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 Email addresses that are no longer active will return a hard bounce and come back as non-deliverables.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!

If you haven’t discovered it yet, Admail.net’s newest tool is our QR Codes. Our goal is to provide QR Codes to our users so that they might collect new user information more easily and expand their database. QR Codes are small bar code images that can be scanned by a cellphone and provide information. They are intended to be used in print materials at the point of sale. Customers can scan a code and be easily directed to your sign up form right through their mobile device.

QR Codes are not meant to be used inside email messages. This would defeat the primary purpose. QR Codes are meant to give people easy access to information or media on the go. QR Codes are useful when a user is away from their computer but still want to be able to easily access online information. Occasions of this include print advertising, on a menu, a business card, or in any non-digital media.

QR Codes are very easy to use and cheap to include it print advertising. If you are a customer already using Admail.net they are a great option for you because you don’t need to set up any data capturing tools on the back end because we already have you covered. QR Codes can quickly grow your email marketing list and bring in even more business. If you have additional questions about QR Codes, please contact us. We are here to help!

*It appears that Trend Micro has cleared up the issue at this time.*

It has recently come to our attention that some of our clients are having issues with the Web of Trust and Micro Trend services. While we are addressing this issue directly with both of these companies, it is impossible to tell exactly when the issue will be resolved. In the meantime, we have some temporary solutions of our clients who are having trouble with their email campaigns.

The problems created by WOT and Micro Trend only occur when a link in an email is re-routed through our domains. We re-route links so that we can accurately track click-through information for Admail users. Therefore, one way to eliminate this issue temporarily is to turn off click-through tracking on your account. You can either do this for everyone you mail to, or, if you know which clients are having problems because of Micro Trend and WOT, you can put them into a separate interest group and turn off link tracking for their mailing specifically.

We hope that these issues are permanently resolved soon. The blocks that are coming from these services are completely unwarranted. Thank you for your understanding and patience as we deal with this problem.

A lot of potential customers ask us how our service compares to Constant Contact or our other competitors. While we do essentially the same thing, our pricing structure is much different. We charge based on how many emails you actually want to send a month, not on your list size. Constant Contact charges you based on your list size and gives you unlimited mailing. We understand how it can be tempting, but most people don’t need unlimited mailing.

Consider the very common situations as I will outline below.

Situation 1:
List Size – 15,000 members
The user would like to send to this list four times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $1,800.00 per year
Admail.net – $975.00 per year

Situation 2:
List Size – 6,000 members
The user would like to send four times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $900.00 per year
Admail.net – $545.00 per year

Situation 3:
List Size – 30,000 members
The user would like to send to this list three times a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $1,800.00+ per year (Price not listed. Would be greater than $1,800 based on their model.)
Admail.net – $1275.00 per year

Situation 4:
List Size – 5,500
The user would like to send to this list twice a month.
Cost:
Constant Contact – $900.00 per year
Admail.net – Less than $300.00 per year!

In all of these cases Admail.net saves the customer a great deal of money. It is worth your time to do the work and figure out how many emails you will be sending a month. Simply find your total list size and consider how many times you’d like to send a month. In most cases, Admail.net will be the better deal for you.

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.