Cathie Dodd from Tears Of Joy video did this simple but effective video on list building ethics.

Since our launch, we have encountered many potential spammers who tried their luck at using eConnect Email as their spam tool.  This post is dedicated to talk about these users and how we are very intolerant towards this kind of behavior in eConnect Email.

First of all, let me be very clear here.  eConnect Email is a permission-based email marketing system.  We have checks in place to ensure eConnect Email does not fall prey to spammers who send out spam emails, or as some call them in a less negative way, “unsolicited emails”, although we still prefer to call them spam anyhow – a rose is a rose is a rose.

We tell all our customers that all batch imports of subscriber lists will be manually approved by our delivery team, and we really walk the talk.  We have real humans looking through the lists to spot out any tell-tale signs of unacceptable lists and perform checks on their email practices.  Admittedly, this is a very tedious (and at times inconvenient) process but is a necessary evil in order to ensure that the system is not being abused and that those marketers using eConnect Email who practice permissible email marketing are protected.  This is a very important aspect for us to be able to maintain a high reputation of our service.

That said, we have also encountered users who tried different methods to circumvent the checking process that we have in place.  One prime example is signing up as paid customers and demanding that we approve the lists regardless of the sources, simply on the mere basis that they have already paid up.  Guess what?  That’s not the way we function.  We clearly state in our Terms of Use and our Anti-Spam Policy that we will monitor and stop any suspicious spamming activities.  So it’s just wishful thinking that we will let your lists through as long as you have paid.  Sure, signing up as a paid customer does in itself show a certain level of commitment on the part of the customer that his/her email marketing practices are acceptable by eConnect Email, but there are still many factors in our approval process that will look at the overall picture, rather than just the fact that he/she has paid up.

Now, some would-be customers might start to worry that if their lists do not get approved after they have signed up for our paid plans, they stand to lose their subscription fees.  To these customers, we would like to assure that as long as you have proof that you have obtained your list under acceptable conditions as stated in our policies, chances are your list will get approved.  In any case, we always advise that you test drive eConnect Email first by signing up for a Trial account, importing your lists, and testing out the functions before making the jump.  That way, not only can you be certain that your list has been approved, but you also get to check out the rest of eConnect Email to see if we are a good fit to your email marketing needs.

I’m going to end this post off with an actual case we had with a paid customer whom we found to have uploaded a subscriber list that showed characteristics of a bought, rented or “scraped” list. Instead of offering information on the source of the list, he counter-questioned “But you are not a US-based company, why should you be worried about spam?”

Our reply to this is that regardless of where you may be based, we believe permission-based email marketing is the only really healthy way to run your email marketing campaigns.  This may come across as being a handicap rather than a feature for many marketers who are still clueless about why respect for their subscribers is of utmost importance, but this is one aspect of eConnect Email that we are proud of and will not budge; we would rather have fewer customers than have too many spammers abusing the system.

I don’t know if I should pity Bob Richards, but I guess if you play with fire, you might get burnt.  Anyway, Bob Richards purchased a list from a company called EmailAppenders and paid some $14,000… Yes, you see that right: $14,000 for 100,000 supposedly targeted email addresses.

The story goes that after being pleased with himself for getting such a good list, cleaning it up and doing the sending, he got 85,000 bounces and his server got locked up.  The company that helped him send out his emails got its account canceled, and now Richards believes he has been ripped off and is hell-bent on getting back at EmailAppenders.

Full story here.

Do not, I can’t emphasize this enough, do not ever purchase a list from anyone, even if they claim they have permission for every single email address in the list.  These email addresses are usually taken without the owner’s knowledge or permission.  Yes, the sellers can claim they called the owners and verified the emails, but do you know what they actually asked them?  Do you think they called them and said this:

“Hello Mr. So and So, I’m calling from a company that sells your email address to people who are stupid enough to buy it.  Can you verify if this is your email address so that I can sell it and make money out of it? And yes, your email account will be flooded with spam.”

And do you think the email address owner would say:

1) “Oh yes, that is my email address, please sell it and give me the spam.  Don’t worry, I think my free anti-spam software can block those spam emails.”

or

2) “How the %#%* did you get that email address?  If you use it, I’m going to sue you!”

Anyone want to make a guess?

I just can’t think of anyone in the right state of mind who would give you his email address so you could profit from it.

Would you?

(Via deliverability.com) According to Return Path, even top firms can’t seem to get it right when it comes to managing subscriber opt-outs or unsubscribes.  It turns out that many of them still lack proper IT setup to help them manage opt-outs and some of these top firms even violate the CAN-SPAM Act.

What I took away from this report, however, is not the fact that even top firms are having problems with opt-outs (not like it should give you justification that you can mess this up too, right?) but rather the point raised by Bonnie Malone, director of strategic services for Return Path.

She points out that when your subscribers opt out of your list, it does not necessarily mean that they are no longer a customer.  This means, if you do not handle your opt-outs correctly, you may end up giving a negative impression to your customers.  Need a real-life example?  Incidentally, Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise just got into this same situation with AT&T who kept sending her emails despite her repeated opting out of their numerous mailing lists.

It cannot be stressed enough that respecting your subscriber’s wish to be unsubscribed from your lists is of utmost importance.  Be it small or large companies or organizations, your reputation will only stand to lose if you fumble on your opt-outs and inadvertently cause frustration in your customers and would-be customers alike.

The more seasoned email marketers already know most of these tips, but we all need some recap every now and then to remind us of the best practices in email marketing, so that we can improve our email marketing practices for better reputation and delivery. In this post, we list down 10 most recommended tips that you should know.

1. Make your unsubscribe link obvious
   Decide on a suitable and yet prominent area in your campaign email where you can insert your unsubscribe link.  This makes it obvious to your subscribers that you already provide them a way to tell you to stop sending them your emails, which should discourage them to use the “spam” button in their email clients.  Some marketers have recommended placing the link at the top or in the footer of the email.  It’s entirely up to you, but be sure to always include one.  If you are using an ESP, like eConnect Email, you will always be reminded to include your unsubscribe link before you can send your campaigns.
2. Give your subscribers a way to update their subscription preferences
   Set up a subscriber preference center so that your subscribers can manage their subscription preferences.  A preference center can help you to retain subscribers who have changed their email addresses by giving them a convenient way to update you without needing to resubscribe to your lists again.  Check out more on why you need a preference center.
3. Encourage your subscribers to add you to their address books
   Tell your subscribers explicitly to add your email address to their address books. Write something like “Don’t miss your newsletter.  Add our email address (friends@abccompany.com) to your address book or safe list”.  Many web mail providers use this as a basis to determine that if the recipient has your email address in their address book, then your email should less likely be spam.  Some clients will even load the images in your campaign emails automatically.
4. Use the same email address to build reputation
   Always use the same From email address for your campaign emails and refrain from using different email addresses for different mailing lists or campaigns.  By using the same email address, not only will it be easier for your subscribers to associate the campaign emails with your company, you will also be able to build a better reputation with the ISP’s and your subscribers, which in turns means better deliverability for your email campaigns.
5. Sign your emails for domain authentication
   Get your domain properly set up with domain authentication schemes like DKIM, DomainKeys and SenderID, and sign your campaign emails to bolster the authenticity of your emails.  Most ESPs today provide some ways for you to set this up easily.  If you are already on board with eConnect Email, but have yet to set up domain authentication for yourself, you should do it today!
6. Avoid “spammy”content
   Be very mindful about the language and visual formatting of your content. Avoid using “spammy” words or phrases, large fonts, sparse text and low quality images, all of which are quite the hallmarks of today’s spam emails.
7. Make sure your campaign emails can be viewed correctly
   If you are sending HTML campaign emails, be sure to also set up the text part of the email properly so that subscribers who are not able to view the HTML version in their email software will still be able to read the content of your email.  The text part does not have to be an exact text-only replica of your HTML message; you can have a simple message to direct them to an online version of your campaign email, which they can view in their web browsers.
8. Avoid list fatigue
   Do not flood your subscribers with too many emails.  Marketers recommend that you send at most one email per week.  If email marketing is one of the major sources of income for your business, make sure you plan and time your launches or new updates properly.  If you are working in large corporation, make sure the different departments who are responsible for sending emails are aware of the sending frequency of one another.  Without proper planning, your subscribers may feel overwhelmed and may end up unsubscribing themselves or reporting your emails as spam.
9. Respect your subscribers
   Make sure your subscribers get what they signed up for.  Unless you have made it explicitly clear to them, you should never send them emails containing information that they never asked for. Let’s say you own a business selling coffee beans and tea leaves and you maintain a mailing list for each of these two products.  If a subscriber only signed up for coffee bean information, respect that, and only send newsletters that are related to coffee beans to that subscriber.  Then, invite the subscriber to also sign up for the tea leaves mailing list.  This way, you can let your subscribers know about your other products, but not without asking for their permission first.
10. Check and test, check and test
    Check your campaign thoroughly and send yourself a few test messages before sending out your campaigns.  Nothing is more embarrassing than grabbing the attention of your subscriber, only to direct them to a “Page Not Found” error page when they click on your links.

That’s it!  Always keep these 10 tips in mind when running your email campaigns.  Have you got your own suggestions that you wish to share too?  Go ahead and fire away in the comments.

Loren McDonald posted an article at Deliverability.com, about lessons we can learn from an unsolicited B2B email she received.  (The article is available at http://blog.deliverability.com/2008/07/lessons-from-an.html).  She listed some obvious facts that many marketers or salespersons either forget about, or simply choose to ignore.

Her point 4.

No Unsubscribe – The email, which was “sent” from a salesperson “Lori M….”, did not include any instructions or means to unsubscribe.  Perhaps she thought this was a “1 to 1″ email and didn’t require an unsubscribe mechanism or she was just a salesperson that ran amok without involving marketing.  The fact that this email was professionally designed though suggests she was not a lone gunman.  What boggles the mind is how does a legit company send out a broadcast email in the year 2008 without an unsubscribe mechanism?

This is something that will never happen at eConnect Email, because in the first place, we require all our customers to practice permission-based email marketing.

Reading the article reminded me of an upcoming conference that we were asked to sponsor in return for free booth space.  In the sponsor brochure, it was explicitly stated that all sponsors would get the contact information of the conference participants.  Well, that’s nice but no thanks.

Recently, we were invited by a big organization to hop over and present our email marketing software to them.  Being a small or even tiny company by comparison, we were naturally honored.

So Johnny and I got to work and prepared our presentation.  On the big day, things went well and we thought we were a shoo-in for the job until The Boss popped this question:

“How do you handle unsubscribe requests?”

With pride on our faces, we told them all about our one-click unsubscribe policy.  (We believe that subscribers should be able to unsubscribe easily from any newsletter, and we require our clients to feature an unsubscribe link in all their campaigns.)

What we heard next left us stunned in disbelief. Here’s an excerpt of the conversation, or at least, what we remember of it:

The Boss
“Oh, one-click unsubscribe?  We don’t want that, we want the unsubscribe function to be as difficult as possible.”

The Stunned Guys (of course, Johnny and me)
“But why do you want to keep subscribers who are no longer interested in hearing from you?”

The Boss (brimming with the confidence of someone who is always right)
“This is marketing.  You shove them with your marketing information whether they like it or not, and eventually they might find something that they like.”

Well, she’ll have to find herself another partner, because she definitely won’t be using our system to carry out her plans for world domination.

The saddest thing is, we’ve been their customers for years (and still are), but we’re glad we’ve never subscribed to their newsletters or any of their campaigns.

You can be anything you want to be online, and your company is just waiting to tap on the endless possibilities.  But first, read our etiquette guide to make sure you’re not in danger of letting your dark side take over:

Monster Marketer #1: The Invader
Think about the people you’d love to keep at arm’s length: the strangers at parties who stand way too close and are way too generous with their hugs and kisses, the dreaded acquaintance who crashes social gatherings and invites himself to hang out at your apartment, or the colleague who reads over your shoulder and steals your stationery.  Here’s what they have in common: they don’t ask for permission.  Ever.  The same rules apply online, and not asking your recipients if they would like to hear from you counts as very bad manners indeed.  Even if you know your recipients in some capacity (and that includes your best friends, by the way), don’t assume they’d appreciate emails from your company – always ask first.  It may not be apparent, but it costs money and takes time to download your emails (and to chuck or report them as spam if necessary), so it pays to be considerate.

Monster Marketer #2: The Show-Off
Why compose an email newsletter in plain text when there’s HTML mail, and why write an obvious subject line when you can pen a headline that’s mysterious, witty, or just plain clever?  Be careful that showing off doesn’t result in your company being showed up.  Not all email applications are able to display elaborately designed emails, so relax on your images and HTML coding, and not all readers will understand what you’re trying to say, if you don’t say it in the clearest possible way.

Monster Marketer #3: The Narcissist
We all know the type: they’re only interested in talking to you as long as the spotlight’s on them.  Although, if truth be told, we all enjoy a bit of attention from time to time.  Which is why the last thing anyone needs is to read about your company’s milestones and awards and exciting new hires, when in fact they’re really wondering, “So what’s in it for me?”  Answer that question for readers right away, and you’ll keep them coming back for more.

Monster Marketer #4: The Chatterbox
Sending an email to your readers is a lot like holding a one-way conversation, and you know what happens during a one-way conversation – the other party tunes out, and fast.  So make your emails as interactive as possible, by inviting your readers to vote in polls, post their views online or send in their feedback.  Also bear in mind that the less you say, the more readers are likely to remember what you’ve said.

Monster Marketer #5: The Loudmouth
If you’re not planning to shout at your customers and scare them off, steer clear of putting words in all caps and exclamation marks.  But if you need to emphasize a word, there is a mature, tasteful way to do it – by using italics.  Exclamation marks can be used sparingly, but we wouldn’t recommend more than one or two per mailer.

Monster Marketer #6: The Slacker
Most people have a good idea of what constitutes professional behavior in the real world: they show up to meetings on time, try to be fairly well groomed, and refrain from chewing gum.  But give them a chance to make an impression online and all hell breaks loose – their emails are riddled with spelling and grammar errors, missing text, broken links, misaligned images… you get the picture. Clean up your emails just as you would clean up before meeting a customer; if not, your offline efforts would’ve gone to waste.

We get plenty of email marketing questions from our customers, some of whom are still treading gingerly into a weird, and sometimes wacky online world.  So we’ve put together our “Email Marketing Basics” Q&A series, to lend direction to email marketers who are just starting out.  We’ll be adding to this section as we go along, and you can keep up with us by subscribing to our RSS feed and newsletter.  (We’re doing some online self-marketing here as we speak.)

Apart from inviting visitors to sign up on my web site, how else can I build my mailing list?

• Use your offline resources.  If you have a physical store, get your staff to check with customers if they would like to receive email updates, and place a sign-up book at the checkout counter.  If you’re making calls to existing customers, take the opportunity to pop the email question.  At a business meeting, seminar or networking event, mention your email newsletter and collect business cards from interested parties (or have a sign-up sheet ready).  After which, drop them an email and direct them to your subscription form, or simply get them to reply to your email if they want to be added to your list.  But remember to keep those replies, because you never know when you will need them as proof of subscription.
• Sweeten the deal with a gift.  You can offer tangible incentives such as discounts or freebies in return for signing up, or highlight your ability to provide valuable information (e.g. tips and tricks, contributions by industry experts).  You can also package your content in the form of crash courses that are relevant to your audience, and deliver the material over a series of emails.  Or, try the fun approach – think lucky dips, contests or games that require participants to sign up beforehand.
• Be an active member in relevant discussion boards, and let other members know how they might benefit from information in your web site or email updates (but before you do, check that this isn’t against the rules).
• Rope in existing subscribers to spread the word.  Marketers often do this by attaching a “send to friend” or “tell a friend” link at the end of their web or email features.

More to come soon.

Your company has just produced this great product and you want to tell the world about it.  You buy advertising space in the newspaper, magazines, on billboards and maybe produce a TV ad.  What’s next? Let’s start announcing your products through email.  But wait, you don’t have any email lists to start with.  No problem, let’s get in touch with a company that sells email addresses, that would solve the problem.

Stop.

Before you part with money to buy those lists, read on to find out how this could impact your company and your new product.

Email marketing works differently from marketing in offline mediums.  It’s ok for you to put your advertisement in the papers, because the reader who purchases the paper knows there are going to be advertisements there.  Also, even though readers purchase the newspaper, they are not its rightful owner.  The company that prints the newspaper is the owner and it can choose to do whatever it wants with its newspaper, and as a buyer, you can choose to purchase the paper or not.

With email, it is different.  An email address is someone’s private property. Y ou don’t have the right to send someone a promotional email if he didn’t request for it.  You could think about e-mail as a virtual home – and you certainly wouldn’t walk into a stranger’s house to tell him about your product.  You would need to first knock on his door and ask for permission to talk about your product.

And so the same applies to email marketing; you can’t simply send your campaign to email users who do not request for it.  You must first get them to be interested in your company (knocking on the door) by setting up a website that features your products or services.  Next, put up an email subscription form (getting permission) to allow visitors to show they’re interested in hearing what you have to say. Only after they have displayed their interest (by subscribing to your email newsletter) can you respectfully send them more information.  That’s how email marketing works.

Back to your current problem: where are you going to get those email addresses?  Our advice to you is to forget about email marketing for now and focus on building up your lists.  We’ll tell you why.

1. You are putting your company’s reputation at risk by using email lists to send out your marketing materials.  There are many people out there who will not think twice about making a complaint against your company, and within days, you will realize that your company’s emails have been blocked and it is now officially known as a Spammer.
2. The worst reputation for a company to have is to be labeled a Spammer, at least in the digital world.  You not only risk angering the people in the email lists you have purchased, your existing customers might feel disappointed with your actions should news spread, and decide not to support you in the future.
3. You might end up losing your internet connection as most of the ISPs have zero tolerance policies towards spammers.
4. You are putting your company at risk of being in a civil and criminal litigation. The fines can go up to tens of thousands of dollars or even millions. (Spammers handed record $234 million fine)

These reasons are enough for you to consider your actions before you proceed.  We have yet to encounter a business owner who has built a successful campaign by buying or renting email addresses.

For now, just focus on building your email list.  As we’ve said before, put a subscription form on your website and encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter by telling them what they have to gain. Or speak to customers in person and interest them in your newsletter.  Remember: getting 10 responses from users who choose to hear from you is better than getting 100 complaints.