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.

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

Lose All Your Twitter Followers with One Mistake

Despicable Me Minion at work
stealing your Twitter login

This article was originally published on Business2Community

Some of you readers have made it clear that you are small business owners and don't have time for all that "security" balderdash where some guy like me is telling you to watch out for this scam or that scam. Well too bad, pal.

If you have a Twitter following, you might want to read this. Otherwise you could lose all your followers. Tweet

Scammers want access to your Twitter account
There are scammers out there looking to gain access to your Twitter account so they can spam your followers by schlepping products like timeshare condos or Ronco Automatic Glass Frosters or used copies of Richard Simmons' Deal-a-meal videos or even tickets to that upcoming Neil Diamond concert you've been dying to attend yourself (admit it). This is probably a reaction from all the Nigerian spammers who no longer can get anyone to transfer them money anymore. Anyway, not only is this not what you want for your followers, but

Most of your followers won't know it's not you sending this garbage and they'll un-follow you. 

If they un-follow you, that will reverse all the hard work you put in to gain them as followers in the first place. Some of you who follow me at @ThoughtReach have huge numbers of your own followers, so you should pay attention.
Follow @ThoughtReach

Here's how the scam works
You get a curious tweet directed at you from one of your followers. It might look like this one that arrived in my inbox while I was minding my own business and innocently grinding some Fair Trade espresso beans in my $19 Boden grinder.

The bait: "Hey, this person is writing offensive posts that are about you"

Now to be fair, for all I know, this guy's Twitter account could have been hacked and was used to try to hack into mine, so if that's the case, sorry. Don't go off yelling at me in the comment section below. Anyway, if you were to click on the shortlink in that tweet, you'd be forwarded to this webpage:

Take a look at the URL. If you can't read it, it says "tvivtter.com" which looks suspiciously like "twitter.com"

Looks like a real Twitter login page, doesn't it
But, take a close look at the URL. It looks like it says twitter.com, but instead it says tvivtter.com. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Had I entered my login credentials to Twitter on this webpage, which is owned by the scammer, he would have acquired my Twitter login and shortly thereafter, my followers would be wondering why I was tweeting them ads for "Ronco Spray-paint-the-bald-away". So just watch out. As a business owner, you may not have time to watch for every security loophole, but you really don't have time to clean up this smashed-Hostess-Twinkie-of-a-mess.

Have you been a victim yourself? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Best and Worst Ever

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

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.
Tweet
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...... : )

Why can't I do email marketing with Outlook?

Why can't I just use outlook to send bulk emails?

Let's start out this article on the right foot, shall we? Outlook sucks for sending marketing emails. Why? Because you are missing so many components that will make you successful. Outlook is fine for communicating with your customers and co-workers, but don't expect it to double as a "free" email marketing tool. Here's a list of some of the reasons Outlook won't work for sending bulk marketing email:

• Poor HTML! - Outlook uses Microsoft Word to create the html necessary to send out a nice looking email. The problem is that Word's creation of html is so bad that your email can get flagged as spam by the receiving email server which is looking for poorly formed html as a sign of a spammer. That's right, even the quality of your html is judged by spam tools.  Use a real email marketing product that forms proper html to avoid getting flagged as a spammer.
  
• No tracking of clicks or opens - If you don't know who is clicking and opening your emails, you don't know who your "engaged" subscribers are. Not knowing this important fact will get your emails blocked.  How? Email receivers automagically monitor how many of their customers are opening and clicking YOUR email. And, if not enough of them are engaging with your email, they start blocking you even if these recipients are double opt-in subscribers who love you dearly, and have sworn allegiance to you as Grand Poo-Bah. You should remove subscribers who are not engaged in the last 90-120 days or so. Outlook won't give you this info.
  
• No automatic bounce removal - how much time do you have on your hands? I have so much time on my hands that I write this blog during a time that I should be asleep.  In case that was too subtle, I don't have any free time.  And since time is not available to me, I certainly don't have time to manually remove every hard bounce that comes back to me, or every person that replies with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.  That's why I use a real email tool that handles all that for me.
  
• BCC email looks like spam - if you use Outlook to send bulk email, and BCC a bunch of email addresses, receiving email servers greet your email with a nice, cheery, "Hello, you are spam, welcome to our spam box" greeting.  It looks like spam so it's treated like spam.
  
• No authentication - when you use Outlook to send your email, you are getting no email authentication.  What in the heck is email authentication?  These are technologies that tell the receiving email provider who you are, that you are announcing your identity and domain, and are doing so such that you couldn't possibly be a spammer.  When you use a real email marketing tool, they provide you with authentication technologies like DKIM, DomainKeys, SenderID, DMARC, and SPF.  Sometimes you need to also have your website guy do a little tweek to your domain record, but your email marketing tool will give you instructions on how to do this.  Let's put it this way, if you don't use email authentication, a huge amount of your email is being blocked at this very moment.  Your email isn't even reaching your subscribers.
  
• No control over unsubscribing - Not only do you have to manually handle unsubscribe requests, but your customers have no subscription preference center to opt in and out of the different emails that you offer.  What customers want is to see a pretty little webpage where they can check cute little boxes to indicate which bulk emails they want from you and which they don't.  If you're not using a real email marketing tool, your customers can't do this, and they pout profusely about it.
  
• No personalization - Finally, using Outlook for bulk email, how are you going to send an email that has personalization on it so it can say things like:  "Dear Mikey, as a kid, Life cereal was your favorite, and now it's Super Fiber Overblow, we'd like to offer you a 15% discount on your next order..."  Every field in red represents data from your database now being displayed as a merge field which would be automagically filled in with the information you have stored about your subscriber, Mikey. Think of how powerful this email message is instead of sending Mikey an email that says "Dear Customer, we use stupid Outlook to send bulk emails which means we can't personalize your email even though we know your favorite cereal, and so we can't offer you a discount on it."  If you use Outlook for sending marketing email, you get no personalization.

Hopefully you see the folly of doing email marketing with Outlook.  So use a real email tool instead. Take a look by signing up for a free account.

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.