Q&A: Send to a friend and CAN-SPAM

Dear EmailKarma,

We’ve been having internal discussions regarding whether or not Send-a-Friend or Refer-a-Friend emails are subject to CAN SPAM laws. I tend to think they are, but am seeking confirmation, what’s your take?

********

Hello,

Please do not take this as legal advice only EmailKarma's interpretation. For legal interpretation of your specific case, EmailKarma recomends you engage your companies legal council for a full review of the SAF/RAF messages your sending.

CAN-SPAM gave us two distinct classifications of email; Commercial and Transactional. These two classes of mail are defined based on the purpose and content of the message. Based on the content of your SAF/RAF messages you will need to fit into one of these two classes.

Commercial; These messages are reasonably understood by a recipient to be selling or promoting a service or product. These must have the proper CAN-SPAM information included in them; Postal Address, web enabled unsubscribe, and subject lines and headers that are not misleading or deceptive.

Transactional; is defined as an email that facilitates an agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer in an existing business relationship. These may not contain false or misleading routing information, but otherwise is exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.

There are also multi-purpose messages that need to be considered and classified into one of the above categories. An example of a multi-purpose message would be your transactional bill of sale with an up sell offer on the next purchase. Based on the subject line, and the uppermost part of the message the you will need to decide how these are going to be treated under your sending policies. Having the transaction/billing details clearly mentioned in the subject line and the purchase information at the top of the message should earn you transactional status, but with an offer at the top of the same message your mail will most likely need to be classified as commercial.

If ever in doubt be CAN-SPAM Complaint, it's better to be safe then sorry.

Do you have a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact or leave a comment.

Q&A With EmailKarma

Hello EmailKarma,

I was wondering if I could ask you a question about SpamAssasin. They have this test in their default settings:2.5 MISSING_HB_SEP Missing blank line between message header and body. I was wondering if you think many ISPs are leaving the score at 2.5, or if re-setting at 1.5 would be ok (for internal use).

Thanks very much for your help!
Kind Regards,
Josie

********

Hello Josie,

What I have read about this particular SpamAssasin rule is that there are extra lines being inserted into the headers that are triggering on this rule set.

"MISSING_HB_SEP: This is another danger sign, typically indicating that a header line has had a newline inserted incorrectly somehow, or an mbox "From" line has been inserted between RFC-822 headers."

Have your technical team review these links;

• SpamAssassin help files
• SpamAssassin MISSING_HB_SEP bug report

If these do not have the answer your looking for try the SpamAssassin "user list". You can subscribe to by sending a message to: users-subscribe-at-spamassassin.apache.org.

As for ISPs changing the score for these message. This particular rule is probably left at the default setting, but each setup may be altered by the local administrator. As for your Internal mail whitelist your mail server to bypass these tests but still protect your users from external spam.

Do you have a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact or leave a comment.

Experimental Authentication Servery

A quick and experimental survey of the solicited messages in the EmailKarma inbox shows that ~50% of messages received in the month of August are not authenticating (total neutral = 59) or are not passing (total fail = 12) one of the four main authentication technologies (SPF, Sender ID, Domain Keys or DKIM).



Inversely the last 8 days worth of spam received (1547 messages) shows that only 24 messages (1.5 %) have been authenticated in a positive manor. The largest set of spam messages are sent from domains that are not supporting authentication off any kind thus becoming an easy target for spoofing or forgery.

Based on these numbers our spam to email ratio is 91%.

If your looking to get noticed and your looking for help getting your campaigns to your users make sure your authenticating. ISPs and businesses are already beginning to evaluate the presence of these solutions and make delivery decisions based on their accuracy, and results.

Is Yahoo! Greylisting?

Recently on the Email Marketers Club there have been discussions surrounding Yahoo! and the possibility of Greylisting being used as an anti-spam feature on their systems.

What is Greylisting?

Greylisting is a simple method of defending electronic mail users against e-mail spam. In short, a mail transfer agent which uses greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again to send it later, at which time the destination will accept it. If the mail is from a spammer, it will probably not be retried.

How do you know if someone if using Greylisting?

Generally greylsiting is visible in your email logs when you see a response code similar to this " stat=Deferred: 450: Recipient address rejected: Greylisted".

What can I do about this?

Nothing generally needs to be done to correct this. Most Mail systems will retry a message by default after a set number of minutes or hours. Spam systems and bots tend to ignore these types of notices and are not able to get around these grey listing systems.

Is Yahoo! using Greylisting?

Yahoo!'s mail help pages states that they are not greylisting mail servers sending messages into their systems. However they have increased the level of filtering on their mail servers and have implemented a number of system rules that may cause your mail to be deferred for a period of time, usually a couple of hours.

Comparing email and pork

Recently a new email term has been circulating the internet; BACN... What's is the deal with email and pork products?

Some simple definitions and comparisons between the pork product and the electronic messages.

HAM:

1. A cut of meat from the heavy-muscled part of a hog's rear quarter
2. Solicited and opt-in email requested by an individual

BACN:

1. The back and sides of the hog, salted and dried or smoked, usually sliced thin and fried for food
2. An email you receive that isn't spam but isn't exactly a personal message, either. A good example of this is the google alert service
   

SPAM:

1. Spiced Ham product made by Hormel
2. Unsolicited email, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk email. Term was developed after Monty Python's spam sketch (youtube.com)
   

One in four messages trashed, and it’s your fault

One in four messages trashed, and it’s your fault
By Ken Magill
Magilla Marketing
August 28, 2007

Ken Magill writes a great article about the average delivery of email programs and a number of ISP Benchmarks, hot on the heals of this gem regarding the state of Direct Marketers and their mailing practices.

A few comments about this latest article:

...the low delivery numbers are not a result of Internet service providers mistakenly trashing permission-based mail.

Blaming the Email Service Provider is also a a common reaction when delivery fails to reach the recipient, reading this article might bring to light some of the key drivers behind filtering and blocking.

AIM.com had the highest delivery rate with 97% of permission-based mail getting delivered

America Online uses the same filtering for AOL.com, AIM.com, Compuserve and Netscape users, yet these are filtering vastly different, when these should be almost identical. Something seems to be

Spamassassin has begun giving bad scores to e-mail with inaccurate Sender Policy Framework authentication records

This seems to be true if you have the Mail::SPF::Query extension installed, this is not yet part of the default Spamassassin 3.0 install.

It's Official!

Yahoo! has just announced an end to Yahoo! Mail Beta.

John Kremer, VP of Yahoo! Mail, published earlier this morning on the Y! the corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Also announced today is Yahoo's text to email functionalty "send and receive free text messages in their email to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines" right in the yahoo webmail client.

Response | Ask a Marketer - When Should You Ignore the Blogosphere?

Kate, from One Degree, asks the question "When Should You Ignore the Blogosphere?"

Every company should be monitoring the blogoshpere (internet) for their brand and the potential negative reactions that users are posting about. The viral effect of Blogging can quickly spread ill news about your company. You'll also find juicy golden nuggets of praise from gracious users or your products spreading how are happily spreading news about their experiences.

Here is a great example of a company listening to the blogoshpere; Direct2Dell. Dell monitors for blog reactions to their policies and products and then uses these to build a (mostly) positive experience for their users/brand. They also build a dialogue with their readers and this is becoming ever more important in the interactive Marketing channels, taking what could have been a PR nightmare and using the attention to correct the wrong facts and respond to some of the criticism or inaccurate fats in the original post, from the Consumerist.

More companies should be doing this on a regular basis. Email and blogging allow for a real conversation between brand and consumers. This type or brand monitoring has also sparked several niche companies, that will monitor on your behalf and let you know if you need to address something negative.

Subscription Management

Earlier this week Ken Magill talked about B2C Direct Marketers finally seeing the benefit of opt-in marketing vs. opt-out. Ken talks about the shift from 23% of Direct Marketer sending opt-out in 2006 to only 14% in 2007. These numbers are even more impresive in the B2B world, a wopping 3.1% of these DM'ers are sending opt-out comunications, down from 16.7% last year.

Why the big drop? Mailing B2B is more complex then B2C, corporate filters are tuned to the needs of a business (thousands of people) and not to the consensus of a large ISPs user base (millions of people). B2C also tend to have additional rules or restrictions on their users and the acceptable use of company resources.

Inversley several people have been part of a discussion around password protected unsubscribes. Are these really necessary? Their doesn't seem to be a clear answer to this question. There may be some cases where you would want to have these options secure behind a login but I can see why can't a user simply say - don't send me any more email about this item without using a password? Forgotten passwords or frustrations waiting to receive these passwords will lead to more complaints, which in time may lead to blocking or filtering.

Send us an email with your thoughts or comments.

Too much of a good thing?

StuffMagazine must really love this subject line, "Ivanka Trump is hands down the world’s hottest boss. Plus: The sexiest belly buttons.", as they have used it in their last three mailings to subscribers:


I wonder how response rates are for messages like this, with the same subject line and virtually the same creative in each of these messages.

Does anyone have a similar story where the same subject line is used over and over?

Why Email Marketing Is Like A Resort Vacation

Loren writes a great article listing may subtle similarities between a users experience offline and their online email experience.

Lesson 1: Timing is everything.

Your customers might not be ready to buy when they read your email message, or to buy exactly what you're selling, but studies show they often use the information to shop later.

Lesson 2: Don't hard-sell subscribers on a soft-sell list.

Make sure your email program stays consistent with subscribers' expectations.

Lesson 3: Align your email program with brand identity.

Understand what your brand represents to your customers and what they expect of you.

Lesson 4: Don't make readers work for benefits.

Analyze your customers to see who your best ones are.

Lesson 5: Use customer-provided information to their benefit.

If your customers have taken the time to fill out detailed demographic or preference pages, use that information to populate new forms so that they don't have to repeat the information every time they interact with you.

Providing timely, targeted and easy to use email campaigns will allow you to have a dialogue with your users and lead to an all round better user experience. A great example of this comes from "The Email Wars" posting today.

Source:
Why Email Marketing Is Like A Resort Vacation
Posted August 22nd, 2007 by Loren McDonald

Listening to your customer

Building a successful email marketing program is something that is key in the online world but knowing what to measure and how to use those measurements is what will drive your campaigns to the levels of success that every marketer desires.

How much data do you need?

Asking for profile information is one of the key things that you should be looking for, managing and leveraging it correctly are your next task. If your are asking for a postal address of your subscribers, think about what you can do with it? Special offers based on city or or local store to the customer. But think before asking for this information; If your not going to be running promotions like this do you really need this information?

How well do you know your data?

Understanding clicks, opens, bounces purchase history and user complaints is one of the most important things in the world of email marketing. Looking at all of these factors will help marketers understand several key things about their marketing programs and the measurements of success.

How well do you use what you know?

Many marketers have taken to highly personalized communications with their subscriber base. This is a key foundation of building a successful program. Each offer has to feel like it was specially generated and thought about "just for me", your consumer.

Real life Example of mis-targeting [names have been changed to protect the marketer responsible]:

As a loyal consumer of [major pet food] company I decided to subscribe to their special offers for my dog, at registration time I answered several questions like the sex of my pet (male), breed and that he had been neutered (Bob Barker would be proud). After several months of highly customized newsletters relating to the health benefits of the food I was feeding my dog, how it was helping them and the special discounts I was eligible for as a loyal reader. I received a message that could not be further from my profile. The advertisement was customized with my dog name and breed, it went on to explaining how I should take care to feed my dog a special diet during his pregnancy… you'll recall I gave the preferences of a male, Golden Retriever that was neutered earlier… When I notified [major pet food]'s marketing people about a possible problem with their customization and that it was mis-targeted to me and possibly others, I was told "We sent the same message to everyone regardless of their preferences. You were meant to get that message".

Net result of exchange:

I am now a happy and loyal customer of [major pet food]'s competitor, happily receiving highly customized targeted adds that listen and respect my preferences for my lifestyle and my dog. I also share this story with others when they ask my opinion on the products from said pet food supplier.

Lesson:

Use the data you have, you asked for it for a reason, and respect the wishes of your consumers/subscribers and you will build long lasting beneficial and mutual relationship…

It only takes one bad experience to lose a loyal customer.

How well do you listen to your consumer?

Warning: New Storm Virus (e-card) messages

Please be aware of a new versions of the "Storm Virus" (e-card) messages that are currently circulating through email. For more information on the storm virus please read this.

Please do not click on the links in messages like this one. Please note the text may vary.

*****************************************

Dear Member,

Are you ready to have fun at Online Hook-Up.

Member Number: 568653417911
Your Login ID: user7413
Temp Password ID: gd809

Please keep your account secure by logging in and changing your login info.

Click here to enter our secure server: http:// 65.186.67.88/

Thank You,
Technical Services
Online Hook-Up

Quick tips for subject lines

The next time your sitting around thinking about subject lines for your email campaign remember to review SubscriberMail's - Seven Dirty Words (PDF) you should never use in your subject line. This list contains phrases like: "Lower your mortgage rate", "Lowest insurance rates", "As seen on Oprah" and numerous single word subject lines.

Quick tips for subject lines:

• Short and descriptive - Explaining what the message contains in less then 30-45 characters
• Eye catching - A sense of urgency for the message
• Use personalization - Build relationships with your consumers

Email Marketing Experts

Thanks to BeRelevent! for inviting EmailKarma to the Email Marketing Experts Feed Network.

Check out the other great email marketing resources in this network:

• Tamara's Email Marketing Best Practices Blog
• The Email Wars
• Persuasive E-marketing
• Denise Cox's blog ...email matters!
• No man is an iland
• WhiteNoise

Microsoft announces changes to x-list-unsubscribe

Recently on a call with Microsoft there was discussions around the functions of the Unsubscribe Header, which lead to the diagnosing of a possible bug regarding this x-header. The header is defined in RFC 2369.

This x-header is designed to send an unsubscribe request to predefined email of the senders and trigger removal of the users address. However in the Windows Live Hotmail – classic environment this was not happening as anticipated by Microsoft. The sender was added to the consumer’s blocked senders list but there was no trigger sent to the senders unsubscribe system.

Microsoft has informed senders that this bug has been addressed and the fix will be included in update released next week.

In addition, a Microsoft spokes person has provided the following updates regarding the list-unsubscribe x-header:

• Both Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail Classic support list-unsubscribe URL and mailto
• Unsubscribe only appears when the user has marked the sender as safe sender or they are deemed safe by our service, aka a “known sender” - When the sender has been added to address book
  
• Unsubscribe no longer results in the address being added to your block list, but:
  
• Unsubscribe results in the address being removed from your safe list
• Unsubscribe using “mailto” results in us messaging the user that “We've asked the sender to remove you from this mailing list.”

Note as with all services, this will evolve over time. We are continually looking to improve the user experience, provide increased level of user personalization while rewarding best of breed mailers committed to online safety and working to stem the tide of deceptive email and spam.”

This is good news for senders publishing the required x-List-Unsubscribe header as one of the previous actions on the unsubscribe button was to add you to the users block list. This effectively prevented users from resubscribing at a later time to your mailings without first removing you from the blocked list. This change will now remove that limitation.

How Do We Reach The Non-Listeners?

Today in MediaPost's Email Insider Loren brings us four ideas on how to raise the bar for commercial email businesses and how to separate yourself from the grey mailers that know what the best practises are but are unwilling to or are afraid to change their practises to keep up.

How Do We Reach The Non-Listeners?
by Loren McDonald, Wednesday, Aug 15, 2007 12:00 PM ET

Loren discusses these fours ideas:

• Get your own house in order - The idea being: If you lead they will follow
  
• Reach out to others - Think of the broader audience and how to reach them, think of the next generation of email marketers, teach these Best Practises to them before they graduate.
  
• Fire the recalcitrant client - Those that don't keep up get left behind... Get rid of those that lag behind or refuse to change, it's simple survival of the fittest. Protect your brand first and your other clients will appreciate it.
  
• Keep the door open - Help those that need it when they are ready. People and business are not lost, they can be reformed and taught the way.

Some really great ideas and some food for thought.

Q&A: Dropping opens with consistent clicks?

Q: Dear EmailKarma,

I'm working with a client that is concerned that they are starting to see delivery issues with their regular email messages. They’re seeing a decrease in open rates of the course of the year – they didn’t see a decrease during the summer last year so they’re looking for some insight into why this trend might be occurring. My initial thoughts are increased number of email clients that default to disabling images. I believe this might be the case because the Click Through Rates are consistent. Any thoughts?

********

A: Your right in thinking that open rates are down due to the image blocking software that many ISPs, especially webmail providers, have been employing. Hotmail has released Live mail and has been rolling this out to their users around the world (Microsoft also released Outlook 2007 with images blocking features), Yahoo mail is in Beta and is rolling out to members, and AOL has disabled images in their latest web client.

All of these factors are leading to lower open rates, but this is not a bad thing and here is why:

1. Realistic view of readers as these individuals are actively calling/asking for your images
2. Provides insights into subject lines, relevance and targeting effectiveness
   

Here are a number of things you can do to help with your opens:

1. Remember "Add to Address book" language during the; opt-in, the first welcome message and every message afterwards.
2. Treat consistent openers differently then your infrequent/never openers. These are your loyal viewers and should be treated as such.
3. Test subject lines on your subscribers. Try a minimum of 3 different subject lines against ~10% of list to each one [total 30% of list], send the winner to the remainder of your list [remaining 70%]
4. Read the Email Open Rates Guide from Email Marketing Reports.

Do you have a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact.

Q&A: with Email Karma

Q: EmailKarma,

I'm helping some folks who are launching a alternative lifestyles website (not porn) and I wanted to let them know what they're potentially up against regarding email delivery. Would the word "lesbian" trigger blocking or triggers with major ISPs?

A: Generally the use of individual keywords will not cause your message to be delivered to the junk folder or just end up missing, it really takes a number of these types of words to have an impact. Spamassassin doesn't even have the word lesbian in their current SARE adult spam rules. Also working with an eRSP and an ESP will help get past some of these hurdles and achieve a higher level of delivery as these services will already be participating in ISP Whitelists and Feed Back loops.

The Keys to email delivery are rapidly becoming; Authentication, Reputation and Accreditation. Building and maintain a clean list will also be a big factor in a successful campaign.

Got a question for EmailKarma? Email them to contact or leave a comment.

What do you need to know about PIPEDA?

Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is Canada's Privacy Law designed for the protection of personal information in the hands of private sector organizations and provides guidelines for the collection.

PIPEDA is built on ten key privacy ideas;

1. Accountability of the organization
2. Identifying Purposes for which personal information is collected at or before the time the information is collected.
3. The knowledge and consent of the individual are required
4. The collection of personal information shall be limited to that which is necessary for the purposes identified by the organization
5. Limiting Use, Disclosure, and Retention. Personal information shall be retained only as long as necessary for the fulfilment of those purposes.
6. Personal information shall be as accurate, complete, and up-to-date
7. Personal information shall be protected by security safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the information.
8. An organization shall make readily available to individuals specific information about its policies and practises
   
9. An individual shall be informed of the existence, use and disclosure of his or her personal information and shall be given access to that information.
10. An individual shall be able to address a challenge concerning compliance with the above principles

For additional information and a Compliance Checklist check the PIPEDA Checklist.

Successful List building

Today Ken Magill published this story about Bath and Body's email acquisition program and how it grew to 10 million subscribers in less then 2 years.

What you can learn from this story:

1. Knowing your target audience is critical.
2. Giving the right incentive and call to action is important. To collect you must print and returning their email to your retail location.
   
3. Getting the customer to return leads to additional sales: First purchase in store is used to collect the shoppers email address and other details, return visit to collect incentive results in additional purchases.
4. Retail bye-in: By having customers return the printed email offer store managers immediately feel the ROI and benefit from working with a program geared to drive retail sales.

Finding a successful recipe like this and maximizing it's effectiveness are keys to building email. The next trick is sending relevant email to 10 million subscribers and staying out of the junk folder.

Building reationships

A good way, and an easy way, to build relationships with your subscribers... Send them a birthday greeting... This year I received four such cards (one actually a physical snail mail card) from companies that I'm a regular subscriber to.

This makes a subscriber remember your brand and appreciate the 'relationship' that they have with you.

The best part is this can be an automated message, but the thought it nice. Kind of like saying thank you to a customer.

A little thought and time to remember your subscribers goes a long way and remind them that they are not just a piece or electronic data in your companies computers some where.

Thanks for remembering me:

Casino Niagara (Postal card)
Dairy Queen (2 for 1 coupon)
Jack FM
680 News

Gmail explains why you should report spam?

Gmail's official blog reciently posted a "Thanks for all the spam reports" to users for using the Report spam, and not Spam buttons. Here are their reasons you should be using these buttons:

Reason #1: It gets the spam out of your Inbox and keeps what is truly spam separate from any non-spam messages you just want to delete.

Reason #2: When our automated system sees a lot of people marking a particular email as spam, it starts blocking similar emails pretty quickly.

Reason #3: When a spammer figures out how to bypass our system, lots of spam reports start flowing in, and we see that pretty much immediately. We react as quickly as we can to these events, developing and testing new code.

Tools like the "Report Spam" button were created by ISPs as a form for consumers to help them determine the difference between legitimate email and spam. This voting mechanism allows for the consumer to express to their provider the types of email that they consider to be spam, ISPs listen to these users (when there are enough of them) and block mail according to the expressed interest of their members. Sending relevant and recognizable to your subscribers may just prevent misappropriate spam reports from happening to your newsletter.

E-mail crowned king of marketing media

Many times you hear people talking about the "death of email" and how social networking and Web 2.0 sites and tools are going to make email a thing of the past. With news like this it proves that email will still be kicking around for a long time.

Source: IT Business Canada: E-mail crowned king of marketing media
8/10/2007 6:00:00 AM by Neil Sutton

What's your reputation?

Email reputation is currently buzzing all over the eMarketing landscape, in fact it have been for over two years.

Mediapost talks about five factors, or tricks as they are referred to, that cause your reputation to suffer. The problem is that many corporation's use these techniques everyday and many believe that is an acceptable practise. Here are some ideas to prevent abusing these solutions yet still have the benefits:

~ Email is inexpensive and has huge returns (DMA $49 ROI for each 1$ spent) so it is abused by many, this has cause organizations like CAUCE and MAAWG to lead the initiative to end spam. Organic growth and proper ad placement will build a much more targeted and active subscriber base. For more ideas on list maintenance read "Keeping your lists clean".

~ Before subscribing and assuming that your current users are interested in your new newsletters promote them via your existing communication channels and ask users to subscribe to your new publication. This is especially important if your new newsletter has different branding then their current subscriptions. Nothing damages reputation faster then a could dozen spam complaints against a new newsletter.

~ Over punctuation is very common in email. Remember your email etiquette - ALL CAPS is like shouting - Small fonts are hard to read and extra punctuation can distort your message. Remember the proper uses for punctuation like the question mark, exclamation mark and other punctuation.

~ Burying phrases in your privacy policy or user agreements that state users give permission to use their email for communications is another good way to damage your reputation. Think about this from the subscriber point of view, or even better ask from your mom's point of view "Would mom realize that she is going to get email?"

Monitor your email with these services offered by Habeas or Return Path.

Image rich emails

Back in May the Email Experience Council wrote about Image suppression in the web clients for AOL.com and AIM.com and how you should expect to see a drop in open rates because of this.

Almost every web mail provider suppresses images for users by default now, and some email clients have been for years, and marketers need to understand how this will effect their communications to their clients. Your team should be coding each and every email with the idea that your images will not display. Use some of the tips provided in "Now you see them, now you don't" to help with image planning in email.

MarketingSherpa recently promoted a case study focusing on this exact issue. This study provided four key guide lines for using images in email resulted in a 41% increase in clickthroughs.

Email Marketing Reports also has a great resource for image related suppression.

Look to the tools provided by email Reputation Service Providers (eRSPs); Habeas, Return Path and Pivotal Veracity for content rendering test tools.

Placing Email Delivery Into Perspective

Today I was featured in ThinData's Email Strategies monthly newsletter, where I talk about "Four Critical Email Marketing Imperatives".

Here is the introduction to the article:

Last month ThinData published The Marketer's Guide to Successful Email Delivery; a white paper that helps marketers increase the number of email messages reaching their target audiences. Because The Marketer's Guide establishes best practices and includes an action checklist it is a strong support tool for marketers addressing email delivery challenges head on.

But where does The Marketer's Guide - and the delivery issues it addresses - fit in relation to other critical email marketing processes? Here we identify four key imperatives common to all complete email campaigns. We also highlight some recommended actions. Read the full article

Past strategies newsletters are also available here.

Are you overmailing?

The politics of spamming
8/7/2007 6:00:00 AM
by Nestor Arellano

IT Business has a story today about commercial email inundating the inbox of subscribers. Not only are companies competing with their competitors for the perfect placement in the inbox but they are stepping on their own toes to do it.

Michael Peddemore, president of Wizard IT, is quoted "the flooding of so-called “grey area spam” is so rampant that some recipients receive up to 20 offerings a day from the same marketing company". Grey area spam referring to email communications where consent is given or inferred but abused by a mailer.

This type of activity can potentially cause subscribers to declare "Email Bankruptcy" due to solicited and personal communications burying them under a flood of email that they will never get to.

Suggestions on preventing the overmailed feeling:

• Make your opt-in clear to your subscribers
  
• Respect the wishes of your users - make it easy to unsubscribe from your communications, all of them not just one at a time (use a preference centre to achieve this)
  
• Employ a recency frequency strategy for user contact (i.e. no more then once a day or 3 times a week)
• Build a publishing calendar with mailings tailored to user preferences
• Use dynamic content to build a custom newsletter tailored for each user, instead of sending a separate message for each subscription or segment.
  

Are you feeling overmailed or do you want to share some suggestions about preventing overmailing?

Share them with us by email at contact or leave a comment.

Switching Email Vendors

Carolyn Gardner over at Sitebrand posted a note today about the issues experienced when switching Email Service Providers and it's effect on your delivery. She points out that "with an increased rate of deliverability, you may also see an increase in the number of spam or abuse complaints".

This is very true and having worked with several different marketers in the past that have done just this here are some ideas to help with the pains you may experience;

• New IPs = New Reputation
• This is not always a good thing, having no IP reputation is in many cases just as bad as a poor IP reputation. To minimize the impact of this; keep the same mailing address, start with a ramp up program for your emails with your new provider, and consider some of the ideas discussed here for "keeping your list clean"
  
• New ESP = New Bounce Processing
  
• You may see your bounce rates changing as each ESP interprets inbound bounce messages received from an ISP differently. There are organizations working to correct this behaviour across the industry on both the sending and receiving sides.
  
• Different ESP reputation and contacts:
  
• Many of the large ESPs employ people to manage relationships with ISPs, Blocklists and mailers to ensure the continuing flow of email traffic from their mailing partners to the consumer.
• Different Reputation partners
• Many ESPs have partnered with one specific reputation provider, each of these providers has a different reach. Most ESPs will work with all reputations providers on request.
• Different campaign metrics:
• A click is a click right? Sure it should be, but some ESPs a click is also an open, find out how your new provider does this to help with your ongoing program metrics and measurements. Join EMACs to be part of the discussion around standardized reporting.

Switch providers recently and want to share some suggestions or pain points, Share them with us by email at contact or leave a comment.

Bounce handling

There are a number of different schools of thought on bounce handling, but it is important to understand that not all bounces are created equal...

Lets start with what is a bounce and then go into how to handle and read them.

A hard bounce (or permanent failure) is one which is not likely to be resolved by resending the message in the current form. English translation: “Do not try to deliver this message again as it currently exists”. This could mean a number of things, here are a couple examples:

1. We don't like this content - change it before you try again - Change your content before resending to these users, but they are potentially still active and wanting your mail.
   
2. The email server could not deliver your email message. "550 User Unknown" - This user doesn't exist - check the user's email before you try this message again - This type of notice should also permanently remove the bad address from your mailing list
   
3. We don't like this IP or mail server or domain - your likely blacklisted (check here), go away until this is fixed - until this listing is corrected you should suspend mailings to these users.

A soft bounce (or transient failure) is one in which the message as sent is valid, but persistence of some temporary condition has caused abandonment or delay of attempts to send the message. English translation: “Try to deliver this message again, but later”, here are a couple examples:

1. The email server is temporarily unable to deliver your message to the recipient email address. Example: "Connection timed out."
2. The email server is temporarily unable to deliver your message to the recipient email address because of a DNS problem. Example: "Host is unreachable"
3. The email server is temporarily unable to deliver your message to the recipient email address because the recipient's email box is full. Example: "Mailbox over quota"
4. The email server could not deliver your message to the recipient because the message size is too large. Example: "Exceeded maximum inbound message size"

Care to read more about the enhanced bounce codes - See these RFC documents;
SMTP Service Extensions
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Enhanced Mail System Status Codes

Now you see them, now you don't

Here are some tips for coding emails that are visually pleasing even without images turned on:

1. JPG’s are best for larger graphics that consist primarily of images, such as a masthead photograph.
   
2. GIF’s are perfect for smaller items which contain less colour complexity and/or text
   
3. Avoid saving anything in a format other than JPG or GIF. Though you might be tempted to save an image as a PNG for the sake of maintaining opacity percentages - they work, but your file size will be huge.
   
4. In either Photoshop or Image Ready, be sure to use the "save for web" feature.
5. Tinker with it to see how low you can bring down the percentage before the image becomes distorted, the difference between saving a JPG at 80% quality in Photoshop as opposed to 40% is usually negligible.
6. Add 'alt' tags with descriptive text to your messages - these can help convey what the user should see in their place.
7. Add the 'height' and 'width' variables to all images. This creates a square place holder of the image and maintains the shape of your newsletter.
8. Lastly don't forget to ask your subscribers to "Add to address book" in each and every message you send to them. Try using a tool like this to generate the proper instructions for your users across multiple email clients.

Got any more rendering and coding tips? Share them with us by email at contact or leave a comment.

Damn Spam - The New Yorker

Damn Spam
The losing war on junk e-mail.
by Michael Specter

This article talks about the origins or spam, the first being sent across the ARPANET by DEC in 1978, and moves on to modern spam related issues like the Robert Soloway case. Other topics covered include Bayesian filter origins and their effectiveness, the Spamhaus Project and the growing threat of Image spam and professional virus writers.

This articles features quotes and facts from; John Scarrow - the general manager of anti-spam technologies at Microsoft, Matt Sergeant - the chief anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs and Brad Templeton -The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s chairman.

Defiantly worth the read