7 Mistakes Beginning Email Marketers Make

Purchasing a list
Paying $5 for a million email addresses may seem like a good investment, but just think about how those addresses may have been obtained. Most likely they were harvested or collected off the Internet from people who never intended to receive messages from you. Anti-address harvesters put out honey-pot addresses out there with the intent of being picked up by the bad guys. When you send these honey-pot addresses a message, you are caught and will have to spend time and resources getting out of a jam. Nothing will get your mail server blacklisted faster than using a list of harvested addresses.
Sending through your ISP
Even if your address list is fairly modest, say 1,000 to 10,000 addresses, sending through an ISP's SMTP server is not going to work very well. Your ISP is not in business to send mail for you; they are in business to provide Internet access and personal mail management for their subscribers. They place strict limits one how many messages you can send because they must protect their reputation for all of their customers. The larger the ISP, the more restrictive they are. If you send bulk messages and are inadvertently labeled a spammer, you will have a hard time reestablishing the ISP's trust.
Not managing failed addresses
Addresses degrade over time. As your list ages, old addresses fail, people change jobs or ignore old accounts. Recipient mail clients can monitor the number of failed addresses you attempt to send to their domain and if the percentage is high, they will start blocking you, or listing you as a spammer. Failed messages, also called bounced emails, need to be cleaned out of your list right away to ensure that the percentage of failed messages in your list remains small. Sign up for feedback loops and find a program that can manage bounces for you automatically.
Failing to honor unsubscribe requests
The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 says you have ten days to honor unsubscribe requests. Email best practices however, say you should honor them immediately. Ten days is a long time to keep sending someone email messages they don't want. Failing to remove them will make them reach for their "this is spam" button, which will reflect negatively on your sender reputation. The CAN-SPAM law was recently updated to require that the request for removal be a one-click process. It also requires you to remove them from the list regardless of how they contact you. However they notify you, do it right away.
Not providing useful email content
The best way to collect subscribers and keep them on your list is to provide useful content. Make sure that you deliver what you promise on your sign up page, if you plan to send an email daily, weekly, or monthly, stick to that schedule. If you have multiple options, make sure you provide a subscription management area where users can decide when and how to receive your newsletters. If your message fails to deliver what you promise, you will see an increase in unsubscribe requests, or worse, spam complaints.
Neglecting to test the message
You spend a lot of time crafting the perfect message. If you neglect to test it to see how it looks in a wide variety of clients, you could be sending out a message you regret. Set up a test list of mail accounts inside and outside your network that you control. See not only how the message looks in various clients, but see whether or not they arrive in the inbox. If a whole domain always puts your message in the junk folder, your message or your mail server has problems. Testing can help you isolate what those problems are so you can address them quickly.
Failing to follow instructions
There are plenty of experts available to offer advice on how to successfully send your messages. You don't have to make all these mistakes on your own in order to learn how to send effective email campaigns. Take the time to learn from others who have already run into the same problems you will at some point. If someone gives you advice, try it out. Maintaining your email reputation is of utmost importance to running effective email marketing campaigns.

Copyright 2009, Pathfinder Email Consulting

Email Marketing is a Tool, not a Goal

Many people seem to think that they can get into email marketing and make money. Of course the people who sell email lists to unsuspecting Internet users out to make a quick buck do make a lot of money off email marketing scams. Legitimate email marketing however, is a means to an end, not the end itself.

First, you must have some reason to send email to people. Buying a list of names and emailing them will not only get you blacklisted, it will make you worse off than you were before. Your email reputation will be tarnished. Once you are on the blacklist's radar, it is harder to stay off the lists. The best way to get people to give you their email address so that you can continue to email them is to give them something valuable.

The value might be information, it might be a free download, it might be advice on how to email people. Whatever it is, they must actively want to receive this information from you. Make it easy for them to sign up. You can start blog like this one and give them RSS feeds. RSS makes it nice and easy to get content off the web, but for selling, nothing beats email.

Find out how to make a simple subscribe form and point it to a database that you manage. Most web hosting companies let you configure any number of databases like MySQL or PHP. Collecting email address via a webform is pretty easy. You can collect all sorts of information on your subscribers, but it is best to make the form short and sweet so subscribers don't feel like they are getting the third degree.

Most importantly, confirm the subscription, this protects you from signing up bogus emails, and the subscriber from having someone else who is pretending to be them from signing up. Hopefully, you will take things slowly and actually think about what you have to offer before you try marketing it to people.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

Consider Ignoring AOL and Yahoo!

The two biggest contributing factors affecting email delivery are the number of failed emails that reside in your email list and the number of spam complaints you get when you send emails. ISPs like AOL and Yahoo use this data when you send bulk email, to either slow you down or halt delivery altogether. It might be better to get rid of these types of addresses from your email list altogether.

Most people have more than one email account that includes a business email, a couple of throw away accounts and maybe one well preserved email address that they only give to close friends and family. The throw away accounts are used specifically for signing up for possibly less than savory newsletters and shady email offers. I use them when I want information for which I have to register so that my good personal account and my business account don't become polluted.

Other people do this too and they use free online email accounts to manage them. If your email list contains a large number of free email addresses, Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, maybe you are not reassuring enough on your website about how you plan to use the email addresses you collect. If there is any question about where the subscriber's email is going to end up, they will likely pull out a throw away and sign up for that. Regardless of how they got on your list, these types of addresses are going to be less responsive by default.

Free email accounts like AOL, Yahoo etc. also have pretty tight spam filters. If you are not careful, your email address may end up in the junk folder with a bunch of SPAM messages. Most users do not carefully sift their junk folders unless they are waiting for something important. These clients have a handy button that can mark every single email message in their junk folder as SPAM, which is a mark on your email reputation. Your email message simply gets lumped in with a bunch of other obvious junk, but the ISP doesn't care about that. Asking the subscriber to add your from address helps, but most people probably do take that extra step.

Even though AOL is now free, most people using AOL are the same people who have been using AOL for a long time and like it. In my experience, although there are many exceptions, the vast majority of AOL users are less savvy about the technology they are using. AOL makes it easy to label incoming email as SPAM and many people take advantage of that. Even if they requested information from you, a single lapse in memory could be a black mark on your email reputation. Signing up for the AOL feedback loop helps you keep track of the percentages of your emails that end up on the list, but it doesn't take very many complaints to slip of the AOL whitelist.

Given the fact that these types of addresses are frequently used as throw away email address and are often used by less savvy or disinterested subscribers, it may be a good idea to wean them from your list. You do not have to eliminate them altogether, but maybe raise the bar for continued inclusion based on past responsiveness. If you track click throughs or opens you can make that one of the filtering criteria for sending these types of addresses. Cutting down one AOL, Yahoo, and Hotmail emails from your list may help with overall email message delivery.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting