In email marketing, a large part of your success will rely on the quality of your list and the relationship that you build with your list members. Using the sign up form is the easiest way to add new members directly to your Admail.net list. The Sign Up Form is easy to set up and can be distributed as a link either on your site or anywhere else, such as at the point of sales or in print advertising, you’d like to put it. With our recent addition of QR Codes, you can now use a QR Code to make your sign up form easily accessible to anyone with a mobile phone.

The Sign Up Form will add new email members to your list directly and securely. You can also gather other information through the form. You decide how few or how many fields you’d like to include and all the information will be stored in your Admail.net database. The sign up form can utilize interest groups to organize your members by interests as well.

We recommend that when you direct people to your sign up form that you make it very clear to them what they are signing up for and how often they will receive email from you. The more transparent you are in your sign up process, the less risk of complaints you’ll have. There is very little value in having a list member who isn’t interested in your mailing. Sending to them is a waste of email credits. Nothing is more important than trust between you and your members.

You can find detailed instructions on how to set-up your Sign Up Form on the Sign Up Form page under the List Builder tab.

You can learn more about the Sign Up Form by watching the video user guide here.

The way that Admail.net handles campaign replies is somewhat unique. All reply emails have to be handled directly by the Admail.net system to provide the best results to our customers.

One of the major reasons for this is to prevent our customers from having to manually maintain their email database. By internally handling each and every reply that is returned by a campaign, we are able to automatically manage your bounces, unsubscribe requests, and maintain our feedback loops. Having the replies come to us and then be forwarded on to you also allows us to report statistics to our users accurately and in a timely manor.

Without having replies pass through our hands, you’d have to manage all of these issues on your own, which would be nearly impossible to do with the high volume of mail that we see many of our customers send.

We recently sent out a message to our LinkedIn followers using another Social Engines invite system, unaware that it was using our Apple Mail server and reply address and the results we’re.. unfortunate. We sent out to only 368 people, but as you can see in the proceeding image, managing the results was a mess.

The image below represents only a sample of the returned messages we got from the mailing. Everything from mail delivery errors to automatic replies flooded our inbox.

Our solution is to collect all replies internally and filter them ourselves. In the vast majority of cases this is to the benefit of our users. We are then able to report all of the information to them through Accu Trak, automatically manage their database through List Builder, and get all of their legitimate replies into their inbox. Another benefit to the method that we use is the fact that it protects your personal email address. No customer will ever see your email address when replying so your address can not be stolen and put on lists or spammed.

Our goal is to make the process of email marketing as easy for you as possible. If you have any problems or questions with replies, or with any aspect of the Admail system. Please contact us. Our customers are always our number one priority!

Check out the action from Chicago and the NRA show. Along with Admail.net, there are thousands of exhibitors and tens of thousands of attendees.

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.

The word “opt-in” has been abused for far too long in the email marketing industry. Misuse of this phrase by list vendors and senders has led to it no longer represent a good faith relationship between sender and customer. The definition is now far too vague and encompassing, creating problems and breeding lack of trust. Originally, opt-in was created to define that an list member had given their permission to a email marketer to send them specific information. Unfortunately, the perception of what permission “opt-in” actually gives has been stretched to the breaking point and now “opt-in” is wrongly believed by some, to give them, or anyone they sell the address to, free reign to send a list member anything they want.

When the functional definition of a word has strayed so far from the original intention, it ceases to be useful and should be tossed aside. Therefor, in order to improve the way email marketers interact with their list members, the word “permission,” needs to replace “opt-in.” The word permission more accurately defines what marketers should be seeking from their list members. It’s not a complex word, the definition is well known, and people use it in common situations; because of these factors, “permission” is far superior in breeding quality email marketing practices. Changing a simple question such as, “Is this list opt-in?” to “Do I have permission to send to this list member?” can make a whole world of difference in perception and function.

It should be the goal of the marketer to know exactly what their customers want to receive. This very specific information is the “permission” and it should not be bent or stretched. In order to keep list members happy, or keep them at all, email marketers must make changes starting with the first moments of their relationship with list members. In email marketing, the process starts with a sign up form or other contact information collection method. A sign up form should be extremely transparent and let the users know exactly what they are signing up for. It should also provide users with a variety options about how, how often, and in what context they can be contacted. The more options provided on a sign up form, the more exclusive permission becomes. When a customer is able to relay exactly what they want, it’s much easier to give it to them. Marketers should seek out as much permission as possible from list members and adhere to it very strictly. The moment that a customer feels they are being sent something they didn’t ask for, the trust between that customer and sender can be broken. These delicate relationships can be nearly impossible to repair.

Defining a list as simply “opt-in” or “not opt-in” is no longer enough. For email marketers to be successful, they need to to focus on collecting more specific permission data from their customers. Just because a list is “opt-in” does not indicate that the members should be sent whatever a marketer wants. A true “opt-in” list should represent specific permission provided by a contact, as well as a honest relationship that with that contact.