Email Marketers Guide to 35% Higher Read Rates and 50% Lower Spam Rates

Guy Hanson, Director of Response Consulting at Return Path, recently presented some very interesting data around email open rates. This research was centered around marketing emails sent in the Daily Deals market. Although specific names aren't mentioned in the study, top brands that come to mind are Groupon, Living Social, and Scoutmob. Some of this data will surprise you.

Best day of the week to send - the argument continues!
Although you need to do your own testing, in this study the worst day to send was Monday and the best was Wednesday.  The rate that recipients actually read your email was 12% higher on
Wednesday. And, the rate at which internet service providers (ISPs) filter email as spam was 20% less! Why did ISPs mark less email as spam on Wednesday? Probably because Wednesday is $1 sushi day at the restaurant in the lobby of the Google building, and they are too busy eating to bother with your email. Actually it was because the read rates are so high. The more Gmail customers that open and read your email, the better. So the ISP filters less of your email out as spam. On Mondays, since the read rate tended to suck, the ISPs marked a lot more of your email as spam.

"Campaigns with “free” in their subject lines have read rates that are 12% higher than those without."

Yes, you read that correctly. I've told my email marketing clients for years that you should watch out for words like "free" in your emails because ISPs tend to flag it as spam. But, based on this study, I've been made into a big, fat liar. And I'm not fat. There is a new normal that is forming in email marketing and that is  if recipients open, read, and click your emails, that indicates engagement. The ISP stops automagically filtering emails that contain a particular word (like "free") if the engagement rate is high enough.  Heck, if enough recipients engaged with an email containing the word "Viagra", Gmail would likely let it through to the inbox.

Wednesday also means less spam filtering
But there's more about this magical day called Wednesday. Not only is it a day where Loraine in the cube next to me didn't kill another ficus tree*, its also the day that ISPs are less likely to filter your email as spam.

Wednesday generated 1/3 as much spam filtering as other days

Subject line positioning
Which of these do you think would make a better subject line?

• 20% off all ficus trees today through Sunday
• Now through Sunday save 20% on ficus trees
• Loraine, don't come to our store, you'll just end up killing that ficus tree anyway

Does it matter which of these you choose? The first one might just result in a 35% higher read rate. Let me explain. Since the first words of the subject line are the first thing that the recipient sees, placing the discount immediately at the far left of the subject line resulted in:

• Read rates 35% higher
• Subscribers are 4 times less likely to register a spam complaint
• They are also twice as likely to re-classify false positives as “Not Spam”
• Spam Filtering levels are almost 50% less

(Discount) size matters
Be careful! When you add a discount offer into your email subject line don't get too carried away. Subscribers are not interested in giant discounts. They simply do not believe in giant discounts and are not likely to open the email.

Smaller discounts generate higher average Read Rates than larger discounts.

On top of that, ISPs applied a much heavier hand when filtering your email as spam. If your discount was 75% or more, the ISP blocked 50% of it. How's that for a waste of your marketing time and money?

Test for yourself
Since this study was centered around emailers sending out Daily Deals email blasts, don't just assume this applies directly to your business. Every industry has a different set of best times of day and day of the week to send email. If you are just starting out, it is fine to use this data as a starting point. Just test and retest to see what happens with your emails.

Suggested: Really sneaky HTML problems in your email marketing campaigns and how to fix them 

Need help with email marketing terminology? Read The Noob's Zen Guide to Email Marketing and Social Media Speak

* Sorry, you've just been drug into our office humor. Our faithful employee Loraine has no proclivity to keep a ficus tree alive. Her tales are legendary though-out our blog.

Gmail users vote for Obama, Yahoo users vote for Romney!

Vote for Kermit! Political parties don't know
how to manage email marketing

Return Path put out a great infographic about the use of email marketing by both political parties during the 2012 presidential election. The results are interesting and somewhat funny. Both candidates use email marketing strongly, but just take a look at the differences!

• Obama has five times the number of email subscribers as Romney
  TweetThat's a telling stat. But, I'm not surprised by this since Obama is a sitting president who's had 4 years in office to grow his subscriber list. Do you suppose he personally manages his email lists? Yeah, you're right. He probably has someone to do that for him. But, I just checked our customer list and no, he's not a customer of our email marketing software product. Go figure.
  
  
• Where inbox placement is concerned, Obama is beating out Romney at 68% inbox placement vs. 50%. So where does the rest of that email go? To the spam box. That's what I've been harping on small businesses about. You've got to really appeal to your subscribers if you want to stay in the inbox.
  
  Suggested: Flush your email marketing job down the toilet with this one big mistake
  
  
• Vote for spam!You don't get to just cast your ballot in the 2012 presidential election, you also get to vote on who's email gets sent to the spam box. In this case, Obama loses with a whopping 5% of all recipients taking the time to manually mark his email as spam. Ouch. Romney is at just 0.8%. Not bad for a political party.
  
  Suggested: Double your Gmail inbox placement rates
  
  
• Deleting email without reading it
  This metric isn't the same as marking an email as spam. If your subscribers aren't opening your email at all, that is not good. Again, Romney has the edge.
  
  Suggested: Your email open rate may not mean what you think
  
   
• Gmail subscribers vs. Yahoo subscribers. This is the most interesting stat!
  
  
  Gmail users vote for Obama and Yahoo users vote for Romney!Tweet 
  
  I honestly would have had no idea if you had asked me to predict this one. We do see stats that say more technical people prefer Google products as compared to Yahoo products, so maybe Obama has appealed to the tech nerds? But that's OK. This is America. You tech nerds can vote any darn way you please. Click the infographic below to see the stats up close.

Hey nimrod, stop abusing your email subscribers
Last year I did some consulting work with a political party (and they shall remain anonymous) about their email marketing strategy. I must say that I will not relish the opportunity again. Political parties are motivated so strongly and on such a finite timetable that they push way too much email to their subscribers, resulting in the poor statistics outlined here. They just have not gotten the message about how to use email marketing without abusing it.

Are you wasting your money with email marketing?

Click to
enlarge

Just think about how different the influence of all these political emails might have been had both candidates had 98% inbox placement (a deliverability metric to which you should aspire). How much voting influence has been lost because they sent out too much email, too quickly, in excess of what subscribers were expecting? And just look at the results. First of all, large amounts of money have been spent to send huge volumes of email that ends up never reaching the subscriber. And more importantly, just think about how much money was not donated to the political party since so much of that email did not reach the subscriber. You still have to pay for email that never reaches the inbox.

Email that doesn't reach the inbox means less revenue for your organization

So what should be your take-away from reading this article?
You need to be convinced, or convince your executives, to stop looking at things like the number of subscribers and how often you can email them. Instead, focus on email marketing best practices. What do your subscribers want from your emails? How often do they want to receive it?

Have you been bombarded by political emails? What was your favorite one? Tell us in the comments.

Image credit: Walt Stoneburner under Creative Commons

The Restaurateur's Zen Guide to Email List Building. Why your Restaurant Must Have Email Marketing

Unique restaurant ingredient known as Galangal

Look, I understand. You're a restaurateur and the last thing you have time for is to send out email marketing messages to your customers. You've got an entire restaurant to run. In fact, you don't even have time to read this article. But just bare with me for a moment. And even if you did have time to send emails to your subscribers, you'd say, "why do I need an email list anyway? I use Facebook to promote my restaurant." So let me make this perfectly clear. No matter how much social media you use to promote your business, nothing, I mean nothing, is as effective as email.

ExactTarget's Channel Preference Survey has shown that although social media is the current raging-bull-in-the-sushi-house, email is the channel that influences the most purchases. Email is where the money is.
It's not that you don't want to use Facebook or other social channels, you do. It's that you want to use all of those social channels to drive sign-ups to your email list. The email list is the center of the wheel, and Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, FourSquare and all the other social media channels are the spokes that point towards the center of the wheel.

The #1 direct channel that influences the most purchases is email at 66%.

The 2012 Channel Preferences Survey, ExactTarget

If you have an email list of people who have been to your restaurant and opted-in to your list, you have a means to speak to existing customers directly. It's a lot easier to resell to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. 

What content am I going to email my restaurant customers?
You need to build a relationship with your customers. And you'll do this through meeting them in person, and then through email. Customers that know you will feel a sense of connection to you. So besides sending them the obvious coupons and incentives that bring them back into your place, also give them the history of the place, the history of you, the owner. How you learned to cook, what you specialize in, where you trained, what you cook when you're at home. You want to give customers a sense of who you are. Let them get to know you (and your staff) and thus they'll feel connected to you.

Waldo may not be good looking, but he's got
a great personality : ). Introduce him to your
customers and build the relationship

• Share your recipes. That's right, I said it. Actually share your recipes with your customers. "What? Share my recipes? Look kid, meatballs don't go with sushi. And, I don't give away none of Mamma's secret recipes." Oh really? You think customers are never going to come back because they now know your secret? Do you think no one comes in to Gordon Ramsay's restaurants because they bought his recipe book and now they just cook for themselves at home? Instead of them always cooking your recipes at home, you'll be surprised how often customers will think of coming in to your restaurant and talking about it with you. You'll position yourself as an expert. Make a video of you cooking the recipe and share a link to the video in email. Use your position of expertise to publish your own recipe book that you sell in your restaurant. Not that anyone would buy it. Your food sucks. I'm kidding.
• Publish a calendar of events at your store. Do you have any special events? Cultural holidays? Let customers know why they can't miss these great events.
• Introduce a staff member. You can't be everywhere, but your staff can. Customers should get to know your staff members as individuals. A great way to go deeper is to write about your staff in your email.
• Highlight an uncommon ingredient you use. Where does it come from? What does it look like when it is grown? What is it used for culturally? Where can customers buy it?
• Have the chef explain a particular dish. What's special about it? What does it mean to him or her? Show a picture of it and offer it as a house special for this Friday night.
• Highlight reviews of your restaurant that you find on Yelp. Particularly reviews that rave about a particular dish. 
• Send out menu changes and new items announcements.

How do I build an email list for my restaurant?
Since you are face to face with so many customers, you are in a unique position. There are many places you can ask diners to opt-in to your list. You'll want both a paper sign-up form and a sign-up form on your website.

Whatever you do, be sure the customers want your emails. If they don't, there are lots of problems you will cause for yourself.

• Do you offer paper menus for customers to take away? Promote the email list there.
• When customers make reservations, ask them to sign up then, or use OpenTable which enables a sign-up on their site.
• Put a sign-up form on your website - put it on all pages, or on each menu page.
• Promote it on the comment card that you're probably already giving to customers.
• When you bring the check to their table, have the sign-up form in the fold-up booklet. And bring a pen even before you know they want to use a credit card.
• Put a sign up form in your normal menu when you first bring it to the customer.
• Create a well made sign up card that has a glossy picture of the free appetizer they'll get if they sign up for your email list. Use this card to get sign-up in the store. And use it if you do catering, or if you have an open house at a partner's neighboring  business.
• Entice sign ups with a coupon. Put a sign-up form in with your paper menu if you drop menus on neighborhood mailboxes. Only customers who sign up for the email list can use the coupon. Since the paper sign-up form is also a coupon, customers will bring it in the store when they visit.
• Put  your website URL at the bottom of the printed cash register receipt. Send them to your website to sign up.
• Do you have an iPad? Have them sign up directly on that when at the register.

A warning about the fishbowl: it's ok to use a fishbowl to collect business cards, but unless it is very clear that customers are signing up for an email list when they drop their card in, do not add these people to your subscriber list.

How do I incent my customers to sign up? 

• Tell them they'll get a coupon by email for a free appetizer
• Send them a free meal on their birthday or anniversary (as long as they bring a friend!)
• Tell them they'll receive weekly specials and discounts. 
• Partner with a neighboring business, have an open house together co-promoting each other's businesses. Have a door prize for anyone who signs up for the newsletter like giving away a free dinner for two.

Why are social channels not as powerful as email? 
Because the rate of engagement is so different. With a channel like Facebook, when you post an update, only a small percentage of the fans that have Liked your page are actually going to see it on their timeline. Whereas with email, a high percentage of the recipients on your email list are going to see and read your email, or at least see the subject line in their inbox. You are hitting so many more eyeballs with email. Don't avoid using social media though. Instead, use social media to drive more people to sign up for your email list.

What about Groupon?
I have no problem with Groupon. I'm not saying to not use Groupon. I'm saying that whether or not you use Groupon, your own email list will be worth far more money to you in the end.

Let us know creative ways you've used email to market your restaurant in the comments section.

Read next: Save time using this free tool to post your updates to multiple social networks

Image credit: Computer Clip Art, FotoosVanRobin under Creative Commons

The Noob's Zen Guide to Email Marketing and Social Media Speak

Are you new to email marketing and social media? (Oh no, a noobie, a noob!) Sick of all the marketing mumbo jumbo double speak? Not sure what all these terms mean? This article will help clear up some of that. Or possibly make you more confused, I'm not sure which. If you are a seasoned email marketer, however, for God's sake, don't read this article. It will bore you so badly that you'll read to the end and say "that's 6 minutes of my life I'll never get back."


Social stuff:
Klout - This is kind of a cool one. Klout is a company and a score. This score measures your "importance" in terms of how much influence you have across the internet. It refers mainly to people who have a lot of Twitter followers and particularly those people who's Twitter followers follow them on a particular topic. The score is used by companies who want to understand how important a particular customer is to their company/brand. So, if you are Ronco, one of the greatest inventors of all time, and you sell a lot of "Spray-Paint-the-Bald-Away",
a Twitter user with 4 followers (one being their mother) does not have the same influence on Ronco's brand as a Twitter user with 19,086 followers, who writes a blog about products for hair loss. By the way, if you find a good blog on hair loss, send me the link.

Bitly - You know how Twitter only allows you to share 140 characters of text? Well Bitly is a company that will help you take a really long URL that you want to share on Twitter and shorten it. So a link like http://blog.thoughtreach.com/2012/07/why-cant-i-do-email-marketing-with-outlook.html will shorten to something like http://bit.ly/M7ho2q which makes it fit a lot better into the Twitter box. When your Twitter followers click the shortlink, it will auto-forward them to the long link.

Mosaic - Not even all the seasoned email marketers know about this one. A mosaic in email marketing is an HTML table that is full of lots and lots of rows and columns, each having a different background color. If built properly, the mosaic can render a fairly good representation of what an image would actually look like. Read why using mosiacs is impactful and then why you may not want to use them.

Social sharing - this is where you post a link to something on a place like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc.


The Big Picture
ISP -  Internet Service Provider. These numbskulls either provide access to the internet or they provide email inboxes (like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo). Marketers will babble on and on about "don't get blocked at ISPs" so get used to this one.

ESP - Email Service Provider. These companies provide mass email sending software tools for marketers. The greatest of all of them is Thought Reach (a company destined to rule the earth one day). But, in the list too are Eloqua, Marqueto, Constant Contact, and Monkey Mail or Mail Chimpanzee, or whatever they call themselves these days.

SaaS - Software as a Service. This just means that it's a software product that you access by using your browser (instead of having to download and install the software).

Mobile - in the email world, this refers to all the bajillion recipients who open their emails on a mobile device. About 1/3rd of all mass email sent is opened on a mobile device.

Email marketing metrics
Click throughs - this is the number of times that any link inside your email message was clicked. This is an important measure of how engaged your recipients are (more on engagement below). If they are clicking, they must have at least some level of interest and thus want to receive  your emails.

Open rate - This is the rate at which your subscribers open your email. Some open, some don't. Not all mass emails sent will register an open if the recipient opens the email, but a lot will. It's not a perfect metric, but it helps you understand if you are on the right track. Open rate is determined by a one pixel image quietly hidden in the email. Once this image is loaded, the open is registered.

Read rate - The read rate is different than the open rate because it’s not based on the one pixel image pixel. The read rate is based on mailbox providers marking the message as “read” due to subscriber activity in the inbox. This is a type of data that you need a third party provider to obtain, like Return Path.

The Who (minus Roger Daltrey)
Receivers - actually, this doesn't refer to the people who receive your email. Instead, it refers to the ISPs like Gmail that are first receiving your email before putting it in the inbox (or spam box ) of your subscriber.

Senders - senders can either refer to the marketer who is sending the email, or to the ESP that the marketer is using to send the email.

Subscribers - these are the people who have signed up for your email list.

Recipients - these are the same as subscribers.

Double opt in - this is a method of verifying that a new subscriber to your email list really, really wants your email. In this method of subscribing, a visitor comes to your website, fills out a form to get onto your email list, and then your system automagically emails them and asks them to click a link to confirm. Using this type of subscription method will help you avoid spam complaints by ensuring that the person who's email address was entered, is actually the person who signed up for the list in the first place.

Spam with Bacon
Spamtrap (honeypot) - Now we've hit upon the good stuff.  Spam traps are email addresses used by ISPs to trap spammers. These are email addresses that are either completely made up or have been dormant for a long time. The ISP is looking to catch people spamming so that they can block the email being sent by that person. If a completely made up email address is suddenly receiving messages, the email is likely spam. If you "accidentally" email a spamtrap email address, here's what you can do to help fix the mess you're now in.

SenderScore.org - this is a free website that can tell you how well your email sending reputation is with the receiving ISPs. Many ISPs report information to senderscore.org that tells others if they think you behave well as a brand in your email practices. Ask your ESP what your IP address is, and enter it at senderscore. It's a little like high school. A score in the high 90's is great. One in the 30's is not quite so great, and may land you in detention.

IP Address - this is a little like the street address in front of your house. Only in this case it's the internet address from which you are sending your email. Unless you send more than 50-100k emails per month, you are likely sharing an IP address with other senders. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it's always a good idea to check the senderscore of your IP address to be sure it is good and that other senders on that same IP address aren't negatively impacting you.

Sender reputation - this is another term used to convey how well your brand behaves with its email sending practices.

Reputation monitoring - this is the practice of a marketer monitoring how well their brand is perceived by ISPs in terms of sender reputation. Software tools can be used to detect email reputation.

Engaged / Engagement Rate - These don't mean the same thing that your girlfriend says they do. When you email your recipients, the number of times that they open the email and click a link within it is called the engagement rate. ISPs use this rate as a determining factor in whether or not they deliver your email to the inbox or not. It's a long story, but trust me, if a subscriber hasn't opened or clicked in a long, long time, you need to remove them from your list to protect your engagement rate.

Authentication - only true email marketing geeks get excited about this one. But any marketer sending mass email needs to have their emails "authenticated." Authentication technologies are things that tell the receiving ISP exactly where the email is coming from and that you are who you say you are. Unless your email is authenticated properly, it may not make it to the inbox because it is not trusted. Authentication technologies include DKIM, DomainKeys, Sender ID, SPF, and DMARC. Not that you care what those stand for, but you want to make sure your ESP sets these up for you.

Segments / segmentation - this is a term that relates to dividing your email list into different groupings. A reporting / analytics tool within your email marketing tool will help you create these groups. For example, if you sell a lot of Ronco "Spray-Paint-the-Bald-Away", you'll want to segment on people who are male, are over 50, and are predisposed to using spray paint on their bald heads. These are the same people who would buy a Chia pet too. Just some free advice.

Search:
SERP - Search Engine Results Page. This term is used to describe the placement of where your webpage sits in the rankings of the search engines. Is your webpage on page one of the search engine results page or on page 39,599?

SEO- Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a set of skills and techniques used to help rank the pages of your website higher in the Google (and other) search engine rankings.

Panda - the name of a software update to Google's search algorithm. Google's algorithm is what calculates where your webpage shows up in the SERP. This particular update routed out a lot of low quality websites from the Google search results. If you aren't doing anything black hat on your website, you have nothing to worry about.

Black hat - these are nefarious techniques that unscrupulous webmasters use to get their web pages to rank higher in the search engine rankings. Use black hat techniques and you might just end up back in detention again.

White hat - these are the good ways to do SEO. Having really good content (unlike this article : ), having really important sites link to yours, and writing in natural language by not stuffing keywords all over the place are examples of white hat techniques.

Twitter:
Tweet - a short message you send out to your followers.

Followers - these are your minions. Those people who, for some reason, unbeknownst to the rest of mankind, want to hear what you are tweeting. Try not to accidentally lose all your followers by being spoofed into giving up your Twitter password.

Followers are your minions.
People dumb enough, I mean
smart enough to listen to what
you have to say.

Following - these are the people you want to hear what they are blabbing about. To become a follower, you may have clicked the little "follow" link like this one.
Follow @ThoughtReach

@ThoughtReach - any time you see an @ symbol, that is someone or some company's username on Twitter.

#something - a # symbol on Twitter is like a keyword or phrase. It might be something like "#emailmarketing" which is a way for Twitter followers to search for people talking specifically about the topic of email marketing. The # symbol just helps identify all the caterwauling going on about that topic.

Nonsensical
Fair Trade coffee - a black liquid substance consumed by marketers nearly as much as it is consumed by software developers and typically packed full of caffeine (a God-given substance that I'm sure is an unrecognized fulfillment of scripture somewhere). The "Fair Trade" part means that the coffee (or chocolate or whatever) is sourced in a manner that certifies that the grower was paid in a fair manner. It also typically is associated to good-earth practices like organic farming.  If you are a marketer and your coffee isn't Fair Trade, and you are hearing this for the first time, that's ok. Just make the switch. A hilarious look at coffee facts.

Ficus tree- a thing thrown at me by Loraine, who sits in the cube next to me. Loraine's forays with flying ficus trees appear notoriously throughout the Thought Reach blog. You'll just have to bear with us on that topic.

Why email marketers should avoid the coming wave of mosaics in email and what to do instead

by Nate Goodman
This article was originally published on Business2Community

Today, ISPs block a lot of the images in your email marketing campaigns. That's not anything new. But what is new is the soon-to-be realistic use of mosaics in your emails. What are mosaics? Mosaics are complex HTML tables that impersonate images. How can a table impersonate an image? The HTML table has so many rows and columns, each cell having a background color, that it can really look like an image. And above when I say "what is new", I don't mean brand new like the new baby ficus tree that Loraine in the cube next to me bought to replace the last one that she killed after throwing it at me.


Creating mosaics just got a lot easier
Mosaics themselves aren't new. But compared to how difficult it used to be to create one, a new tool called Mozify coming from Email on Acid will make creating mosaics a lot easier. You see, in the past, to realistically create one that actually looked like an image took forever and was a giant pain in the (insert expletive here). So why would you use a mosaic in the first place? Well it's a bit like slipping images into your email campaign and always having them displayed even if images are turned off. Since the mosaic isn't really an image, the ISP doesn't notice it. But your recipients sure do. In Mozify beta testing, one company saw a 346% increase in click throughs. So why do I think using mosaics is going to become a bad idea? Because mosaics will be blocked from email marketing campaigns in the near future.
Tweet

Mozify at work.
Left: mosaic loaded. Right: images loaded.

Why would mosaics be blocked from email campaigns?
To understand my point, you'll first have to understand why ISPs block images from your email messages in the first place. The top reasons Gmail, Hotmail, and others block images is privacy. Typically there is a one pixel image embedded into each email that is sent. When you open this email message, Gmail calls back to the email marketer's server to retrieve the one pixel image. When that happens, the email marketer's server now knows you've opened the email. And that verifies your email address is valid, is being used, by you, right now, at this very moment, in the privacy of your own home, and there you sit without yet having run the straightening iron through your hair. Now, that email marketer knows what you look like without makeup and hair frizzed all over the place. Well ok, so he doesn't know that much. But it is still a validation to the sender that your address is in use. And if the sender was a spammer, you wouldn't want him to know that.

The reason Gmail wants to block images is infrastructure
Very few words in the English language are as boring as the word "infrastructure." You want to lose a bunch of readers of your blog articles quickly? Just pop that word into print and you'll see what I'm talking about. Concerning Gmails desire to preserve infrastructure, Richard Evans, Director of Partner Marketing at Silverpop, says

"Rendering 3k worth of HTML vs. 30k of HTML and images across millions of inboxes and dozens of emails per inbox each day is a substantial reduction in load on the (email) infrastructure." 

If you are Gmail, and you have millions of inboxes, you'd be very interested in reducing the load on your infrastructure. Thus,

Gmail has a vested interest in blocking images in emails

Also, consumers are reading more and more emails on mobile devices and thus are incurring higher data usage fees. Setting a mobile device to disable images will reduce data usage and thus consumers are already demanding a lower filesize of their individual emails.
Tweet
Mosaics will be blocked as well
After all, mosaics, which are meant to temporarily replace an image, are somewhat large in filesize themselves. If the ISP is blocking your 50k image because of their interest in reducing load on their infrastructure (sorry, had to use that word again), and now you're slipping a 48k mosaic in there, Gmail will probably not like that.

Gmail will create scanning technology that determines that a mosaic is being used in an email, strip it out, and leave you with the same email-images-not-being-displayed problem that you started with. After a while of having mosaics blocked, I can foresee some not-so-intelligent email marketer who will try to game the system. They'll try decreasing the number of rows and columns used in their mosaics to try to skirt around the Gmail filter. But once Gmail catches up on that little trick, the marketer just might find themselves blocked. Or worse, banned. Or worse still, flummoxed (whatever that means). Or worst-est still, they might get fired from their current email marketing role and have to come work here and sit next to Loraine (flying ficus trees are dangerous; just a warning.)

Getting images displayed
So what can you do to avoid this whole "images blocked", "mosaics blocked", "emails banned", "ficus tree thrown at me" situation? Richard Evans continues, saying,

"Get back to basics. If you follow these steps you'll do a lot better getting your images displayed in the first place. 

• Only send to true opt-in subscribers
• Ask recipients to add you to their safe senders list (try a set of dedicated campaigns targeted to just recipients at a single ISP asking them to add you to their safe senders list (read this article on How to double your Gmail inbox placement rates) 
• Encourage recipients to click through or reply to your email directly-remove unengaged subscribers 
• Don't go nuts during the Christmas season by sending huge volumes of email unless you've properly ramped up your sending"

Expert commentary provided by:

Richard Evans is the Atlanta-based Director of Partner Marketing and Alliances at Silverpop, a leading digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile and social. Mr. Evans has 12 years of experience in the email marketing field and currently leads Silverpop's global partner program.

What other best practices should be used to increase image display? Tell us in the comments.

Image credit: Fotpedia

Part 2: Flush your email marketing job down the toilet with this one big mistake

This is Part 2 in the series about emailing a spamtrap email address. In this part, we discuss what to do now that you've made this big mistake. Read part 1

And so does Google, if you email to a spam trap

So, you've emailed a spamtrap email address to Gmail? There are some things you need to do to get out of this mess and to avoid having your job flushed down a toilet by your boss. Follow these steps closely:

Step 1: Stand straight up, point your finger at Loraine in the cube next to you and shout, "it's her fault, boss. She's the one that emailed the spam trap, not me. She must have hacked my password into our email marketing system and sent that email!"

Step 2: Duck as Loraine throws her dead ficus tree at you, ceramic pot and all (the potted hulk of the dead ficus hurls past you and explodes on the wall of your cube, narrowly missing that velvet Elvis tapestry you have hanging there. But, at least you're not hit).

Step 3: Call Google and beg forgiveness. Well, that could work. If they cared. And if they had a phone number. And if they cared.

Step 4: Admit to yourself you've emailed a spamtrap and read the rest of this article.

How do I know I've emailed a spam trap?
I use Gmail as an example here because they are one of the big cahunas of the email world and they also don't always answer their phone and jump at the chance to gladly unblock your emails just because you asked nicely and sent them flowers.

First of all, you have to know you've hit a spamtrap to begin with. So, I'll assume the reason you know you've hit a spam trap is either:

• You use a reputation monitoring platform like Return Path or IBM Email Optimization (formerly Pivotal Veracity) and the report of your inbox placement says something really educated like "Um, there is no email reaching inboxes because you emailed a spamtrap, you nimbleweed."
• You routinely monitor SenderScore.org for your IP address' reputation and instead of looking like the below screenshot which shows a sender score of 97, it sports a score more like 63 (owee), or 24 (big owee).
• You have created several free email accounts at the various ISPs to use as your own, personal seed list, and you've found that your emails are vaporizing instead of reaching the inbox
• Brittany, who works at the coffee house on the corner, while sipping an iced frapamochachino latte, said "your boss was just in here! And he was fuming mad at you!" For some reason, she was laughing hysterically. She thought the situation was so funny that a little coffee came out of her nose when she laughed. 

The first three above are ways to help gage your sender reputation. If you have no budget to purchase reputation monitoring tools, take a look at SenderScore.org. Not only is it free to access, it will tell you you've hit a spamtrap.* 

SenderScore.org showing the reputation score of an
IP address (100 is the highest)

Sender Score will also show you if your IP address
has emailed a known spamtrap

To use Sender Score, you'll need to find out from your email software provider from what IP address you are sending mail. Keep in mind that in all likelihood, you are sending mail on an IP address that is shared with other customers. For email marketers sending less than 50,000-100,000 emails per month, it is recommended that you be on a shared IP instead of one dedicated for your own use. Lower volume senders like this are not likely to have enough email volume to properly build a good sender reputation in the first place. That's why sharing an IP address is a good idea in this case.

I don't envy you about that situation with Brittany in the coffee house though. That whole "coffee coming out of the nose" thing is sacrilege. To waste good coffee like that.

Since you've emailed a spamtrap, what you're really going to need to do is to slowly rebuild your email sending reputation. Gmail can be very ornery, but believe it or not there are some things you can do to appease the gods of Gooooooo.(gle)

What do I do if I've emailed a spamtrap?
Email reputation expert Neil Schwartzman, VP, Sender & Receiver Relations at Message Bus, has the following advice on rebuilding your sending reputation after mailing a spam trap email address:

The keys to dealing with spamtraps are three-fold:
Permission, permission, and permission: Confirm all your sign-ups. The very best way to avoid adding spamtraps to your list, be they normal-looking addresses like FredUser@somedomain.com or typo’ed domains like FreddyUser@htomail.com is to ensure that A) sign-ups don’t bounce, and if they do, remove them immediately and B) confirm opt-in to your list. That means your initial message is a confirmation message that requires the recipient to click a link or otherwise take action (logging in) so as to complete the loop. Also, never buy or rent lists, they are ultimately a scam, and do not have the requisite (legal) permission. 

Keep track of your segments –keep track of sign-up dates and times (especially if you aren’t confirming subscriptions), and your mailing times, campaign ids, and so on. Completely remove any segments that immediately garner trap hits you see from monitoring services. 

Process bounces and complaints immediately. A common type of spamtraps should, by their very nature, be addresses that have bounced for at least a year if they are reclaimed addresses or domains. Other traps can be made by inserting addresses surreptitiously onto forums and other places that gather addresses illicitly by scraping or tricking the user to signup for ‘free’ iPhone 5s or whatever. See my advice about purchasing lists (this means you too – co-registration folks. If you want to grow your list in this way, the lists should be 100% confirmed / double opt-in). 

Narrow down your list until you locate the spamtrap. Despite all these steps, you may still find yourself with spamtraps on your list – sometimes the trap owner won’t get around to complaining of blocking your campaigns until well after they’ve been added to your list. Try this: segment your list by half, send, see if you are still hitting a trap, cut that list in half again, in a continual series of A/B tests. Or, you can email your entire list and ask them to "re-confirm" (usually by offering a bonus for re-confirming, to encourage people to do so). While this sounds onerous, and you will likely lose a lot of subscribers, if these people aren’t buying, or aren't engaged, you might as well ditch them anyway. 

Which brings me to my last point: Beyond spamtraps, large receivers are now heavily into using recipient engagement as a decision point to delivering your mail. If people aren’t opening or clicking your messages in a reasonable period of time, you would do well to offer those folks a bonus to re-engage, and if they don’t, drop them from your list. Your email delivery will thank you, as will your ROI and bottom line.

Gmail does not contribute data to Senderscore.org, so while a poor score may indicate issues Gmail is seeing (because they appear elsewhere as well) it isn't 100%. You can have a good Sender Score, and poor performance at Gmail, or a poor score, and get (good) Gmail delivery. 

This was Part 2 in the series about emailing a spamtrap email address. Read part 1

---

Neil Schwartzman is the VP, Sender & Receiver Relations at Message Bus, and the Executive Director of CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. Neil has been quoted in the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, CNET, Reader’s Digest, and the Chicago Tribune on spam-related topics. He has over 17 years of experience in the email and spam prevention industry. You can read more at http://news.messagebus.com.




* SenderScore.org can tell you that you or someone who is also sending mail on the same IP address has hit a spam trap. If you are like most marketers, you are sending mail on a shared IP address. In most situations that's fine, but it has some limitations, like this one.

Image credit: William Murphy under Creative Commons

Email Marketers: Say Goodbye to Images not Displaying

Email marketers have always struggled with image display in their emails.

Are my images going to show up? Do my repcipients have to click the stupid "Download Images" link? Do my recipients really have to add me to the safe senders list just to get images displayed? Well, all of that may change very soon with the introduction of a product called Mozify by Email on Acid. Mozify leverages a previously known trick to get images to display in an email message even when images are turned off. Huh? Let me explain. The trick is to use what's called a mosaic in place of an image (temporarily). In the email marketing world, a mosaic is simply an HTML table that is full of lots and lots of rows and columns, each having a background color. If built properly, the mosaic can render a fairly good representation of what the image would actually look like. What this means is that even if you send an email message to your subscriber and images are off by default, when they open your email, that mosaic will be on full display making it almost appear as if the actual images are really there.
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An email with images blocked

The same email with images blocked, and Mozify mosaics in place

The same email with images on

So why can't you just build a mosaic table on your own without need for a software product like Mozify? Well, I suppose you could. But, unless you want to spend about a dozen hours building intricate mosaic HTML tables for a single email, you may want to instead consider Mozify which will greatly enable the process. Why should getting your images displayed matter so much to you?

Early beta testing of Mozify has shown up to 376% increases in click through rates 

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As you well know, your email marketing campaigns should have a call to action in them. Increasing your click throughs by 376% should drive up conversions. If you have huge increases in click throughs and still aren't driving more conversions, call me, something is wrong : ).

Outrigger Resorts was the beta tester who saw the 376% increase for one of their monthly email campaigns. Now, to be perfectly fair, this was a comparison to their previous month's campaign. The prudent email analytics nerd, Loraine, who sits in the cube next to me, points out that "this is not an A/B test which would indicate a perfect comparison of one email against another." Had it been a perfect A/B test, and click throughs increased by 376%, she would have come unglued from the chair in her cube, bounced off of the ceiling, and come crashing down on her ficus tree. As it is, with an increase of that size, I'm not worried about all the "A/B-test-perfect-scenario" hoo ha. It's quite impressive without all that. Although, seeing Loraine fly through the air and crush her ficus would be impressive too, so you be the judge.

If click throughs went up, did any email metrics go down?
Email open rates went down. That's right. During beta testing, even when click through rates skyrocketed, email open rates actually decreased. How could this be? Well, it's simple. Sort of. Normally there is a teeny little one pixel tracking image that is automatically incorporated into all outbound email messages. This one pixel image is used to determine if the message was opened or not. If that image is called by the receiving email client, then an email open is registered.

In beta testing, since mosaics were on full display, fewer recipients bothered to click "Download Images." Why? Because they didn't care.

Recipients didn't need the images to display. Instead, recipients just read the email and clicked through on the call to action. Since the actual images throughout the email were never loaded, the tiny one pixel image was never called, and thus no email open was registered. That means the email sending system didn't actually realize that the email was opened. So, the email open rate decreased. However, let me ask you a question.

Do you care that your email open rates decrease if click through rates and sales of your products increase?

No, you don't. Well, maybe you don't care. But our email marketing analytics geek, Loraine, cares. She lives and breathes email metrics. But, she can't even keep her ficus tree alive, so what does she know.

We are looking forward to seeing more data from customers as Mozify is launched and emails start driving more click throughs without images being displayed.

Here's a question for you: do you think Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL will start looking for mosaics and blocking them too? Let us know in the comments.

Read part 2 of this article: Why email marketers should avoid the coming wave of mosaics in email and what to do instead

Flush your email marketing job down the toilet with this one big mistake

This is Part 1 in the series about emailing a spamtrap email address. Read part 2

This is where your job is
headed if you email a spam trap

If you want to lose your job as an email marketer, just send a few emails to a spam trap email address

What's a spam trap (or honeypot)? It's an email address used as a trap by the ISPs. You didn't need me to tell you that, did you? You kind of figured that one out on your own? So, Miss SmartyMcKnowEverythingPants, you may know what a spam trap is, but do you know how they are formed, what happens if you send to email to one, and what to do if your sending reputation is in the toilet because you "accidentally" sent an email to a spam trap address? (And by "accidentally," I mean "on purpose.")
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How spam traps are born
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are so sick and tired of all the whining and sniveling they hear from their customers about spam, that they use a lot of methods to catch Mr. Russian McSpammyPants at his game. So, the ISPs, like Gmail, might take an old, unused Gmail address and start monitoring it. Gmail knows it's unused because no one has logged into it since Ronald Reagan was in office. And, Gmail follows the logic that if no one is logging in to the email account, and yet somehow, almost as if by magic, a marketer like you just sent a "subscription-based" email to that dormant email address, that something is amiss.....

"It must have been Jeeves the Butler who murdered old Mrs. Forthingtonwinkle in the library with the candlestick." 

After all, if no one has logged into that Gmail account in quite a long time, and yet that email is starting to receive a new subscription based email, that you, the sender of said subscription based email, must, in fact, be Mr. Russian McSpammyPants; or you could be Jeeves the Butler. Either way, Gmail is not too happy with you.

What happens if you send an email to a spam trap address?
Well, let's put it this way. In the movie "As Good as it Gets" with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, Jack Nicholson plays the role of an author who writes best-selling novels. Do you remember the scene when the receptionist (Helen Benz), fascinated by how well Nicholson's character understood women, asked Nicholson, "how do you write women so well?", and he responded, "It's simple. I start with a man, and I take away reason, and accountability." A more demeaning statement has never been made. The look on the receptionists face right after he said that is the look that will be on your face should you ever find you've emailed a spam trap email address. Even if you had a good sender reputation prior to this, sending to a single spam trap address just might cause your sender reputation to be flummoxed, thrashed, and not-so-politely tossed into ye ole spam folder. That look on your face is going to be on full display to your CEO as she asks you why she just got a call from an important partner who said that he's not getting your marketing emails to which he is subscribed (enter sound of glass breaking, followed by the sound of gnashing of teeth, followed by a pink slip.)

This will be the look on your face
right after you've emailed a
spam trap email address

Your deliverability into the inbox after sending to a spam trap email address might move from 98% inbox deliverability to 65% (or 35%, yikes!) inbox deliverability. O-U-C-H. Recovering from this will not be easy or fun.

How do you avoid sending an email to a spamtrap email address?

1. Stop sending to your un-engaged subscribers. If a subscribers hasn't opened or clicked on one of your emails in several months, it's best to stop sending your newsletter to them. It's fine if you want to email them one last time and ask them if they want your email or not (a re-engagement campaign), but after that, stop sending. This email address may have gone dormant and has now become a spam trap address.
2. Be sure you use double opt-in when enabling recipients to subscribe to your email list. Why? Because every once in a while a spam trap address becomes publicly known. And, if it's your competitor that finds a known spam trap email address, he might just sneak over to your newsletter sign-up form on your website and enter that spam trap address as a subscriber. If your system doesn't use double opt-in which auto-emails the new subscriber and asks them to manually confirm their subscription, then guess what? You've just accepted a spam trap email address into your list. (Thought Reach's email marketing software offers double opt-in)
    
3. No page scraping. This isn't the scraping sound that you heard on the chalkboard in first grade when your teacher wanted to get everyone's attention (70% of my readers just went, "Huh?" because they aren't old enough to have ever seen an actual chalk board). Anyway, page scraping is the kind of scraping where an automated robot roves around the internet looking for email addresses that are visibly posted on web pages. Not only is that not a good way to create your newsletter sign-up list, but sometimes ISPs post spam trap email addresses on websites just to catch page scrapers who start sending email to that address. You just got busted.
4. No purchased or borrowed list. Do not purchase lists, ever. I know, I know. It's so tempting to go out there and just buy a big, fat email list to really get the word out. Might as well buy a big, fat lard sandwich while you're at it. The lard sandwich will have the same effect on your ability to get into your skinny-jeans as the purchased list will have on your email sending reputation. The only difference is that you can go on a diet to fix having eaten too many lard sandwiches. You won't get off that easy when trying to repair your email sending reputation if you buy an email list. You never know how old that list is, how many dead email addresses are on it, and how many of those dead email addresses have been repurposed as spam traps.

What to do if your email deliverability reputation is in the crapper because you sent to a spam trap email address
Unfortunately, you can't just "call Google." And, sorry, you'll have to wait until our next post to get advice on what to do to repair this mess.
------------------------------
We've posted the next article in this series. Read part 2 and learn how to repair your email sender reputation after having emailed a spam trap-->.

Read related: Gmail gives email marketers a second chance

Really sneaky HTML problems in your email marketing campaigns and how to fix them [INFOGRAPHIC]

Click to view

Litmus* created a really swell infographic to describe common problems that marketers have with the HTML in their mass emails. If you fall into one of these HTML traps, your email may end up in the crapper, or in the spam folder at least. I've taken it upon myself to "liberate" the content from their infographic and discuss it for you here below. Those guys at Litmus love me, so I don't expect any backlash or gnashing of teeth.
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Embedded media that doesn't play well with others
Litmus Marketing Director Justine Jordan says, "one of the most common problems we see is the inclusion of certain types of media within an email that aren't supported in that environment. These are things such as video embedded in the email itself, flash, rollovers (and other types of javascript), and even simple surveys." Most of these types of media need to be avoided when sending mass email. But, if you really want that funny cat video embedded in your email (and by "funny" I mean stupid), why not just embed an image that looks like a (stupid) embedded cat video instead? When the image is clicked, the recipient is taken to a website where the actual video exists and can be played. Where surveys are concerned, instead of placing the survey in your email content you should simply include a link to the website that hosts the survey.

Instead of embedding a video in an email, place an image
 like the above in your email body, recipients will simply
click it and visit the webpage to play the video

Problems with images going AWOL and such
The most common issue with the display of an HTML email is that images are blocked or don't show up due to some boneheaded HTML coding : ). Actually, some of these HTML mistakes aren't boneheaded at all. There are some hidden reasons why you have a problem with displaying images in your emails.

1. Don't put text on top of background images
   Background images aren't supported in Outlook 2007 and beyond. Why? No one knows, or cares. But what we do know is that some nimnod at Microsoft decided to be a pain in the background images. Instead of using a background image, and then typing text in the table cell across the top of it, why not just use Photoshop to add the text onto the image itself? If you insist on using a background image, as a precaution you could use a background color to help protect you when background images are misbehaving. That won't solve your problem, but it will look better and it is better than receiving a sharp stick in the eye from your CEO.
2. Image blocking
   Many email programs disable images until the user clicks "Show Images". You could avoid this whole problem if you ask your recipients to add you to their address book. Once in their address book, your images should display fine. Tell your recipients that if they don't add your From address to their address book that they won't get to have a cookie and hear a bedtime story. That ought to show them.
3. Gaps under images
   Every once in a while you'll see an email with a large image where the image is visibly split into parts. If you need to slice apart your large image so that it loads better, and you see a gap between them, add this CSS code:
   <img src="http://www.thoughtreach.com/images/logo.jpg style="display:block;">
4. Blue hyperlink borders around images
   Sorry, this one has been around for so long that if you are still seeing this in your HTML emails and don't know why it happens, you are a nimbleweed. This happens only when you are using an image as a hyperlink. If you didn't specifically tell the image to not have a stupid blue border around it, an ugly blue border will appear. Simply add code like this to your image hyperlinks
   <img src="http://www.thoughtreach.com/images/logo.jpg border="0">
   
   Sorry about the whole "nimbleweed" comment. I wanted to apologize before you went off and told the teacher on me.
5. Image file not supported
   This one is actually not too boneheaded at all. It's not uncommon for a marketer to want to use a .png image in their HTML. Why? Because it's such a small file size compared to .jpg and loads quickly. Unfortunately if you want all email clients to display your images, you need to use only gif or jpg images. Don't use png, bmp, or tiff, no matter how pretty they are.

Fonts displaying incorrectly 
While we all appreciate your CEO's love for fonts like "Jester" or "Kidsprint", any font you choose for your HTML will only display if that font is also installed on the recipient's computer. Since your recipient doesn't hold the same appreciation for your CEO's quirky love of those fonts, you'll need to stick to using normal-person fonts (and by "normal" I mean boring). The more boring fonts are highly supported in all email clients. These include Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Trebuchet.

Silly fonts in your HTML email
don't show up that way

Gmail can be a pain in the head tag
Using CSS formatting in the head tag of your email will cause your email to not display properly in Gmail. The gods over at Google will take it upon themselves to strip out any CSS formatting in the head of your emails. To have your formatting display properly at Gmail (and everywhere else), use inline formatting in your HTML code. Your HTML email will display properly and you'll have fresher breath too (not sure what that means but that's what Loraine in the cube next to me told me to write).

Example of what not to do:
<head>
     <style type="text/css">
     hr {color:sienna;}
     p {margin-left:20px;}
     body {background-image:url("images/back40.gif");}
     </style>
</head>

Instead use this CSS code inline with your paragraph:
<p style="color:sienna;margin-left:20px">This is a paragraph.</p>

Default values
Some email clients will decide layout options related to borders and spacing for you. To prevent this, be sure to specify them first. For example, go ahead and set a table's cellspacing and border to be equal to zero such as
<table cellspacing="0" border="0">

That way, you're telling the ornery email client to not mess with your spacing, and to shut up about it.

Validate your HTML code
Some email clients are picky about the validity of the underlying HTML. If your HTML isn't exactly formed as they expect it, they will go off and cry in a corner. To validate your HTML use W3C's HTML validator tool. I'll be honest with you, this validator tool can be a pain so don't say I didn't warn you.

If you've read all the way through this article, you either are really serious about your email, or you wish you could get that ten minutes of your life back. You deserve a cookie. Since I don't have one, "liberate" one from the break room.

Read next: Learn how to save time by posting to multiple social networks quickly using one simple tool.

* About Litmus: Litmus has great toolsets for previewing your HTML emails across many different email clients before you even send it. They also have spam filter tests and email analytics. Not bad for a company made out of thin paper that changes color when you dip it in a liquid base solution...... : )