Do you know who's killing your email marketing?

Imagine you take a trip to your post box down the road today to pick up the mail. To your surprise, you find nothing. Not one word. All you see is just an empty hole in the wall with zip in it. Annoyance would be the prime emotion here. Maybe even a dollop of disappointment.

But what if you find out that all that airy space exists simply because the post office decided to send all your mail back? Now that would get you in a bit of a boil, wouldn't it? Frothing at the mouth, wouldn't you want to tear all those bespectacled post office workers into little
vulture-sized meat bites?

And then what if I told you that your email marketing business is going the same way? What if you suddenly learned that the email newsletters you'd subscribed to are now doing the boomerang dance? What if you're an email marketer and your subscriber isn't even getting your mail? What if he's just getting a stripped down version of it?

Is that smoke coming out of your ears?

The Wild West Lives Again!
In the Wild West the rules were simple. If I didn't like you, I'd shoot you. Email isn't dropping to the floor quite that quickly, but there is a definite pattern evolving that you should be aware of. Someone has put your email marketing on a poison drip, and by golly, if you ignore it, you're one dead puppy! Read how Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are systematically working to weed out HTML mail and what you need to do to minimise your damage.

Who's Paying for Whose Fault?
Spammers are the baddies, and spammers don't care. Bandwidth can span the breadth and depth of the Grand Canyon and it won't make any difference to them. You can be sure they'll find a way to top it up with their junk. It was also obvious, even several years ago, that control of spammers was improbable. They know very well what they are doing. All they have to do is go to an offshore provider when anti-spam legislation is passed. What's to stop them? As long as there is one country in the world that will allow spammers to send their poison, they will.

Does anyone really believe that every ISP on the network is going to spend the resources to closely examine the specific content of each and every large-scale email transmission to see if it's okay or not?

The answer has to be no, since this doesn't avoid the cost of spam in the long term. It simply transfers it from a cost of bandwidth to a cost of administration.

The harder commercial email pushes, the harder the network will respond by pushing back. "Big" email is a lame duck -- and will soon be a stone cold dead one. Even with filters in place, my email account bulges with mail I didn't ask for, and would never reply to. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) on the other hand, are watching this rainstorm with increasing concern. Every day, the volume of email threatens to blow the dam, and they're not going to sit back and take it.

How an ISP's Worry Becomes Your Headache
Bandwidth costs money. The more email you get and send, the more it's costing your ISP. They can't charge you more (or may not want to charge you), and so the easiest way out is to send your email à la Elvis: Return to sender!

The biggest offender here is HTML email that clogs up the system with a reasonable amount of imagery. It's the graphics that generates business for you and me, but it's also this very factor that is clogging up the pipe. This has led several ISPs to take some very radical decisions that border on telling you what you can and cannot read.

A Growing Menace Called Filters
Filters that are easy to implement seem to beat the system, so that's the option that many ISPs consider first. In an attempt to control the traffic, they simply install cheap and nasty systems that send any mail that's considered 'spam' right back to where it came from. This seems noble until you consider the following. These filters may be stopping legitimate mail from entering your mailbox.

If mom sent you a mail with a word which the filters pick up but don't like: Bounce, bounce. It would go bouncing back! If you had the word 'search engines' in it, maybe they'd decide that word signified spam. Kaboom! It's back to where it came from. Suddenly, your business that depends on the mail getting through is being vetted by an unasked police patrol run by goons. You're not getting across to your customers, and even worse, your customers' mail may not be reaching you.

What's worse is that as an email marketer, you would tend to take for granted that you would get an "undeliverable" note when this happens. I understand it's not always true; you can send out thousands of messages and remain blissfully ignorant of their eventual fate.

Why HTML-Based Marketing Will Be Easier To Kill
Macromedia Flash went through a fashionable phase and had to be dumped in favour of good ol' HTML. HTML, while great on the web, is a pain in the neck in your inbox.

To counter this, many a software developer is seriously working out ways to have HTML-like effects within your email without the code and bandwidth that goes with it. This software, though available today, is quite expensive and not a very viable option except for larger companies. The rest of us have to contend with the inescapable fact that any email over a certain size will be treated as an HTML file and fair game for the intrepid filters to play 'shoot the ducky.'

HTML will always be bulky, and is already denied or stripped by some carriers and destination ISPs, so it will always be a hazard. Some companies and email marketers have decided they are cutting out HTML altogether. It's too much of a risk when you don't even know whether it's been dumped or stripped.

How Can You Go Past This 'Doomsday Scenario'?
Two possibilities: text and online HTML.

Text is faster, and has stood the test of time. But it's devoid of colour and formatting -- and more tedious to read. The better bet is to use HTML to link back to the website or online email newsletter. Businesses that get their customers trained to fetch their newsletter off the web will have fewer problems because they'll have few occasions when they will have to send emails out to their customers -- and then only very short notices or informative "drip feeds".

The kind of email you would then send would rarely have the kind of signature that causes the spam filters to scream. Most of these filters are weighted, and there are very few stand-alone telltales that send email into instant oblivion.

My guess is that small emails, even if numerous, will escape filter security, because it requires a certain minimum amount of text to make a spam offer. Emails, smaller than this minimum will probably not be checked at all, owing to sheer volume.

The Hero Doesn't Die In The End
The saddest part of this whole scenario is that people like you, me and a dog named Spammer are all trying to achieve the same thing -- bulk up the profits. And in doing so, we are all part of the gloomy picture. But don't despair.

Unlike you, Mr Spammer doesn't want to be traceable. You do, because you're legit. Make use of your legitimacy, and drive your customers back to your online newsletter or website.

And simultaneously drive the spam merchant out of business!

Next Step: Read more Internet Marketing and Website articles.Create your own internet marketing strategy using these tactics.

©2001-2008 Psychotactics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.Wouldn't you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas? Find simple, yet electrifying ideas, on copywriting, public speaking, marketing strategies, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com/ today and judge for yourself.

Become a Legitimate Emailer

As mentioned previously, email marketing is black and white, you either do it correctly, or you don't. There are seven things you must do to set your self apart from the email marketing wannabes.

Grow your list naturally
Sure, this is hard to do, but it will pay big dividends with establishing and maintaining your email reputation. A purchased list may have a collection of email addresses interested in what you have to offer. It may contain people who opted to receive information on whatever it is you are trying to sell. But, if they did not agree on a sign up form on your website, chances are, once you send them an email, they will not care about all that and will instintively reach for their report as spam button.

According to Direct Magazine "the Inbox providers, such as Yahoo, AOL and Gmail, all use the percentage of people who hit the "report spam" button for a particular sender as the No. 1 gage in considering whether to deliver incoming email to users' inboxes or not." If you send to a list with a high percentage of purchased emails, your spam rating is going to be higher. If you feel you must supplement your list with some purchased email addresses, consider easing them into your production list and defintately consider inviting them to opt-in before you send your first real email message.

Honor opt-outs immediately
The CAN-SPAM law gives you ten days to honor unsubscribe requests, but you want to do it immediately. Most of the people who unsubscribe or opt-out of your email message would be disappointed if they continued to receive ten more messages after they opted-out. The way the register their disappointment is by reaching for the mark as spam button, which will negatively affect your email reputation.

De-spam your message
Test all email messages before they go out, against a spam checker. Spam assasin and others offer tools that can grade the message to ensure it is not too spammy. The danger is that your message will be delivered to the junk mail box and be marked as spam in bulk. Most email clients have an option to mark all the messages in the junk folder and report them all as spam. The recipient never even sees the message, but your reputation suffers.

Personalize your message
Most bulk email marketing programs allow you to personalize your message. People like seeing email messages that are addressed to them specifically. The more you make your email message a correspondence, the more responsive they are to what you are offering. Personalizing also ensures that the content is something that interests or pertains to the recipient.

Segment your list
Tracking recipient behaviour can help you segment your list by whatever criteria you happen to collect. Segmenting allows you to send your messages in smaller chucks, making recipient ISPs happier and less likely to get on your case. Jeanne Jennings at ClickZ has an excellent series about list segmentation and all the things you can do with the information you gather.

Monitor delivery
Knowing what is going on with your messages can help you strategize your overal marketing goals. You used to never know if your email reached its destination unless you are tracking opens and click throughs, metrics which are better at showing you trends rather than actually providing you solid data on deliverability. Sign up with Delivery Monitor and find out exactly what is going on with your bulk email campaigns.

Get accredited
Finally, you should accredit your email to help the recipient know that the email you send is from a trustworthy, legtitimate email marketer. SuretyMail works directly with all the top ISPs which account for the vast majority of delivery issues. When you send accredited email, ISPs and spam blockers know that your email is legitimate. Of course you have to do all the other things we mentioned and more in order to get accredited, but you with SuretyMail you have extra assurance that your email messages are reaching the inbox.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

Ride the Legitimate Email Marketing Wave

Email marketing is like riding a wave, you have to hit it just right to keep moving forward. With today's fast moving technology the wave may pass you by before you can even paddle to the starting point. Here are three tips for keeping abreast of email marketing technology.

Don't linger in the past
Just because you have been doing email marketing since 1997 doesn't mean you are still legitimate. Email marketing in the past was cutting edge and only a few people took real advantage of it. If you are still doing things the way they did them last century, you will find yourselves on the wrong side of legitimate email marketing.

Settle into the present
Now that you have caught up with the latest technology, prepare youself to ride the wave. The current best practices are what work best for legitimate email marketing. If you continue with some dinosaur technologies that you can't let go of, the wave will leave you behind. If you jump too soon toward new technology, you are headed for a wipe out.

Look to the future
While you don't want to jump on new technology too soon, you do want to look ahead to see what is coming. The government may throw up roadblocks and other obstructions at any time. Keep track of where the industry is going so you are not caught by surprise. Keep your eye on new technology, or even participate in its development.

Like a surfer, you must maintain balance as you traverse the water. Hanging ten in email marketing will ensure your continued success.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

Black and White

Email marketing is black and white, you either do it correctly, or you do not. There are plenty of companies that do it "mostly" correctly, but if they miss one element, then they are not doing it right.

For example, if you have a clean, confirmed opt-in email list of highly qualified customers to which you send a newsletter once per month. You stick to your schedule, you only send the newsletter and no other promotions not previously agreed upon; in essence everything is perfect, but you fail to honor unsubscribe requests, you're doing it wrong.

If you keep the law, yet offend in one point, you are guilty of all. The judge is not the federal government, nor your IT department, the judge is the email recipient. They do not care how carefully you crafted your message or how many rules you follow, if the email is not right for them, they will judge you and send you to oblivion. If they can punish you along the way, they will do that too.

The problem of course is there is no standard. What if you honor unsubscribes within ten days, just like the CAN-SPAM act says. If you send monthly, you should not have a problem. If you send daily however, you could have a huge problem with someone who unsubscribes. You know that CAN-SPAM gives you ten days, but the recipient may not. When they see the next email message from you, they will simply reach for the report as spam button. If you get a few of those you are in trouble.

The law governing legitimate email marketers is email best practices; an ever-changing and ambiguous set of guidelines that are not set in stone. The lowest common denominator is the CAN-SPAM act of 2003, which allows you to send out spam to any email address you happen to have, one time. Some of the provisions of the law require that you:

• Include an unsubscribe method in the email message
• Honor unsubscribes within ten days
• Include your physical address in each email message

That is all there is to the CAN-SPAM act, but following the act will not keep you from being labled as a spammer. Some of the best practice guidlines admonish you to do the following as well:

• Confirm subscriptions
• Honor unsubscribe requests immediately
• Personalize your email message
• Include the email address the recipeint used to sign up in the message
• Clearly identify yourself in th email
• Do not use a no-reply in the from address

That is a small list of things that will help prevent you from being labled a spammer, but there are plenty of additional tactics you can apply to your email message to improve the responses you get to your email. Ultimately, it is the recipient who decides your fate. If you can please most of the people most of the time you should be able to effectively reach your audience.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

P.S. Please share your best practices here, the things that you do to improve your chances of making it to the inbox.

The Three Biggest Problems with Email Marketing Today

Spammers
Unsolicited Bulk Emailers are the most obvious contributors to email delivery problems. Their actions negatively impact the Internet on several levels. Each email that is sent, whether delivered or not, takes up processing time on one or more servers. This time is paid for in real dollars by domain hosts and email servers along the entire path of the email delivery cycle. Time spent dealing with spam email result in hours of lost productivity.

There are two types of spammers; those that deliberately want to damage a particular mail server by flooding it with traffic, and those that hope to cash in on someone buying whatever it is they are selling.

The first type of spammer is identified by the goofy messages they send. The subject lines do not make sense and they are obviously spam messages that most people would not read. People who leave their message preview pane on in their browser may see something offensive, or inadvertantly verify their email address through a tracking image, but they will not likely purchase anything from an email like that.

The second type of spam message is a little more sophisticated. They look like legitmate emails, and actutally offer products that many people want. Many of these spam email messages are backed by real companies trying to sell their products or services. The thing that makes the messages spam, or unsolicieted bulk email, is the fact that the recipient never asked for the email, nor consented to receive the email, explicitly or implicitly, the emails just came.

Companies who engage spammers to send UBE on their behalf should be held as accountable as the party actually sending the message. Anti-spam efforts need to focus on drying up the funds that fuel spam behavior if they want to solve the spam problem. End users also have a responsibility to recognize and refrain from buying products sent via spam email messages.

Novice Email Marketers
While not intentionally sending UBE, many novice email marketers engage in spam without even knowing it. As mentioned previously, UBE means unsolicited bulk email and to be considered spam, it must contain both the element of being unsolicited and bulk.

Unsolicited means that the email message was not asked for by the recipient. In many instances your email address is harvested off of the Internet, or guessed at through a dictionary or phonebook attack. Novice marketers who purchase a list from a list broker may or may not end up with a list of emails obtained properly. Even if the list is grown natually, the novice fails to correctly obtatin consent to send email messages.

Bulk email messages are sent en masse to several email addresses at a time. There are many ways to send a message to an entire list of addresses, some are more sophisticated than others. Basic email clients like Outlook allow users to send email using a carbon copy or blind carbon copy to everybody found in the address book. This of course is how many people receive messages from friends and family members.

Consent to receive emails is one of the major points of discussion in the email marketing community. If someone gives you an email address, it does not necessarily mean that they expect you, or want you to email them. The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 failed to address the issue of consent and allows marketers who have access to an email address to send an initial UBE as long as an opt out option is provided.

Some people think that if someone does not opt out, they are implying consent, or opting to receive the message; in the early days of the Internet they may have had a point. Thanks again to spammers, the recipient avoids the opt out option because it can verify to the email harvester that the email address is valid. Legitimate email marketers need to follow a higher standard in obtaining consent.

Failure to adopt best practices
Many email marketers fail to adopt email marketing best practices when sending email to their recipients. Even if email addresses are obtained through explicit consent, and the marketer comply with the CAN-SPAM act, the legitimate email marketer can easily be lumped in with spammers unless they adopt email marketing best practices.

Best practices include.

• Obtaining confirmed consent through a subscription confirmation process
  


• Immediately honoring unsubscribe requests
  


• Maintaining a clean email address list that is free of dead or erroneous email addresses
  


• Removing unresponsive email addresses from the list
  


• Clearly identifying from where the email is sent
  


• Adopting DKIM, SPF and other technologies
  


• Participating in discussions that drive the email marketing industry

The only way for legitimate email marketers to continue to take advantage of all that email marketing offers is to continually improve the way email marketing is done. An effective solution to spam is still in the future.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

How do Spammers Obtain Email Addresses?

Email technology is a good and useful tool for personal and business communications. However, it is being hijacked and tarnished by unscrupulous criminals called spammers. Most people in the world enjoy an email account or two. What people do not like is getting email messages that they do not want or need. This includes spam email of course, but for many people it also includes messages forward from friends and family; things like chain letters and jokes you have read a million times already. Spammers take advantage of uncareful email users who do not use common sense when emailing. The best way to stay spam free is to only give your email to those close to you.

This often backfires however, when your sister-in-law forwards something to you and includes all of her email contacts in the message. Invariably someone will cc someone else who decides to harvest your email to send you spam offers. Novice email users do not realize that their email clients automatically add people to whom they reply to their address book. This means that when your sister-in-law adds her entire email address list to a forwarded message, some of those who receive the email are spammers to whom she has fallen prey.

Separating business and personal emails is a good idea. In business, you will get a lot of spam from business related newsletters for which you sign up. It is pretty much inevitable that you'll eventually get spam to a business account. Many spammers target company address with a dictionary attack, adding all the names ever given to the front part of a company address. Invariably there is a bill@yourcompany.com at your company. Most people want to use email addresses that they remember easily, but it might be a good idea to make them a little more difficult to guess what they are. Add some numbers to the mix and many dictionary attacks will fail.

Posting your email address on a website is a surefire way to get spam. If you have a domain name, you typically have an email address posted somewhere if you want people to reach you via email. There are some handy email obfuscators available that convert your email address to html code. The email will work when clicked, but will not be noticed by the harvesting bots rummaging through your site. Contact web forms can also help eliminate company email addresses getting harvested. Your email is also listed during a whois look-up for your domain. Some domain hosting companies now offer private registration so you don't have to expose your email to the outside world. If someone needs to get a hold of you through your whois record, the hosting company will forward it to you if it seems legitimate.

The fastest way to get spam emails is to accidentally open or respond to a spam email. This will verify to the spammer that your email address is legitimate. It is difficult to tell sometimes who sent an email or where it came from. Spammers will use images to track the message to see if it is open. Even looking at the message in a preview pane will make a trackable image request back to the spammers sever. Once they verify your address is real, they will send you tons more spam, and worse yet, sell your verified email to all their spamming friends.

So what is a soul to do to prevent all this spam? There are several things you can do to eliminate, or at least minimize the dangers. - Separate your real email address from ones you use to sign up for things on the Internet. Only give this email address to close friends or relatives who understand that you don't want to get junk forwarded to you every time they get something forwarded to them.

• Set up a sign up address. This is an address that you use to sign up for offers, newletters, bank accounts, travel sites, and newsletters. Eventually, you may start getting junk to this folder, but if you are careful about the places where you sign up, you can track down and tell where the problem originated and can appeal to the perpetrator to cease. If they do not you may have to report them to a black hole list service or complain to their ISP.
• Set up some additional throw away accounts. These are email accounts for sites where you want to get information for which you have to register, but you know that by registering, you are going to get a bunch of junk. Using this type of address will let you sign up and get the information you need and then move on. You can ignore the account until you need to sign up for something else.
• Turn off the preview pane in your email client. Most of the time you can tell when a message is spam by the from address or the subject line. If you have the preview pane open however, you may end up landing on a spam email and notifying them of the fact that you are a valid address. By keeping the preview pane closed you will be able to delete all the spammy email before you start reading the valid email you receive.

Never buy from a spammer. It only takes one person to purchase a spam product and perpetuate the cycle. The only way the Internet community will stop spam is to make it unprofitable. There are many ideas about how to stop spam, none of which have been widely adopted or implemented. It will still be a few years before a comprehensive solution is agreed upon. In the meantime, you will need to protect yourself from spam as best you can by adopting the previously cited steps.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting

Exploring All the Opt-Ins

Sometimes technical terms are like the menu of a coffee bar that can leave you scratching your head. The email marketing menu lists items like "opt-in," "opt-out," "single opt-in," "unconfirmed opt-in," "confirmed opt-in," and "double opt-in." Articles about mass email marketing often assume their audience is up to speed on all these terms. At Pathfinder Email Consulting, we deal with a lot of customers just breaking into the mass email marketing business, and like the novice coffee drinker, they have one simple question, "What does all this gibberish mean?" Consider this a primer.

Opt-Out
In the old days, the only option (when given an option at all) for an email message recipient was to opt-out of a list to prevent any further email message delivery. This was a standard practice for bulk email marketers, often giving rise to the perception that their email marketing practices were suspect. Eventually, illegitimate bulk email marketers began using this as a method to confirm harvested email addresses. When a batch of email messages was sent, those that opted-out were confirmed as legitimate addresses and sold to the highest bidder. The CAN-SPAM Law of 2003 is mostly criticized for leaving the opt-out option as the primary recourse for people finding themselves on a bulk email list to which they did not subscribe. An unsubscribe request is a subset of the opt-out procedure and presumes that the owner of the email address actually subscribed, or opted-in at one time. An unsubscribe opportunity should be included in every legitimate email message. Fortunately, most legitimate email marketers adopt a higher standard than just opting-out, and actually send email messages only to those who explicitly opt-in to receive an email message. Legitimate marketers also include a way to unsubscribe, and they honor all those requests in a timely manner.

Opt-In
When someone subscribes to receive an email message, such as a newsletter, they are asked to provide an email address to which the email newsletter will be delivered. Making this type of request is an explicit opt-in, or subscription, purportedly made by the owner of the email account. The subscriber has chosen the option of receiving an email newsletter, for example. The publisher has all the necessary information, namely an email address, to send the subscriber what they are asking to receive. If the subscriber is lucky, the publisher will only send the information that is requested and will not rent or sell the email address to a third party. If the publisher is lucky, the email address provided is really valid and belongs to someone who really is interested in receiving email messages. There are two main types of opt-in procedures: unconfirmed and confirmed.

Unconfirmed Opt-In
A subscription page that only asks for someone to provide an email address, but does not require verification, is an unconfirmed opt-in. Unconfirmed opt-in is also frequently called a "single opt-in," to be differentiated from the common term "double opt-in" that we address later on. Unconfirmed opt-in web forms may also request more information such as a password, or even an entire page of information via a secure site. However, they are still unconfirmed opt-ins if no verification is made. There are many obvious problems with unconfirmed opt-in subscriptions. People can sign up using someone else's email address, leading to unsolicited bulk email a.k.a. spam. These allegations are damaging to the sender's reputation, are difficult, and often time consuming to correct. There is no confirmation to the publisher as to whether the email address used is actually valid, potentially increasing the volume of undeliverable messages. It also fails to secure a commitment to the newsletter from the subscriber. People who confirm their subscriptions are more loyal and interested. They typically do not report the sender as a spammer when they are tired of the email message, but simply unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive it.

Confirmed Opt-In
When a subscriber is asked to verify their subscription request, indicating they really do want to receive the specified publication, that is a confirmed opt-in. Typically, this is done by immediately sending the subscriber a confirmation email message, usually with a link to activate their subscription. This verifies to the publisher that the email address is valid, and it reaffirms the subscriber's commitment to receive the information requested. The confirmed opt-in is considered a best practice for mass email marketers. If the publisher follows confirmed opt-in procedures, they are more likely to use best practices in all email marketing and other business practices, which inspires confidence. A confirmed opt-in procedure also improves the overall effectiveness of the mass email marketer's list. On many websites, confirmed opt-in practices are sometimes erroneously referred to as "double opt-in." Spammers coined the term "double opt-in" to give the impression that confirming a subscription was a duplication of effort. Mass email marketers who use this term may be viewed as novices, and therefore are not really using best practices in their other email marketing efforts. The most accurate and appropriate term is confirmed opt-in.

Whether you are just getting started or are looking to brush up your email marketing vocabulary, words mean things. When you are at the coffee house, you definitely don't want to accidentally order a decaf espresso – what's the point? Make sure you are not only using the best practices available in your mass email marketing efforts; be sure to also use the correct terms to avoid any misperceptions.

Copyright 2008, Pathfinder Email Consulting