Period Three Blog » Email Marketing

Aug262009

Big guide to CSS support in email clients

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The team over at Campaign Monitor has recently updated their giant CSS support guide to email clients and boy is it awesome. I’ve been designing and coding HTML emails for for almost 10 years now *sigh* and it never gets easier. It seems every month a new email client comes out, then there’s the iPhone now. Resources like these become invaluable to you if you do this kind of work. In their own words:

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

Make sure and check out the web guide, you can also download the full spreadsheet for all the known email client support info.

Thank you Campaign Monitor!

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Jul232009

Your email address and blacklists

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

Something I get asked a lot, since we have two email messaging products (swiftpress.com and our enterprise version of swiftpress) is: I’m sending emails to my list but they aren’t being delivered. Deliver-ability from your email messaging system provider is one thing, with swiftpress we have pretty good deliver-ability but it’s not just on our end of the server. It comes down to your domain name’s email history too.

What are DNS blacklists and blocklists? According to blacklistmonitor.com:

A dns blacklist or blocklist is a database containing known internet addresses (or IPs) used by individuals or companies sending spam. Various ISP’s and bandwidth providers subscribe to these DNS blacklist databases to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.

I won’t go into what you should do to keep off of a blacklist or maybe even how you got on one, that’s for another post, but for now let’s assume you just want to check.

Step 1 Find out what your IP address is:
You can do this by going to network-tools.com or dnsstuff.com and running a “Ping” look up by copying and pasting in your domain name.

Step 2 check the blacklists:
Now head on over to a couple of the blacklist services and check to see if you’re on there.

SpamCop
SpamHaus
Delivery Watch
MXToolBox
DNS Stuff
EmailReach
RepCheck
Blacklistedip
Blacklist.ie
Blacklist Check

If you see your IP show up in any of these lists, chances are you’ve been sending emails to honeypot email addresses. That is email addresses that are setup specifically for the purpose of catching you sending unsolicited emails. It’s a trap…

You then will need to petition the blacklist organization to get off of said list, if that fails we can then get involved to start tracking down specific ISPs that are blocking your email delivery and try to negotiate a way to get your messaging through. All in all, it’s a hard road to travel down. If you even suspect your list isn’t 100% quality you need to talk to us about it before you use it, I promise we won’t yell at you. We can help keep you out of trouble and it’s much easier to do that before you send, once you’ve sent to a suspect list you can’t take it back.

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May132009

The Seven Deadly Sins of Website Copy

Posted by Gene in Marketing, Email Marketing

This is a great article from Michel Fortin, that covers what he sees as the 7 deadly sins of website copy writing (really any marketing project copy falls under these 7 items). I agree with what he’s saying overall. Think about these things as you are pulling your next projects copy together and i’m sure you’ll be a success.

1. They fail to connect.
2. They lack a compelling offer.
3. They lack reasons why.
4. They lack scarcity.
5. They lack proof.
6. They lack a clear call to action.
7. The lack good copy.

Particularly I like #6, I scream about this a lot to clients and I say it over and over again. The further boil this down Michel says:

Focus on the “power of one.” That is:
One message
One audience
One outcome

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Mar252009

Insider tip to better email subject lines

Posted by Melissa in Email Marketing

Do Not Send Messages on Fridays. Especially Friday afternoons! - This is one tip I usually give our SwiftPress customers regarding send days and times. Why? Well, from my research and experience, the open rate for Friday sends - especially afternoon sends - is usually pretty dismal. However, my theory was debunked this past Friday with a send. All because of a strategic subject line.

This certain customer is a retail store who, like many others, is trying to move their advertising from expensive print mailers to more effective email sends. Their eMessaging has proven to be pretty successful with a good number of opens and clicks per send. The switch has also proven helpful with the retail store for the fact that sales can occur at short notice because of a shipment, etc.

The usual subject line is broad considering they have several things on sale at once. For instance, “Last Chance Winter Sale” or “2-for-1 Sale now in Progress.” This time, they needed a message sent that afternoon which was a Friday. I wasn’t very optimistic sending the message so I decided to try something a little different and a little more precise. I sent with the subject line “20% off Polo Knit Shirts” - instead of just the general, “Polo Sale.”

Finalize. Click. Send. Within 30 minutes of the send we had hit the open percentage rate the previous email had received after a full send (which, in my opinion, is about 3 days) that was sent on a Monday afternoon. After the full send for this particular email, the open rate surpassed the open rate of the majority of their other sends. The click through rate was also pretty high taking into consideration the email had no direct URL link. Pretty impressive, eh?

I know what you’re thinking, maybe people just really wanted some Polo knits that Friday afternoon. But I beg to differ. My moral of the story is this: Precise and strategic subject lines make a great deal of difference in your resulting mass email opens and clicks. Find what you think the customers will be most interested in and push it in your delivery. I’m still not convinced it’s more important than the send day/time; however, I’ll keep testing it.

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Mar052009

250 pixels is all you get

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

This is an old(ish) blog post over at the mailchimp blog talking about the 250 pixel box that you have to entice subscribers to click more. He couldn’t be more right on. I’ve always thought about the limited view of the outlook preview pane when I lay-out my email newsletter designs. But thinking only in terms of the 250 pixel box makes you think about the most important elements of email design. The links above have plenty of great pics and ideas about this subject, if you’re anywhere near an email design project, read these suckers first.

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Feb192009

Small Biz online marketing plans for 2009

Posted by Gene in Business, Email Marketing, Social Web

According to a new emarketer.com survey, small business will generally not cut spending on their online advertising and based on the research a higher percentage said they plan to increase in the areas of social networking and email marketing.

Small businesses in the US will not cut spending on most forms of online advertising in 2009, judging by a survey conducted in December 2008 by Ad-ology Research. A higher percentage of respondents said they planned to spend “about the same” in 2009 than planned to change their spending.

More small businesses said they would increase their spending on social networking than on any other format. And respondents were more likely to say they would increase spending in 2009 on e-mail and their company Websites than make cuts on those formats.

We’ve been getting more and more into social networking for our clients over the past year, the results can be huge if managed correctly…

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Feb042009

The perils of buying email lists

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

It never fails, we always come across someone who just doesn’t quite get the “permission” part in “permission marketing”. What the heck does “opt-in” mean anyways? Well here’s a pretty long article that kind of dissects the issue at hand. Here’s my walk through:

Although permission-based marketing clearly is the best practice, a huge market apparently exists for e-mail addresses compiled by others. A Google search for “email lists” brings up 3.1 million results containing that exact phrase. A significant number have to be those of third-party compilers.

Yes, there are plenty of places you can buy a list of email addresses from, don’t do it. YOU WILL GET IN TROUBLE!

Yet buying e-mail addresses is risky, and not just for the possible loss of the money spent on them. Mailing to a purchased list can destroy a firm’s e-mail reputation as well as the chances of getting all its e-mail delivered.

Yep, never buy a list.

Spamhaus maintains a list of mailers it deems to be spammers, against which a sizable percentage of inbox providers check incoming e-mail to determine whether to block it as spam. A listing on Spamhaus can cause a marketer to have serious deliverability issues.

Absolutely, never buy a list.

Moreover, e-mail inbox providers like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft convert abandoned e-mail addresses into spam traps. A firm that hits enough of them will be dubbed a spammer — or at least a very sloppy mailer who wastefully consumes others’ bandwidth by sending to garbage addresses. And it will be blocked.

Just don’t buy a list.

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Oct282008

CAN-SPAM updates to the law, what you should know.

Posted by Gene in Uncategorized, Email Marketing

On May 12th, 2008 the FTC updated some of its rules concerning the CAN-SPAM law(s), that should concern any of you that practice email marketing. The extended measures attempt to address 4 areas, in their words:

(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
(4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Here’s the skinny in my opinion:

Overall it’s about “permission” if someone doesn’t give you permission to send them email, don’t send it to them. This includes “forward, send-to-a-friend forms and people sharing lists with you.” Don’t do it, you can get in trouble. They also identify the “sender” as the person or company behind the email campaign - where it should be.

FYI: If you didn’t know, or never bothered to look up the name, CAN-SPAM stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing”. I’m thinking the name is actually getting outdated… Read the updates here.

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Jun042008

Newsletters and Spam

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The Neilson/Normal Group released a report on email newsletters, they reviewed just about every aspect of email newsletters and how we use them as marketers and recipients alike. One thing they did have to say is that you should keep it brief (people scan not read in detail) and only send one when you have something to say. The big detractor is Spam in the wild. Here’s what they had to say:

There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being baffled about unexpected messages.

The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.

We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

So, before you just “blast” out that next newsletter, make sure it has relevant, timely content and make sure it works (test it)…

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May152008

5 commandments for email marketing

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

Here’s 5 top rules for email marketing for us all to follow:
1. Market unto others as you would have them market unto you.
2. Deliver content that you can’t get anywhere else.
3. There is a limit to the amount of email your audience can stomach.
4. Make sure your message is emotional or memorable (have a purpose).
5. Make the message personal.
Source: OMMA

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