The Noob's Zen Guide to Email Deliverability Speak

(This is a companion guide to "The Noob's Zen Guide to Email Marketing and Social Media Speak")

Are you a noob to email deliverability? Don't worry. I know experts who are noob's at being experts, which is to say that they know a lot more than you, but they are new at being experts, hence their noobishness. Make sense? No? Perfect. Lets get started.

Above the Fold:
When a man is significantly overweight, this is the part of his waistline that is above the belt. In email marketing, this is the part of an email message that is visible in the email client without scrolling down. This is different depending on what email client your subscribers open your email in. It's good to test your email in different clients like Gmail and Hotmail. It's also good to test it on different mobile devices. You should put your most valuable content above the fold, and you should tell your husband to get on the stairmaster.

Appending:
If you are performing email appending that means you have been a very bad girl. This is where you take a list of customers from your database (that has everything on it EXCEPT the customer's email address) and you use a third party company to help match an email address to that customer. Your intent is to then
start sending marketing email to that customer. Unfortunately, since the customer didn't sign up for your email in the first place, they'll mark your email as spam fast enough to get you banned from your ESP.

Authentication:
ESPs want to know if the FROM address represents where the email really came from. If it doesn't authenticate properly, that means instead of coming from you, it may have come from somewhere deep within the borders of Svatlanikanitski, near the road to Duchambe, which as everyone knows is home to spammy-McRuskiNatishamivoya, whatever that means. ISPs are trying to protect us from spammers and they use technologies like Domain Keys, DKIM, Sender ID, and SPF to authenticate email. You don't need to worry about what those are, just suffice it to say that your ESP better know what those are.

Bacn:
Bacon eaten in too high a quantity will cause you to need that stairmaster again. Email that is called Bacn is email that you subscribed to but yet you let it sit for a long time before reading because you are too busy doing needless tasks for your boss. ISPs watch to see how much email you let sit around for a long time without reading and then they label that as Bacn.

Blacklist:
Loraine in the cube next to me put me on her personal blacklist which means she is mad at me (again) and might toss her ficus tree over the cube wall at me at any time. Email blacklists are lists of emailers that are on the naughty list. Do something naughty, like hide Loraine's plant food for no particularly good reason, and you'll find your email not making it to the inbox. Or something like that. You can find if you are on a blacklist by checking at SenderScore.org.

Block:
Blocks were a set of toys with letters on the side that fascinated me for days on end when I was a wee little one. In email marketing a block is where your email has been greeted by the ISP with a warm, "Hello! Welcome. We're so glad you came! Now don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." This is a refusal by an ISP to accept your email because of their spam filters.

Bulk Mail:
"Bulk" refers to fiber. You know, like the fiber in your "Super Colon Overblow" cereal. In email marketing it refers to when your email gets shoved into the Bulk folder, which means that your recipient probably never sees it. It's not exactly spam, but since the recipient doesn't see it, it is worthless.

Click-to-Open Rate:
You've heard of the click-through rate, but the click to open rate is where you're comparing the number of unique people to open the email to the number of links they've clicked within the email.

Not this type of whine

Complaint Rate:
Also known as the "Pouter Rate". This refers to that guy in your office that pouted and whined so much that he got the window office, whereas you are stuck in the center of cube-land. Even though this upset you, you agree that your boss made the correct decision just to shut him up. In email when a recipient hits the Spam button, that registers as a complaint. This is the ratio of pouters to the total number of emails sent. Complaints are routed back to your ESP through feedback loops. A good ESP will automatically remove that pouter from your email list to avoid future pouting.

Content Filters:
These are software filters that block email based on text, words, phrases within the email that might look spammy. When you pour coffee from your French press coffee maker it tries to filter out the coffee grounds. It generally does a good job but sometimes a few slip through. Your ESP should have a content filter that scans your email prior to launch to tell you about the coffee grounds it found.

Deliverability:
Refers to the whole subject area of tracking where your emails end up; in the inbox or elsewhere. As a child, your grandfather, on his paper route, would have said that the Monday - Saturday newspaper had high deliverability but the Sunday paper was so darn big and bulky that many times, he crashed his bike trying to haul the stupid thing.

Domain:
This is just your registered website URL name on the Internet such as ThoughtReach.com.

DNS:
Domain Name System. This is the thingy by which computers know how to look up other computers in the phone book to find them, ask them out on a date, and then get rejected by them. Story of my life (kidding).

Email Client:
This is just a fancy term that means "the thing that your recipient uses to read her email." Examples of clients are Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Outlook, Lotus Notes (who the hell uses Lotus Notes anymore?), and Zimbra.

Email Service Provider (ESP):
These are companies like Thought Reach, Constant Contact, ExactTarget and Eloqua that have software to send mass email for people like you, their customers.

Feedback Loop (FBL):
FBLs are the thingeys that will report back to the email marketer that "Hey, some nimrod whined about your email by hitting the Spam button." ISPs monitor their users and use the FBL to report back to the marketer. Most good ESPs will automatically remove the pouter from the email list.

Hard Bounce:
This is different from Bounce Fabric Softener in that a Hard Bounce doesn't smell so pretty. If you send an email to a dead email address, you'll get a hard bounce. Thought Reach and other ESPs automatically remove hard bounces from your email list after the first bounce. Too many hard bounces and it makes you look like Ivan McSpammyPants.

Multi-part Mime:
Blessedly, this is not that obnoxious mime in Central Park with the white face paint that won't stop acting like he's trapped in an invisible box. This term refers to the two formats of email that are sent out by ESPs. Each email is sent in both HTML and plain text. Once the email is received, the email client determines which format to display. Typically you'll create both types of content prior to launching your email campaign.

Inactives:
These are the slackers on your email list. They are also called non-responders, un-engaged, or "nimbleweeds who signed up for my email, then never open it." This type of inactivity is calculated based on whether or not the recipient opens or clicks a link in your email. You should remove inactives from your list.

Internet Service Provider (ISP):
These are the companies like Google, Hotmail, and AOL who provide people like you and me with an email address and a place to receive our spam.

IP Address:
This is just the address of your computer or mobile phone. It's kind of like the street address of your house. It identifies where you are. IP addresses are also used by your ESP when they send bulk email on your behalf. The reputation of the IP address is one factor that is considered when the ISP determines if your email is spam or not.

Mr. Brusha-Brusha

List Hygiene:
This is a little more fun than dental hygiene. This is when you make sure your email list is clean, and cavity-free. Hard bounces and unsubscribes are removed. You might even remove anyone that hasn't opened or clicked on a link within your email in the last six months.

List Purchase:
If you use a purchased email list, you might just find yourself booted from your email service provider. Sending mass email to a purchased list is the quickest way to see about a million spam complaints come in from one campaign. Those recipients don't recognize you and thus they think you are spam. Don't purchase an email list.

List Rental:
This is different than purchasing a list. You pay a third party to send your email to their list. Presumably, their subscribers have agreed to this process. List rentals can be successful only when the recipients are the exact kind of people that want to read the type of dribble that you send out : ).

Open Rate:
This is the rate at which your recipients have opened your email compared to the total number sent, presuming they are opening the HTML version. The only way for your ESP to know if the subscriber opened your email is that the email has a hidden one pixel image in it. Once that image is called for by the email client, your ESP will know your subscriber has opened the email. If the subscriber only accepts text email, there is no image in it and you'll never know if they opened it or not. Dang.

Opt-in:
Opt-in email marketing means you send your dribble only to those of us who sign up to receive your dribble. Double Opt-in is where I sign up to receive your dribble, then your ESP automatically sends an email to my email address asking me to confirm that I'm sure I want your dribble.

Read Rate:
The percentage of email recipients who have marked your email as "Read" in their email client. Typically thought of as more accurate than open rate, since read rate is not dependent on image downloads like open rate is.

Receiver:
Receiver is just another term for ISP.

Re-engagement Campaign:
If you have a list of un-engaged recipients, you might want to send them a slap-in-the-face email to see if they are listening, and to ask them if they want your dribble or not. Otherwise, you'll remove them and not speak to them again. Really good email marketers send creative re-engagement campaigns. Why conduct a re-engagement campaign? Because if you have too many un-engaged recipients, ISPs view you as a spammer. Removing un-engaged recipients shows you are not a spammer.

Reputation:
Email reputation is very different from what the term "reputation" meant in high school. Sender reputation is a measure of everything related to how reputable an email marketer you are. How many complainers, hard bounces, spam trap hits, open rate, click-through rate, email volume, and consistency of email sending.

Sender:
This is you, the email marketer, or refers to your ESP.

Server:
Servers are those magical computer boxes that live in the sky somewhere. They have little blinky lights on them and secretly run the internet and control all life as we know it.

Soft Bounce:
This should have been called something like "we tried to send your email, but the guy was out of office or his email server was drunk and thus couldn't deliver the email." Often, the problem is temporary and your ESP will try to deliver it again.

Spam Traps:
Spam traps are email addresses used solely to capture spammers (also known as "honey pots" because apparently Winnie the Pooh was a spammer). Some of these email addresses were never owned by a real person, which would seem to indicate they could not have signed up for your email. Other spam traps are email addresses once used by a real person, but that person abandoned the email address sometime back when Bill Clinton was in office. If you send a marketing email to an email address being used as a spam trap your email sending reputation will look like a Smart Car that's been in a head-on collision with a freight train. Fixing that email sending reputation is not an easy task.

SpamCop:
A big list of email marketers who played badly with others and got sent to their room without a cookie. A lot of email receivers check the IP addresses of incoming email against SpamCop see if you've been arrested for armed spammery and served time in prison.

Suppression List:
A list of email addresses you specifically don't want to send email to because they unsubscribed. Sometimes you use a suppression list because your company was purchased by another company and you need to make sure you aren't sending email to the pouters that unsubscribed from their email lists too.

Throttling:
When I was little, my mother would say she would throttle me if I didn't lay down and take a nap. And knowing me, she was probably justified. This is where your ESP will send out your mass emails at a fast enough speed to get the job done, but at a slow enough speed so as to not piss-off Gmail or another receiver who doesn't want email to be sent to them too quickly.

Transactional email:
Transactional email messages are different from marketing email in that they are just things like receipts for your purchase, password resets, updates on shipping of your item, or other notices that don't involve selling.

Unknown User:
These are email bounces where the ISP just doesn't know who you are emailing.

Whitelist:
This is a list that you create which tells your ISP that you want these emails. This is where the "Add this sender to your safe sender list" comes into play. The term "white listing" is also thought of as some kind of magic way that an email marketer can send emails and they will always get to the inbox (this is associated with feedback loops). A feedback loop doesn't really create a magic way for your email to be delivered, but it does help.

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

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 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.

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

Disaster awaits retailers who aren't planning Christmas email marketing campaigns right now

Retailers will face email deliverability nightmares if they aren't planning their Christmas marketing campaigns early

Trashing your deliverability: Might as well
pour BBQ on your keyboard

Although August is too early to see any Christmas decorations in Macy's in Manhattan or Schwegman's in New Orleans or Kimbell's department store in the movie Miracle on 49th Street, it isn't too early for those retailers to begin planning their Christmas email marketing campaigns. Why bother to plan this far in advance? Why not wait till the last minute, slap together your creative and punch it out to your list? Because if you don't plan now, you're going to blow your email deliverability to smithereens. Then I'll get a phone call from you the day after your "Thanksgiving Day-a-palooza blowout" email blast and have to hear all that pouting from you saying, "My deliverability is down to 35% inbox placement! Our CEO wants an explanation! And then she said she wants me to blast more, more, more!" Yeah, blast out more email after you just trashed your deliverability. Why not just pour barbecue sauce on your computer right now.
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Why retailers must plan Christmas email campaigns now
The normal email deliverability trap is that a large retailer, who's spent a lot of time building an opt-in email list, will want to send out huge volume just prior to the Christmas season. The problem here is that ISPs don't want to see massive spikes in email volume coming from you. They want to see smooth, consistent email volume being sent over a long period of time. So, if you normally send an average of 500,000 emails per month during the year, but then towards the end of November, in preparation for the Thanksgiving Black Friday sale, you suddenly send 12 million emails, ISPs like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, and even "Charlie's ISP and Laundromat" will block you (No!, not Charlie's ISP! Insert shrieking sound here). That type of spike in email volume can look like spam to an ISP. And to them, if it looks like spam and comes in a metal can with a pull-top, it is spam and they block it.

A plan for retailers to avoid this problem
Whether you are a retailer or not, your email marketing efforts need to be planned so that you can spread out the volume much more evenly throughout the year.

Deliverability rates will plummet if you send
too much email volume during Christmas as
compared to other times of the year

Step 1: Reevaluate your life 
Not really. But do reevaluate your need to send all that email. Are you sure your subscribers want all that crap? If they don't want it they're going to click the Report Spam button anyway.

Remember, ISPs don't care that your CEO thinks that a bigger email list is better, they only care about their customers.

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Reduce your email list to focus only on customers that want it. Conduct a re-engagement campaign well prior to the Christmas season. Ask subscribers if they still want your emails. Tell them that during the holidays you'll be emailing incredible deals that would make Thanksgiving's Black Friday half-off sales look as boring as a set of actuarial tables that predict the reproductive rate of the unladen swallow (the European type).

Step 2: Get engaged without the diamond
Create an incentive to engage with your emails. No diamond rings required. Create a contest, or offer an extra coupon to subsribers that consistently open and click links in your emails. Tell subscribers what you are doing and what they will win. DeBeers might want to give away a diamond ring though.

Step 3: Increase volume well in advance of Rudolph
Send increasingly more and more email volume over the next few months so that ISPs see your volume steadily increasing. These are not Christmas emails, these are emails that you might normally be sending out in July, August, and September. Sending out an increasing amount of email now will also serve to flush out the non-interested recipients who will unsubscribe (and hopefully not click the Report Spam button). You want to clear out your list now instead of having a high rate of unsubscribes during the holiday email season.

As you increase email volume, start segmenting your list so that you identify the really interested recipients. These are the ones who consistently open and click. Then, when it comes time to send out the big Black Friday email marketing campaign, you'll know which customers really want all that email and which don't. Send the highly engaged recipients a lot of email, but don't send nearly as much to those recipients who's engagement level is lower. By not sending too much to the lesser engaged recipients, you will be sending less overall email during the holiday season.

At the end of this plan, you'll have sent out much more email in advance of the holiday season and much less during the holiday season. This will result in a more even volume of email being sent over time. Your sales results will be fantastic (thereby shutting up your CEO) and your deliverability rate won't suck either.

Retailers read next: How the Black Dog Tavern runs circles around your small business advertising strategy

How to double your Gmail inbox placement rates

We all talk about the little tweaks we can do to help increase our inbox placement rates at the major ISPs like Gmail. But what if you are having trouble getting into the inbox at Gmail at all? What if we asked the question "how can I DOUBLE my inbox placement rates at Gmail"? AND, what if I further asked "why can't Loraine at our office not keep a simple Ficus tree alive?" Well it is possible to answer the first two questions, anyway. If you are willing to incorporate some personalization tactics that specifically target Gmail subscribers with their own campaign (and yes, this means doing some extra work), then you may be successful. If you aren't willing to do any extra work, then I've got a great piece of advice for you--> read someone else's blog : ).
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Double your Gmail inbox placements
If you have been paying any attention to your inbox placement rates at the ever-fickle Gmail, you have noticed a decrease which means your readers aren't reading your email anymore.
Two B2C retailers that depend on their email newsletters getting through to the inbox are ProFlowers and Shari's Berries. The Magill Report witnessed these retailers start sending out personalized emails intended just for Gmail subscribers. The subject lines of these emails were things like "Gmail Users Weekend Sales Event: 59% off a Gift Mom will Remember Forever". The results from these highly targeted campaigns were quite impressive. ProFlowers' Gmail inbox placement rate jumped from 35.9 percent to 71.8 percent (eDataSource).  And, in subsequent campaigns, the inbox rates were at 95%! Shari's Berrys also provided graphical instructions on how to report the email message as Not Spam (see the graphic below).

Click to enlarge

If you are having trouble sending to Gmail
First set up a few free Gmail test accounts to monitor what happens when your campaign are sent there and then try the below:

• Remove any subscriber from your list that has not opened/clicked one of your messages in the last 90 days
• Be sure your email service provider doesn't send your emails too quickly to Gmail.  A good ESP will know the appropriate speed.
• Use email authentication
• Use a spam check tool prior to launch to help spot problems
• Check with your ESP to ensure they participate in feedback loops*
• Check your Gmail test accounts and be sure that the emails are received, and that images are displayed.  If emails are not in the inbox, stop!  Don't send the rest of the campaign until you know what the problem is. You may be able to narrow down the problem:
• Send your campaign in small segments, dividing the content into two parts. 
• If both sections of your content fail to reach the inbox, continue dividing the content into smaller pieces and resend. Repeat this process with subsequently smaller sections of content until what content is driving the spam filtering issue. 

If your campaigns are still not reaching the inbox at Gmail, consider engaging the tools and services of inbox placement companies such as  Litmus, Email on Acid (yes!, that's actually the name of their company), Return Path, and Pivotal Veracity (IBM Unica Email Optimization).  They can help you see exactly what is happening with your emails and provide advice on what else you can do.

Read next: Gmail gives marketers a second chance
If you are still trying to send your bulk emails using Outlook, you may want to read this article

* Feedback loops are where the ESP receives the complaint list from the ISP of any recipients that clicked the Report Spam button. These subscribers should be automatically removed from your list. Gmail does not participate in feedback loops, but this is an important fact to know about your ESP.

ESP- email service provider
ISP- internet service provider

Your email open rate may not mean what you think. What the Silverpop Benchmark study can teach marketers.

Email service provider Silverpop conducted a benchmark study which reveals some interesting email marketing information that impacts senders of bulk email. Below is the recap which may open your eyes.

Your open rate may not mean what you think:
Email recipients are now commonly using their mobile device to scan their email messages. Many emails are deleted, but some are opened on a mobile device and then saved for later viewing on a laptop. This could register two opens for the same subscriber. It might seem that this subscriber is really interested in your email message and was so darned excited about it, she had to reopen it later just to take a look at your rippling prose. Let's put it this way; she's not as excited about your prose as you might think just based on the fact that she opened your message twice. Don't get me wrong, she likes you, but you aren't exactly dating yet either.

Size matters:
No matter what you've been told, (email) size does matter. Emails that are lengthy are more likely to be opened a second time for another look. Don't get carried away here and go all "War and Peace" on us. But, this data also reveals that you shouldn't write an email so short that the time it takes to read it is the same amount of time it takes for a jackrabbit come home from a date either. Emails that also include deadlines, especially deadlines with offers in them, are also more likely to get a second look from your recipient. When it comes to the physical size (in KB) of your emails, keep in mind that your subscriber might be downloading your email on their mobile device, sitting in the lounge at the airport, listening to the live stylings of "Murph and the Magic Tones", with two lousy bars of cell signal. In that case, your 290KB message isn't going to load too fast. The best rule of thumb is to try to keep it to under 50KB.  Don't go too small though. A message of only a few KB "is likely a text-only message and may significantly underperform versus a comparable but HTML-designed message many times larger".

Lighten up on the cheese:
Emails that are heavier on news, are educational, or contain really relevant information get higher click through rates and engagement compared to those cheddar-filled, sales-ey cheese-ball things you've been throwing lately. Three industries seem to excel in the anti-cheese department. Computer Software, Media / Publishing, and Consumer Services were the best performing verticals in click through due to their focus on low-Brie email content.

"List Churn" doesn't have anything to do with making homemade butter:
List churn includes what we at Thought Reach like to call "the ugly." The ugly is comprised of things like unsubscribes, hard bounces, and the dreaded spam complaint. The study reveals that recipients that unsubscribe may be trying to tell you something. Your email is irrelevant. Or, something far easier to handle- the fact that they just want to change their email address or subscription preferences, but they don't see that as an option on your email.  Since they don't know how to change these things, they simply unsubscribe.

Was it over when the German's
bombed Pearl Harbor?

The spam complaint is the Grand Poo Bah of the ugly. "While each ISP is different, the rule of thumb is to not exceed one to two complaints per thousand messages". Those subscribers may be telling you they simply don't trust your unsubscribe process in the first place. Worse still is if they simply can't find how to unsubscribe, so they click the spam complaint button instead. And the ugliest of the ugly is when they click unsubscribe, yet your page wants them to login before they are able to unsubscribe. Requiring a subscriber to login to be able to unsubscribe is not only a violation of CAN SPAM, it's just downright un-American. In fact, it almost reminds me of when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

Managing your list is critical as well. "Top-performing companies had hard bounce rates one-twentieth that of average performers". I'd repeat that statement again, but instead, why don't you just reread it so I don't have to. If you just do it right, keep your list up to date, and stop emailing non-engaged bozos, your hard bounce rate would plummet to near zero. Top performing companies are spending a lot less money reacquiring the same customers that you keep trying to chase.

To read the study in full, visit the Silverpop website.  And while you're at it, stop using Outlook to send marketing email.