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.

Sometimes little things slip through the cracks when sending an email like a typo or sending the email twice.  We kick ourselves for these little mistakes and call ourselves an idiot but in reality you got your message across and people forgive and forget quicker than you think, sometimes they may not even notice.

So, before you go correcting the mistake and resending the email or send another email apologizing for the duplicate, just realize that your readers may or may not have noticed the mistake and have already moved on.  An extra email would just seem annoying, after the fact.

If you are constantly flooding inboxes with typos or other mistakes, then you have a problem.  Otherwise just chalk it up as a mistake and move on.  We tend to over think and worry for our customers too much sometimes.  They’ve probably made mistakes in life too.

So just be careful and proofread your emails before sending and check all your links.  If mistakes happen every once in a while it’s no big deal, don’t beat yourself up over it.

Our development team is always working to make our email marketing application the most robust in the industry.  We are always introducing new features or helping our clients improve their inbox results.  So, I wanted to take a few minutes to outline some pretty cool features about our system that you may not know about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer.

1. Snippets: Save yourself some time by reusing key elements to your emails like a header, footer, or side bar.  Snippets are small pieces of HTML that you can create and save and use over and over when you need them.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter is going out of business? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.  70%! Wow.  eConnect Email can help you recover those lost sales by firing off triggered emails to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentives or reminders to complete the purchase.  Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cold hard cash!
4. RSS-to-Email: Why work harder than you have to. With this feature you can update a blog and then reuse your content for your newsletter too, automatically!  Some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Want your emails to be working for you while you play? Just set it and forget it. The eConnect Email advanced scheduler deploys your emails on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Want to know how your email will render in all the top email providers including the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screenshot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: eConnect Email can communicate with your CRM. While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration, you may want to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have us “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: Readers will want to keep reading your stuff if it’s relative to them.  So tailor your emails to your client’s specific interests and you’ll keep them hooked a whole lot longer.  It just takes a little set up but the results will be well worth your time.  It’s no longer a one-size fits all world.
9. Browser Image Editing: We have a simple way to edit your photos or images inside our program.  Photoshop can be overkill and sometimes we just need to make a simple edit.  We have included the most common image editing functions inside of eConnect Email through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Pretty neat.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Let our system go to work for you once again.  Set up your welcome emails and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions with an auto-response or triggered mailing series, and relax.
11. API/Integration: For you developers out there, here’s one for you…with our API tools you can integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? Well now you can.
12. The Free Plan…Forever!: Want something that will really entice you …You can have a free account with us for up to 150 emails per month as long as you wish.  That’s a good one…free emails!  Woo hoo!  Here’s what you get: 150 email/month, store an unlimited number of subscribers, access to all account features, no contract or credit card required!  So give it a spin, activate your free account today and see why eConnect Email is simply, email done better.
13. Email Marketing Services: Need some help with your email design and delivery, or maybe your just too busy doing what you do best? Put us to work for you whether it’s one really important campaign or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing campaigns everyday.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to pricing, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We want you to feel comfortable with how you are billed, whether it be monthly or on a pay as you send basis. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the emails you send not the number of contacts you have within your account. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. Give us a ring we’re here to help – 888.596.9997.

Here’s the rundown: you are like one of the many companies out there with a facebook fanpage…as you should, especially if you have a product or service that lends itself to the world of social media, which is pretty much anyone these days.   You also have an email marketing database that you would like to grow and you have an idea of  “how can I get my Facebook fans to join my email list”.

Lucky for you, this process is easy and soon your facebook fan page and eConnect Email database will have a complimentary relationship.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Navigate to your fan page and select Edit Page (under your main image on the left hand side).
• Scroll down to Static FMBL under Applications. Click ‘Add To My Page’ when the pop-up window appears.
• Go back to your page, hit ‘Edit Page’ again and look for FMBL. Click the editing icon at right and click ‘Edit’.
• Cut and paste the code from your Subscription form which you’ve already created in your eConnect Email account.
• You’re good to go. Just like that. Simply rearrange everything how you’d like and you’re off to growing your mailing list.

Now when your boss complains about your Facebook usage, let em’ know you’re working. The crew @eConnectEmail will vouch for you!

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.

This month we will focus on some simple rules to follow for email marketing compliance, delivery, and the respect of your readers.  Also, make your emails pop with our Spring Fever Sale…details at the bottom of this email (ends April 1st)!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/March/index.html

Our newsletter this month focuses on helpful tips to engage your reader, when to connect with them, and keeping your relationship clean with simple ethics reminders.   We know that you will think about email marketing in a fresh way after reading this month’s tips and you may see your relationship with your readers in a whole new way.  Also, check out our special offers this month at the bottom of this email!

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Feb/index.html

For essential tips on creating interesting emails that will get your message delivered and keep readers subscribed, check out our January Newsletter:

http://econnectemail.com/images/Newsletters/Jan/index.html

If you need to get the sale, go with the no-holds-barred promotional email instead (e.g. 20% off storewide!). Marketers who create email newsletters want to build relationships with their customers by providing support and information, and common newsletter features include “how to” guides, expert advice and opinions, news updates, case studies and interviews.

That’s not to say you can’t mention your company or direct readers to your website; you can and should do so, especially if you’re discussing a situation where your product or service could come in handy. We practice this even on our blog; from time to time, you may come across statements like “this feature is available on eConnect Email, so give it a try.”

Some marketers observe the 25% rule – that is, an email newsletter should not contain more than 25% of promotional material. But every target group is different, and if you’re a eConnect Email user, we recommend that you run an A/B Split Test with different versions of your content to find out what your audience is comfortable with. (Notice that we’re slipping in some product information right now.)

To ease your content load and cover more ground, consider a joint editorial effort with a related company. For example, if you’re marketing a bridal boutique, you could produce a newsletter with a wedding consultant, a jeweler or a hair and make-up service provider. But please note that we mean joint editorial, not joint subscribers.

Another source of inspiration is your competition – examine your rivals’ newsletters for strengths and weaknesses, and find a way to differentiate your newsletter from theirs. And look beyond your industry for ideas. Pick up a magazine (preferably something from the easy reading variety), or scan the email newsletters that land in your mailbox – take note of headlines and articles that capture your attention, and identify elements that you would like included in your own newsletter.

3R’s of email marketing. Respect, Relevant, Reputation. Respect your subscribers by providing them Relevant content and this will build up your Reputation.