These days there’s a growing list of essential content you should include in every email you send. You know the drill. Unsubscribe mechanism, postal address, link to web version, the list goes on.

The permission reminder message

Of all the essential content though, there’s one I consistently see missing in many of the thousands of campaigns we deliver each week. What makes this more surprising is that this is one of the most important elements and also one of the easiest to add. I’m talking about the permission reminder message – a simple sentence or two reminding the subscriber how they gave you their permission to email them. Here’s a quick example:

Hi, just a reminder that you’re receiving this email because you subscribed via our website. As promised, this issue includes great tips on ……

Simple hey. In 2 simple sentences you’ve assured each recipient that your email isn’t spam and reminded them why they were interested in hearing from you in the first place.

Don’t stop there

We’re nearly there, but now that you’ve reminded the subscriber how you got their permission and what you’re sending them, why not give those that are no longer interested the option to unsubscribe right there and then. Here’s a complete example:

Hi, just a reminder that you’re receiving this email because you subscribed via our website. As promised, this issue includes great tips on ……, but you may unsubscribe if you’re no longer interested.

If you can’t summarise how you got their permission in a few words, then there’s every chance you don’t have it or they won’t remember giving it to you. “Remember that time you downloaded a report from our partner and gave them your email address” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

I recently sent a work-related email to a colleague with some time sensitive information in it. Not being in email marketing mode, I included the words “time sensitive” in the subject line and hit send. Several days later when I hadn’t heard back, I called him to see if he had received my message. He hadn’t. After a little digging, he found it—yep—in the spam folder.

Deliverability is a serious issue for brands, not just because legitimate messages get siphoned out of the inbox and into the spam folder, but also because your sender reputation is at stake.

What Happens When Someone Marks Your Email as Spam?
When a subscriber marks your email as spam, his ISP will block future messages from you. Your email service provider will also keep track of this information, making it possible for ISPs to make judgments about future emails you send to other recipients. Every time someone hits the spam button, it chips away at your sender reputation, making it harder for you to reach your subscribers.

Why Legitimate Emails End Up In the Spam Folder
Spam filters are all well and good for keeping out the baddies, but what about your legitimate messages? What mistakes are you making and how can you fix them?

• You’re including questionable material in the subject line. Spammers use tactics like all caps, multiple exclamation marks, and key phrases (like my “time sensitive” email above) to get people to click.Fix: Create subject lines that communicate message content without using gimmicks.

• You’re not communicating the right expectations to subscribers. If you send messages more often than expected or send valueless content, your subscribers will get irritated and send you careening into the spam folder.Fix: Communicate clearly what types of messages you’ll be sending and how often. Each message should include valuable content such as special offers, useful information, or sales announcements.

• You’re using shady list-building practices. Purchased lists often include spam trap messages and closed accounts. Too many of these bounces will destroy your sender reputation. Not only that, it’s bad business practice.Fix: Use double opt-ins to build your list, ensuring that each subscriber legitimately meant to sign up and knows what to expect.

A strong sender reputation is essential for keeping your legitimate messages out of the spam folder. Focus on providing valuable content, presenting it in a reputable format, and keeping an eye on your email metrics in order to deal with potential problems before they spiral out of control.

In a post on the eConnect Email Blog at the beginning of October, James Trumbly, Director of Business Development at eConnect Email explained how to use an email marketing system to nurture leads. Trumbly discussed how the best lead nurturing approaches to email marketing consists of delivering high quality content to a narrowly targeted audience at regular intervals. In addition, they always provide incentives to opt in to an email list that contains your ultimate offer and leads to a sale.

I’d like to talk about how marketing should approach leads after they’re nurtured by email marketing when the prospect is ready for qualification. In my view, the lead qualification process, like the lead nurturing process, should stay within the marketing department. I also think that marketing personnel should take the additional step of getting on the phone to qualify leads. While this is a function normally left to sales departments, I think Marketing is in a better position to qualify leads- and by doing so will ultimately produce higher quality leads for your sales teams. Here’s why:

Marketing Doesn’t Have Near-Term Quotas to Close Deals
The reality of sales departments is that salespeople live quarter to quarter, and they have to hit a quota each quarter in order to stay in the good graces of their department. While this is a great incentive for keeping your sales team motivated to bring in revenue, that same incentive could be counterproductive in the lead qualification process.  So that is the reason I believe Marketing is better suited for lead qualification.

First off, the marketing department isn’t particularly concerned with hitting near-term quotas. This allows the marketer to engage a prospect in a more open and honest conversation about their needs, purchase time frame, budget and other factors that comprise typical qualification criteria. Beyond that, marketing departments should become more responsible for the quality of leads that they send to the sales team. By managing the qualification process, the marketing team becomes intimately tied to the quality of the lead.

In order to make this work however, marketing departments need to be methodical about whom they hire, how they compensate and how the lead qualification process is managed- and improved. Here are four tips for managing this process:

1. Hire at the Junior Level
In any role, hiring the right person is critical. For the role of lead qualifier, you want someone energetic, competitive and willing to spend time on the phone. You also want them to be junior enough to grow into a different Sales or Marketing role. Beyond that, you want someone that can really drive a phone conversation and has the inquisitive nature to dig beneath the surface to and uncover information from the prospect.

2. Compensate with a Sales-like Pay Structure
The biggest driver in increasing the quality of marketing leads is to tie compensation to the sale. The easiest way to do that is to start them off at a base salary while offering them a commission based on the total revenue of closed deals. You can also add incentives for qualification accuracy such as an additional bonus for a great sales-accepted lead.

3. Decide How to Route Leads
The natural lead category breakdown is to create three buckets of leads:
a.  Qualified leads
b.  Disqualified leads
c.  Leads that need to be nurtured

All of these are fairly self-explanatory but the last one is worth elaborating on. The real opportunity for shifting this role to a marketing department is that you can dedicate someone to nurturing leads with a human touch. As such, there should be an intense focus on the nurturing aspect of lead qualification.

4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
While this is a long-standing issue in companies across the globe, it’s a necessary area of focus for making this model work. Both the sales and marketing departments should have regular meetings about lead qualification criteria. This allows the sales team to fully understand why Marketing is disqualifying certain leads (and to double-check that they’re not disqualifying a few hidden gems). The best way to manage this process is to have both departments meet frequently. Introduce weekly meetings and gradually move to once a month.

While this is not a comprehensive list of what needs to happen, I believe it to be the key area of focus. If you follow these steps, you can create a Marketing team that drives more sales, is more accountable and is better suited to see its contribution to revenue.

Increasing deliverability is a noble goal for every email marketer. And while you may be able to boost your rates with subject line and offer techniques, there is an underlying issue that often gets overlooked: list building.

The Wrong Approach to List Building

Despite the mountains of evidence showing the benefits of building your own email list, less than 45% of all email marketers use permission-based lists. That means that more than half of businesses who send emails on a regular basis buy, rent, or use co-registration to build email lists. That’s a problem for three reasons:

• People who don’t explicitly sign up for your newsletter will be more likely to send you to the spam folder.
• People who sign up for your list accidentally or only as a result of another promotion will be unlikely to remain active.
• Purchased or rented lists have high unsubscribe rates because they consist of people who haven’t showed any interest in your products or services.

How to Build a List That Jump Starts Deliverability

Deliverability depends heavily on your subscribers wanting the messages you send them. If they didn’t sign up to receive your messages or they don’t remember signing up, they’ll hit the spam button. Respecting your subscribers’ right to choose which messages they receive and which ones they don’t can make a huge difference in how many of your emails reach their intended destination. In order to achieve better deliverability rates, implement these proven list-building strategies.

• Use double opt-ins whenever possible. By sending an initial email with a link that must be clicked to complete the opt-in process, you increase the likelihood that your subscribers will remember signing up.
• Make it easier to unsubscribe. Sound counterintuitive? Look at it this way. If a subscriber can’t easily see the unsubscribe link, he’ll hit the spam button instead, which will chip away at your deliverability rates. By making the unsubscribe link more visible, you ensure that the email addresses on your list belong to people who still want what you have to offer.
• Monitor and remove both hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce should be removed immediately from your list, while a soft bounce can be retried several times before removal. Either way, don’t let bounces sabotage your deliverability.

At eConnect Email, we help you maintain stellar deliverability by helping you monitor the vital stats of every email campaign you send. Keeping your lists clean ensures that the highest number of emails possible will reach their intended destination, meaning greater return on the investment you’ve made.

Two months ago, Hotmail announced the addition of new email controls that will give users greater ability to regulate the influx of marketing messages they receive. The new features will address the problem of “graymail,” the messages a user did at one time subscribe to but which now no longer engage his attention.  Newsletters, Groupon-style ads, and online clubs can all fall under the category of graymail if the subscriber deletes or marks them as spam without opening.

How Hotmail users will control graymail

The primary change to Hotmail’s handling of graymail is that newsletters will be automatically marked as such by the email service. This designation will enable Hotmail users to perform tasks such as:

• Scheduled Sweeps—Designate an expiration date for mail from specified senders, with automatic deletions when the message expires. This action also allows Hotmail users to sweep newsletters directly to a subfolder or to delete them altogether

• Inbox Unsubscribes—Unsubscribe from a mailing list directly from Hotmail’s inbox. Hotmail will handle the unsubscribe process for you, or simply block the email

• Instant Actions—Delete, flag, mark read, or sweep messages to a subfolder simply by hovering over the message in your inbox

What this means for marketers

While news of Hotmail’s new graymail controls may cause initial panic for email marketers, the truth is that the success of your email marketing campaign will continue to depend on the same thing it always has: value for the subscriber. Your customers wanted your email once; by making each email communication relevant to your subscribers, you can continue to keep them engaged with the marketing emails you send.

Continue…

Is your email marketing campaign struggling to get off the ground? Maybe you’ve spent a lot of time crafting beautiful emails with enticing copy and images, but more often than not, your subscribers are hitting delete without even opening the message. Let’s take a look at four ways to increase your open rates and maximize the effectiveness of your campaign.

Subject Line

The subject line is your first point of contact with subscribers. Blow it, and you’ll never get the results you’re looking for.

• Simplify It—Creativity is great, but getting too flowery with your subject line can make you look suspicious. Stick to the essentials: email topic, special offer, or product name.
• Personalize It—Write your subject line in terms of the way it will benefit the subscriber. Use action words such as save, enter, or win. Speak to the reader rather than at him.
• Test It—Set up an A/B test to determine which subject line produces the best results. Use test results not only to determine the actual wording for a certain campaign, but to influence the style you use for future emails.

Send Time

The time of day you send your email can greatly affect your open rates. However, the best time of day for you will depend on who makes up your primary target audience.

• Optimize It—If you send primarily to business people, for instance, avoid sending first thing in the morning or right before 5:00. Both of these times are likely to lower your open rates.
• Test It—Try sending emails at different times to find out what time of day generates the most opens among your target audience.

Send Day

• Accommodate It—The day you send will be influenced by the type of special offer you’re promoting (a weekend sale announcement might be sent on Thursday, for example). Mondays and Fridays tend to generate lower open rates than other days.
• Test It—Experiment with different days of the week to find out when your subscribers are most likely to open and read your messages.

Subscriber List

• Segment It—Acknowledge and cater to the differences in your subscribers, especially if your list is very large. Use profile information or customer surveys to develop customized special offers based on your subscribers’ interests.
• Test It—Once again, the best way to know what works for any group of people is to test. Set up a series of tests to determine what kinds of emails appeal most to the various groups in your subscriber list.

Did you notice a pattern in the tips above? eConnect Email can help you design and run tests for your email campaign, displaying detailed reports to help you make the best possible decisions.

Yahoo!’s new email visualization tool may be email marketing eye candy, but it has also revealed some noteworthy tidbits for email marketers. The map on the front page shows Yahoo! email usage volume by location as well as a continuously updated number of emails delivered every second by the Yahoo! mail network. Click on a continent, and you can receive the same information specific to that area, with additional clicks zooming in further to reveal more detailed information about the data used to determine whether a particular message lands in the inbox or the junk folder.

What Information Is Available?

Perhaps the most interesting pieces of information for email marketers are the trending keywords and the email verification criteria.

• Trending Keywords

Click on the green box on the left side of the map to view keywords showing up most often in the subject lines of emails that make it to the inbox. Click the “Show Spam Keywords” box at the bottom of the graph to see keywords appearing in messages that land in the spam folder.

• Email Verification Criteria

This information is buried a little deeper, but can be found by clicking on a continent on the main page, then on a point within that continent. Click on one of the envelopes labeled either “Junk” or “Inbox” to see a list of five criteria used to determine which emails go where, as well as a pass or fail designation for each.

What Does This Mean for Email Marketers?

Sure, it’s interesting, but can it really impact your email marketing strategy? We think it can, by offering some valuable information we could only guess at before.

• The subject line isn’t as important as you might think when it comes to spam determination. So you can forget your list of approved or banned subject line words (like “free”) as well as those odd variations that attempt to fool the filter (f.r.e.e.; f*r*e*e; f-r-e-e). The trending keyword feature demonstrates that previously anathema words like free actually show up in delivered messages a high percentage of the time. They also show up in junked messages, suggesting that subject line words might not play as important a role as once thought.

• Spam filters look at the email as a whole to determine in-box worthiness. Criteria such as a verified IP address, links, sender, and message content all play a part in determining which messages get marked as spam and which ones reach the inbox.

The bottom line? Stop trying to game the system and instead work towards creating engaging, useful emails that build relationships with your subscribers—the kind of emails we help clients create every day at eConnect Email.

Given the amount of spam constantly battering inboxes, ISPs are understandably cracking down. And while most people are thrilled to have less spam, the 20% of legitimate emails that never make it may be cause for concern. If you are an email marketer you have a vested interest in practicing habits that will increase your sending reputation and place you in the 80% success category.

Five things determine sending reputation: volume, complaint rates, bounce rate, spam trap hits, and correct authentication. When it comes to monitoring these all-important categories you have two choices. You can either do it yourself or have professionals (like us!) do it for you.

So what if your score is already sub-par? Here are several steps you can take in repairing your reputation.

Take Action on your User Count
Want to prevent complaints and resolve your unknown user count? Stick to emailing active users who want to get your emails, and always use double opt in for your registrations. Using old contact lists is a sure-fire way to injure your user count. The unknown recipients may either delete the email or send it to spam. Bounce rates always drop when you contact people you know are interested, and spam traps will be much less likely.

Prevent Complaints
The first step in preventing complaints is understanding why you’re getting them. New users often complain when they do not receive the information that they thought they’d get. If the source of your complaints is users who have received your emails for a long time, you may simply need to delete them from your list. If they don’t want your emails and continue to get them, they will complain.

Set up Feedback Loops
If you have all of your feedback loops set up for your sending IPs it is unlikely that you will resend to complaining users. If complaints are still high after setting up the loops, the problem may be the frequency of your emails. Even interested users hate getting too many emails. Back off on your frequency and see if complaints fall. If they do, you can then slowly increase your mailings until you find exactly the right frequency. What you want to achieve is your top ROI without lots of complaints.

Authentication
SPF and domain keys can be a great tool, depending on your list sizes. If you are using an ESP in your email marketing, they can help with authenticating the sender to organize and send emails on your behalf. If interested, ask your ESP for more information about the usefulness of SPF and domain keys.

While underappreciated, deliverability is crucial to the world of email marketing. If you need help in improving your deliverability, eConnect Email would be happy to assist you.

In life, most things are far more complex than they appear at first glance.  Have you ever thought about what goes into making your shower water turn on in the morning?  What makes your microwave heat your food?  What makes your cell phone work?  What gets your piece of mail delivered to a totally different continent?  What gets your email delivered to any place in the world almost instantaneously?  Well, this post isn’t here to answer your questions about showers and microwaves, but maybe it will help answer some questions about email delivery and how it works.

#1) When emails get blocked by ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) can it be a result of content?

Yes, content can affect email blockage.  For instance, anything you put in your email that resembles spam can cause your email to be blocked.  Even if you only have an ad with links in it can cause you to be blocked.  Certain topics and words are generally associated with spammers and are good to avoid (making money, mortgage refinance, medication).  Disguising these words and others like them will only make you appear that much more of a spammer.

#2) Feedback loops—what are they and are they useful?

Feedback loops are basically just that—feedback from users.  Yahoo’s feedback loop, for example, has a spam button that will send a report when clicked by a user.  If you are getting lots of these, then you should probably take a look at what issues are causing complaints and why you are being associated with spam.

#3) What does my email reputation consist of?

Several things, actually.

• First would be your sending infrastructure.  Being compliant and having the latest standards in place is key.  Authentication also plays a vital role (spf records, domain keys, etc).
• Don’t buy email lists and start sending to people who haven’t signed up for your campaigns.  This will definitely add to your complaints and will hurt your reputation.  These spam complaints will damage your reputation.  Be worthy of the trust of your recipients.
• The longer you send from the same IP address, the more your reputation will grow.  Trust is built up over time, so if you are a new sender, use best practices in your campaigns—it will help build that trust.
• Consistency in volume is important.  Don’t send every other day, but you will have to send more than twice a year to have a good email reputation.

#4) Honeypot?  What is that?

A spam trap that is specially placed by blacklist makers and spam watchdogs.  What they do is create email addresses and place them strategically in places that only email harvesters would ever think to look.  This harvester adds them to his email lists and is subsequently caught in the act.  The main point is, don’t buy email lists.  It will get you on a blacklist faster than anything.