to be in compliance with the act. All the information you need can be found on the FTC website, here is just one example of a compliance guide.

Spamhause and Spamcop are self appointed guardians, or vigilantes, of the internet.

Not familiar with these names? They are organizations dedicated to stopping abusive bulk mailing, but they can occasionally be over zealous. They hold no real legal authority and therefore can’t enact any legal ramifications. Despite this, they do have a following and can hamper deliverability as much as 30% if you get on one of their blacklists. Spamhause is currently considered the most credible and is more widely followed. Spamcop is a subsidiary of Ironport which is owned by Cisco. Their practices concerning honey pots and using decoy addresses are questionable. There are approximately 150 organizations of this type with varying reputations and levels of creditability, ending up on the bad side of any of them can hamper deliverabilty and create problems. We monitor the reputation of all of our IPs, if one of these organizations has an issue, we resolve it. Our users, however, will be held accountable for their mail practices as defined in our terms of service.

Hotmail addresses are throw away addresses.

Based on the domain of an email address, you can get a general idea about it’s quality. With Hotmail, consumer typically use them once to make a purchase or sign up for a free services and then never use them again. This is a generalization of course, but statistically it’s true. Yahoo addresses are almost as bad, though recently they have partnered with some of the phone companies and as result some legitimate businesses are using them as a business contact address. Other free services like Gmail fare better in reliability but can also be abused. One algorithm used by ISP’s, such as Yahoo and Hotmail, to determine the likelihood that a source is spamming, is to look at the total number of non-deliverable emails being sent to them from that source. When you analyze your email list, you can get a general idea of the quality based on the breakdown of address domains. If you have a very high number of Hotmail or Yahoo addresses, don’t be surprised if you have deliverabilty issues. The quality of your list may be very low.

BUY LISTS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Admail.net supports organically grown lists only. If you purchase a list we provide no guarantee that our compliance team will allow you to send to that list.

These are several of the issues that all email marketers face. Don’t let them intimidate you. You’re already in a better position because you are aware of them. Companies all over the world navigate these hurdles every day, you can too! If you are an Admail.net customer, you have a partner who is always there to help you do things right.

Relax, you’re in good hands.

I just got off the phone with a client who was very concerned about her open rates. We occasionally come across this from a new mailer and it can be hard to explain to them why they shouldn’t worry about it. The reason we provide an open rate statistic is, for the most part, because people expect it. Having been in the email marketing industry for almost 20 years, we know that open rates aren’t really an accurate way to measure the success or failure of a campaign.

At one time, open rates were an accurate and useful way to record campaign data, but starting in 2004, Microsoft began blocking images by default in their email programs. In the proceeding months and years, other email clients followed suit. Today, nearly every email client provides their users with the option to block images and most do it by default. This dramatically changes the usefulness of open rate statistics. They no longer provide accurate information about the individuals who open email. Certain situations, such as if an email happens to have no pictures, and therefor provides no incentive for your users to click the “load images” button, makes open rates appear even worse. This isn’t to say that you should include images solely for the purpose of getting your open rates up. What you should do is accept that open rates just aren’t as important or as useful as they once were.

Open rates, while no longer effective at projecting how many people have actually read your email, can sometimes be used effectively as a meter stick to compare results. Looking at the open rates of two different campaigns sent to the same list and noting how they differ can be a helpful exercise. Each list you send to will have a baseline open rate based on several factors. Those factors will include: the email habits of your recipients, what email client they are using, and how interested they are in your general message. Once you have figured out this baseline open rate, you can use it to judge the overall effectiveness of future mailings. If one promotion or newsletter performs above or below the baseline, you know you’ve either done a superior job with that content, or missed the mark.

If you want a more accurate statistic to monitor, you may want to keep a close eye on the clickthrough statistics. A clickthrough is recorded anytime someone clicks on a link in your email. This number has nothing to do with unreliable image loading and can’t be distorted by the email client. It’s simply a one to one representation of how many people have clicked the links in your email. Many of our clients are trying to drive traffic to their website, this number is actually the most crucial number for them. If you have a call to action on your email that involves clicking a link, the clickthrough statistics will give you actual numbers on how many people answered that call to action. Clicking on a link or acting on the mailing is the true test of it’s effectiveness and should be of much greater concern then open rates.