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

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

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

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

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

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

What's a spam trap (or honeypot)? It's an email address used as a trap by the ISPs. You didn't need me to tell you that, did you? You kind of figured that one out on your own? So, Miss SmartyMcKnowEverythingPants, you may know what a spam trap is, but do you know how they are formed, what happens if you send to email to one, and what to do if your sending reputation is in the toilet because you "accidentally" sent an email to a spam trap address? (And by "accidentally," I mean "on purpose.")
Tweet

How spam traps are born
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are so sick and tired of all the whining and sniveling they hear from their customers about spam, that they use a lot of methods to catch Mr. Russian McSpammyPants at his game. So, the ISPs, like Gmail, might take an old, unused Gmail address and start monitoring it. Gmail knows it's unused because no one has logged into it since Ronald Reagan was in office. And, Gmail follows the logic that if no one is logging in to the email account, and yet somehow, almost as if by magic, a marketer like you just sent a "subscription-based" email to that dormant email address, that something is amiss.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read related: Gmail gives email marketers a second chance

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.
Tweet

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.

Tweet

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

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.