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How to Stay Away from Spam Traps

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

Spam traps are a tool ISPs use to identify and track email spammers. A spam trap is a special email address designed to receive spam and “trap” mailers who spam. They are email addresses that should not be receiving email and in turn alert the ISPs the email sender might be a spammer, or an email marketer who does not follow proper sender practices. If you get flagged as one of these, it’s extremely difficult to get any of your email delivered to ISPs; so staying away from spam traps is imperative for any email marketer. Sending to a spam trap address can quickly damage your deliverability reputation and cause you to be blocked or, worse, be blacklisted.

There are two types of spam traps you should be aware of: pure spam traps, and recycled spam traps. Understanding the different kinds of traps will help you understand how to avoid them.

Click below and begin your campaigns today!

Pure spam traps are the worst for your sender reputation, making it extremely difficult for you to deliver email to an inbox if you are caught sending to one. Pure spam trap email addresses are set up with the sole purpose of identifying spammers. There is no conceivable reason any sender should have these email addresses, unless they are harvesting lists or scouring websites.

Recycled spam traps could have been active email addresses at one point in time. That means they might have just gone inactive, and they have been taken over by the ISP after a period of inactivity. For example, if one of your subscribers stops logging in to check their email, eventually the ISP will disable the email address. When the address is disabled, any email sent to this address will hard-bounce. ISPs re-enable a small percentage of these disabled email addresses and turn them into spam traps. At this point, ISPs will deliver a hard bounce notification to email marketers so they know they are emailing an inactive account. It is at that point email marketers should remove the email address from their list. Some of them, however, do not. After a couple months, ISPs convert those email addresses into recycled spam traps and stop delivering hard bounce notifications to email senders. If you keep emailing that address, they will mark it as a spam trap hit.

Avoiding spam traps is possible. Here are some ideas –

  • Do not purchase lists. Purchased lists are often full of reactivated address spam traps because the list maintainer is never sending to the addresses and doing bounce processing. They may also contain classic spam traps depending on how the list was created.
  • Practice list hygiene – clean your lists.
  • Do not trade email addresses with another company; this is basically a purchased list.
  • Ensure your ESP is using proper bounce-processing practices and hard-bounces are removed from your list. If you do not have proper bounce-processing you will eventually hit reactivated addresses or domain spam traps.
  • Make sure you email every address in your database at least every couple of months. If you do not email an address for an extended period of time, you run the risk it will turn into a reactivated address or domains trap. It is better if you never send mail to an address more than a year old.
  • Never send to or reactivate bounced subscribers. Your list of bounced subscriber is likely full of recycled address and domain spam traps.
  • Be careful of incentive-subscriptions, i.e. if you are a retailer and you offer a coupon at checkout for subscribing to your email newsletter, you will get plenty of email addresses that people will just make up to get the free coupon. Some of these addresses will be spam traps.
  • Remove addresses that do not click or open for a long period of time.
  • Ensure your email does not look like unsolicited email. Even if people requested mail from you, do not send just something without your logo or an email that is all one image. If your email messages look like spam and you send to a typo address or domain spam trap, you are more likely to get blacklisted.
  • Asking a subscriber to confirm their address is correct by sending a message to their provided email address and requiring a click action will assist in ensuring that the address is both valid and active
  • Make it easy to unsubscribe. If a subscriber is unable to quickly figure out how to unsubscribe, they are likely to complain. If the subscriber then abandons their address, the address may be converted to a spam trap.

Bottom line, the only definitive way to prevent hitting a spam trap is to perform proper email marketing practices.

To recap, this means you do not purchase email lists; you are not harvesting lists on your own; you are removing hard bounces; and regularly cleaning your list. You also should maintain a suppression list. This helps if you change email service providers, so you do not accidentally email contacts you suppressed.

Remember, something about your list practices allowed you to send to the spam trap. Therefore, removing the spam trap would be just treating the symptom. Evaluating your list practices will get to the root of the problem.

Did You Know – The variables taken into account to generate the Sender Score are –

  • Complaints
  • Volume
  • External Reputation
  • Unknown Users
  • Rejected
  • Accepted
  • Accepted Rate
  • Unknown User Rate

Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Newsletter Tips, Tips, What is SPAM | No Comments »

Trust the Expert Email Service Providers

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools to reach mass audiences and targeted ones, depending on the message. The power lies in the fact that you are connecting with people in a place they visit often…their inbox.

Quality content is essential for successful email marketing. Providing prospects with content they deem valuable, such as a special offer based on past buying habits, can keep you connected with customers for many years.

One of the challenges of email marketing is the media overload from recipients receiving too many email offers. No one is truly interested in having more unwelcome mail in their inbox. Advertisers and Publishers must be conscious of this fact and rely on the professionals, to assist with their email marketing efforts.

Click below and begin your campaigns today!

One of the major problems with email marketing is phishing emails. These are emails that try to trick the recipient into thinking they come from a legitimate source. We have all received them. The email attempts to get your password, account info, etc.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and additional companies created DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) to promote a standard set of technologies that lead to more secure email and reduce phishing.

Even though email will continue to evolve as a way to enhance your overall marketing strategy, phishing spells big trouble for email marketers.

Hundreds of emails get flagged as SPAM going into Junk mail folders, but more and more official looking emails claiming to be from Facebook, LinkedIn, UPS, FedEx, and many more reputable companies, are arriving in our mailboxes. The problem is many are fraudulent and are attempts to gain access to our computers or obtain personal information.
Clicking the links in these emails can spell disaster and providing any personal information can lead to identity theft. Since our inboxes are increasingly flooded with SPAM and Phishing scams, how long do you think it will take before users go with completely private, “permission based” email communications, preventing ALL emails from unapproved senders? Expert email service providers already require opt-in and double opt-in permission based email sending, but the law breakers and scammers are difficult to stop.

Email phishing attacks are destructive for everyone, it is not just the brands (and their customers) who fall victim to these scams; it is the entire email community who feel the effects. Phishing can ruin email marketing as we now know it except as a very specialized and selective B2B marketing tactic.

So, how do you protect yourself, your employees, your email servers, and your networks from phishing? Education and training are the first line of defense. Remember, the phishing scam might appear as any normal email from a trusted source. These can include — your bank or financial institution; from a friend or someone in your address book; a company where you shop; a social networking site; they may include official looking logos and trick you with personal information; etc. Most likely, phishing email messages will direct you to a fictitious website (that looks like the real thing) using masked links.

The current solutions to overcome phishing filters are not very complicated and can be easily implemented into your next campaigns.

Follow Email Marketing Best Practices: Phishing messages often have poor grammar, misspellings and weak HTML coding. By following best practices for email response and deliverability, not only will you increase the chance your messages will reach the inbox, but your customers will be able to differentiate between your messages and those of a scam email.

Overcoming the Filters: Filters are set to search out and compare apples to apples or in the case of phishing, they search out the prefix to confirm it is a URL, and then further compare URL to URL. If both URLs are different, your email may be flagged as phishing. So the solution is to simply omit the prefix (http:// or www. or both http://www.) on the URL link spelled out in the text of your email, or use linkable text phrases like (“click here”, “more info”, etc.).

Consistency: Be consistent with the look and feel of your email programs. Once you land a prospect, subsequent email communications should give subscribers tips on recognizing a forgery. You will then want to educate your subscribers on how to identify a legitimate email from you. Highlight any unique features, which will help protect your customers and your brand.

Did You Know? A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and (according to its creator) the first recorded use of the term “phishing” was made in 1995. The term is a variant of fishing, and alludes to “baits” used in hopes that the potential victim will “bite” by clicking a malicious link or opening a malicious attachment, in which case their financial information and passwords may then be stolen.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Convert your website visitors into leads, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Newsletter Tips, Social Media, Tips | No Comments »

You MUST alter your email campaigns and strategies in 2013

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

You MUST alter how you design and develop your email campaigns and strategies, in 2013. You will need to take extra steps to make your email campaigns work. Triggered email programs will give sophisticated marketers a sustainable competitive edge.

So let us discuss necessary changes, significant statistics, and innovative trends.

More than 17 million new smartphones and tablets were activated on December 25, 2012. The transfer to mobile reading of emails is indisputable — so marketers MUST get serious about creating mobile-friendly emails.

Many marketers have not made the necessary changes to their email creative materials. Whether it is simple mobile optimization techniques, responsive designs, or live content — 2013 is the year to take action.

Click below and begin your campaigns today!

Closely review the subsequent 2012 statistics about mobile phone users and their email use:

  • 56 percent of all U.S. mobile phone owners access the Internet.
  • 85 percent of all U.S. adults now own a mobile phone.
  • More than 50 percent of mobile users read email on their phones.
  • 88 percent check email on their phones every day.
  • 36 percent of email messages across 12 key industries were opened on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) in the first half of 2012. That number is up from 20 percent at the same time in 2011.
  • Mobile’s share of email opens is projected to surpass 50 percent for most brands over the next six to 12 months.

In 2013, the majority of your subscribers will open your email on a mobile device. Therefore, you will need to rebuild your templates to account for responsive design; because “mobile-friendly” scalable templates will no longer be enough. Responsive email design is the only truly mobile-first strategy. A responsive email design allows you to auto-adjust the layout, content, and text size of an email to tailor it to a specific screen size.

Econsultancy reports that 63 percent of Americans would close or delete an email not optimized for mobile. Therefore, if you fail to address your customers’ mobile-reading habits, your emails will fail.

However, let us not forget that delivering relevant content remains the key — you consistently must offer highly relevant content to your subscribers if you want to stay in their inboxes and keep your email program effective. Start tracking behavioral traits, such as clicks in the email, browsing on the website, etc. Use this data to segment your list and send follow-up messages.

Consider these tactics:

  • Segmentation
  • Dynamic content
  • Preference data
  • Increasing frequency to your most active subscribers and decreasing frequency to your less-active recipients

While ESPs are making triggered programs progressively easier to set up, these programs do take time to establish and optimize, especially more advanced ones like browse-based emails. This means marketers who have invested significantly in triggered emails should experience an edge over their less sophisticated competitors.

Here are some trends to review:

We should see an increase in special characters, in subject lines, two to three times more often this year. One of the reasons marketers are turning to special characters is for the novelty factor. In the beginning, the novelty of these types of messages may cause higher response rates, but in the end it is likely to wear off, as marketers move on to the next new thing.

Pinterest – the first uses of Pinterest content and calls-to-action appeared in retail emails last year. By the end of October nearly 60% of retailers had used a “pin it” button in their emails or promoted their Pinterest boards.

Free e-gift cards will be the new free shipping – free shipping is losing effectiveness. It has become expected. In response, retailers are establishing year-round free shipping offers and eliminating promotion codes for free shipping. Retailers are clearly searching for the next “free shipping” offer, something consumers value significantly more than it costs retailers to supply. That magic offer may be a free e-gift card. Profit margins and less than 100% redemption rates mean they cost retailers less than the face value to provide, plus they drive repeat business.

2013 will be the year email marketers will continue to optimize and grow their programs by addressing their subscribers’ changing habits. Effective marketers will focus their plans on customer centricity, relevant content, and data-driven programs to keep their email campaigns successful.

*Did You Know? Responsive design is different today then from the past. We have more control over how things scale themselves up or down, as well as many more screen sizes and shapes. This design is accomplished through style sheets, (a CSS3 stylesheet that adapts based on what kind of screen it is being viewed on), that are designed to scale up or down, or even switch out based on what kind of device is being used.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Internet Spending, Mobile Strategies, Newsletter Tips, Social Media, Tips | No Comments »

Be Ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

With the biggest shopping days quickly approaching, you need to make sure you have your promotional and communication plans ready. This year retailers are even more aggressive. Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, and Kohl’s will open for the first time at midnight on Thanksgiving; and Wal-Mart plans to open at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, to start offering deals on some merchandise.

So, let us discuss the ways you can prepare.

You should already be signed up for competitors’ email programs but if not, this is the time to do so.  It is important to see how they are messaging their Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers.  This will help you to understand any advantage the customer may see when deciding between you and your competition. Monitor their emails throughout the sales period to see if their promotions are becoming more aggressive.

Click below and begin your campaigns today!

Know where to get your results and how to get them quickly. You probably review your email performance data several hours or the day after a mailing deploys. For your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, you should monitor your results as they are reported. Make sure you are aware of all of the options available to you. Do a trial run for a pre-Black Friday mailing to make sure you understand the immediate trends for your mailings so you have a baseline to measure against.

Make sure everyone in your company comprehends the importance of Black Friday and Cyber Monday to your business. Outline last year’s performance and make sure the team understands the goals for the current year. Discuss the expectations for availability during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. You should document any hours when resources are not available.

You may have already chosen the products that will be featured, the offer that will be promoted, and who you are emailing, but engagement and conversion may not happen as well as you expected. Make sure you have a back-up plan.  Select additional products and price points you can offer and prepare your commerce platform with secondary coupon codes or discounts. This could save you precious time if things are progressing slower than expected.

Valuable time and revenue can be lost if you need to make creative revisions during peak hours. While qualified marketers can make quick adjustments to segments and deploy a mailing successfully, making creative changes can take hours to turnaround. This is not the time to get stuck in a creative bottleneck.

Prepare email creative alternatives in advance.  This can include:

Featured Products

Product-to-Copy Ratio

Prominence of Calls-to-Action

Reminders such as “Hours Left”

Promotional Variation

You should have a resending strategy included in your communication plan. Customers will have a significant rise in the amount of email in their inbox so make sure you have a calculated approach to your resending methods. This will help decrease the abuse complaints and the amount of those who unsubscribe, which in turn could help avoid blocking issues.

One method is to build segments based on engagement:

Openers who have not clicked: These subscribers have shown they are engaged yet they did not see anything in the email that made them interested enough to click through. Resend to this group with a creative variation, changes to calls-to-action, etc.

Clickers who have not purchased: This is your most engaged subscriber. They were interested enough to open your email, and they also clicked. Something happened on the path to checkout that made them abandon the purchase. If you already have a high frequency communication plan organized and you want to limit the size of the audience you resend to, these are the contacts you want to pursue. Make sure you use a subject line and a creative that drive people to purchase. In addition to featuring your promotion, reference customer service information, your return policy, as well as shipping options and deadlines.

Be sure to prepare your strategy, but realize things may change and flexibility is the key.

*Did You Know? The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism – (a newly coined term, word, or phrase, which may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language) – invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation. It was first used within the ecommerce community during the 2005 holiday season.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Convert your website visitors into leads, Email, Email Lists, Email Marketing Holiday Campaigns, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Internet Spending, Newsletter Tips, Tips, ecommerce | No Comments »

Increase the Effectiveness of Email Marketing Campaigns

Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

It is time discuss more ways to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Let us begin with how you can start using email marketing to power social media and social media to power email marketing; to integrate email marketing and social media for maximum effectiveness.

Include Social Icons in Emails — It is important to include social icons in your email campaigns.

Ask Email Subscribers to Share and Connect — Sometimes just including social icons is not enough. Many subscribers recognize the Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn icons, but not all know what action to take when they see them in an email, so tell them!

Provide Incentive — If you want someone to connect with you on other social networks, sometimes you need to offer an incentive.

Promote Email Sign-ups Via Social Networks — If you have a strong following on a particular social network, do not hesitate to ask for new email subscribers.

Build an Email Opt-In Form on Facebook — Facebook allows you to embed an email sign-up form as one of your applications, so encourage your Facebook fans to opt into your email list. By adding a custom subscription form to your Facebook Page you have made it even simpler for the users.

Promote Email Marketing on Your Blog — Use your blog to mention, link to, and ask for new email subscribers.

Once you send a campaign you will start to have access to a wealth of social reaction data. You can then segment future campaigns based on that data. The data is yours to segment and work with.

While social media marketing cannot be automated entirely – you can setup automated social reactions.

Here is another method to employ — increase sales from your current customers.

Driving sales to existing clients is easier than acquiring new customers. Yet, a large number of businesses seem to be missing an opportunity that is right in front of them. Cross-sell and up-sell programs are a low-cost way retailers can increase revenue by reaching out to the customers they know best.

You may be thinking about targeting email subscribers who have previously purchased your products with complementary (cross-sell) or enhanced (up-sell) offers. Keep in mind; you do not want to annoy valued customers with a poorly-timed offer. With the right tactic, you will be on your way to making the most of promising sales prospects.

Consider the following elements when implementing cross-sell and up-sell email programs.

Take advantage of available data — The volume of customer-related data available to retailers is rapidly growing, and those who find ways to put it to use will be the most effective at developing highly relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers.

Purchase data from point-of-sale and transactional systems; web analytics that track site clicks and views, email response data, and preferences that email subscribers all provide marketers with great insight into the types of products to recommend to customers in cross-sell or up-sell situations.

Deploy the right resources — all the data in the world will not make a difference if you do not act on it. You will need to analyze your data and to create alternative versions of emails that include new offers based on what you have discovered.

The right technology can minimize the level of resources and time you will need to output. For example, a transactional email solution can be tied into your data warehouse and other back-office systems so you can pull in relevant data and use it to identify the best targets. Someone, or some technology, needs to build your offers, so you need to decide how you are going to get this accomplished.

Consider when and where to reach out — For example, you can label your offer onto a transactional message, such as purchase confirmation or shipping notification, since customers pay closer attention to these communications. Setting up messages triggered by customer actions or tying offers to regularly scheduled emails like newsletters are other options to consider.

Make sure you test various methods and then measure the response. Email marketers who employ cross-sell and up-sell offers can increase sales simply by engaging more often with the customers who already have a relationship with the brand.

*Did You Know – An unconfirmed opt-in is when someone first gives an email address to the list software (for instance, on a Web page), but no steps are taken to make sure that this address actually belongs to the person submitting it. This can cause email from the mailing list to be considered SPAM.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Newsletter Tips, Social Media, Tips | No Comments »

Reputation is the Key to Deliverability

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

When it comes to email marketing deliverability is still your chief concern, and reputation is the key to deliverability.

So, how do you protect and increase your status as an email marketer? The answer is simple. You must accept the fact that opt-in is the most important factor in protecting your reputation and your deliverability. Permission-based email marketing will always result in a better sender reputation. The goal is not to increase the number of emails in your database; you have to increase the number of opt-in emails. A quality email list is much better than a quantity email list. Why? People in your smaller opt-in lists will be more responsive to your offers, which will lead to more conversions. These opt-in customers also are less likely to report you as SPAM, which will protect your reputation.

Let us further examine ways to help your build your reputation, properly practice email market, and more.

Opt-in and opt-out are two kinds of privacy methods adapted to email marketing. With the opt-in method, consumers must actively agree to receive commercial email messages, usually by making some type of positive response. Consumers only receive commercial email messages after they have given their permission. Therefore, opt-in email lists consist only of email addresses for individuals who have given their permission to receive commercial email messages. Double opt-in means after giving their permission, consumers also submit a confirmation email.

Under the opt-out method, consumers are given the option of not receiving any further promotional emails after they already have received one. Messages are sent to individuals until they ask to be removed from the mailing list. A similar system, known as passive consent or negative opt-in, allows marketers to add consumers to their lists if they do not click or unclick a checkbox on a web page in order to avoid receiving commercial email. There is an argument that the necessity to actively opt-out places an undue burden on consumers who may routinely visit numerous commercial websites, for example.
Collecting email permissions the correct way is the key to an email marketer’s success. Explicit permission is the preferred method versus a sneaky pre-check or hidden consent.

SPAM complaints will destroy a sender’s reputation, so they must be monitored carefully and properly. It is imperative you understand what SPAM complaints are, how they occur, and how to reduce them.

The increase in mobile awareness is unstoppable and so are the abuse challenges in this medium. This is communication channel for senders needs to be implemented into every marketer’s plans.

Email marketing professional must develop best practices by making things more straightforward, such as the elements of security, deliverability permission, privacy, etc.
Review some of these best practices:

  • Senders only should send commercial email to individuals who have provided informed consent.
  • For all third-party licensed data, a global unsubscribe mechanism should be implemented.
  • Consumer permission to receive commercial email from a list owner cannot be replicated or transferred without reference to the original point of collection.
  • Clear and repeated notice of data collection and use are required.
  • Advertisers and marketers should authenticate their email by publicly registering the domains from which they send email.
  • Anyone using email for marketing purposes should adopt and use authentication protocols for their email and corporate domains.

Remember by developing clear data management guidance the industry will increase consumer trust. Best practices protect consumers and improve the quality and performance of email marketing campaigns.

*Did You Know? There are several forms of opt-in email. Unconfirmed opt-in is when someone first gives an email address to the list software, but no steps are taken to make sure this address actually belongs to the person submitting it. This can cause email from the mailing list to be considered SPAM because simple typos of the email address can cause the email to be sent to someone else. Confirmed opt-in is when a new subscriber asks to be subscribed to the mailing list, but unlike unconfirmed opt-in, a confirmation email is sent to verify it was really them. Generally, unless the explicit step is taken to verify the end-subscriber’s email address, such as clicking a special web link or sending back a reply email, it is difficult to establish that the email address in question indeed belongs to the person who submitted the request to receive the email. Using a confirmed opt-in procedure helps to ensure that a third party is not able to subscribe someone else accidentally, or out of malice, since if no action is taken on the part of the email recipient, they will simply no longer receive any messages from the list operator.

Posted in Building Email Relationships, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Tips | No Comments »

Providing an API gives Your Business More Value

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

API means Application Programming Interface.
What is an API? Let’s try to shed some light on this term. Let us focus on the word interface. An interface is a common boundary between two separate systems. It is the medium in which the two systems communicate. An API is the interface implemented by an application which allows other applications to communicate with it.
So why is an API necessary? The answer is simple — to communicate properly. Here is an example, imagine Notepad could not copy-paste to and from Microsoft Word. Envision having to type each and every time even though the text is present in some other application. This is an illustration of communication between applications, and this communication is made possible by APIs. In other words, an API invokes a function from a computer program.
Each API call is different in how it is called, when, what it does, and what it returns to the caller. These APIs are generally invisible to the end users. They are carefully thought out sections of code created by programmers.
The purpose of an API is unlimited. Examples of an API include: to allocate, manage and return memory; to create, manage, and delete files and folders; to receive and set the current time; to draw lines and other geometric shapes; etc.
If this all sounds confusing then think of it this way — and API is a means of putting information in and getting information out of your system without having to type it yourself. You will provide the API with information, and in return the system will process and emit back other data. Here is one final analogy you will all understand – the ATM machine. This is a sort of an API for your bank. You place your card in the machine, then you enter your PIN number and ask the bank for money, and then it dispenses cash. The information you are providing is the data on your card and PIN number, while the bank is supplying you with cash and a receipt.
What about the potential business value for providing an API? Firstly, you are making it easier for your customers to deal with you. Secondly, if clients can interact with your system through your API, this will shorten their overall process. Thirdly, it will cut down on errors and duplication. If it is simple to deal with your company, then more people will. This will have a positive effect on your bottom line.
So, the reality is no longer — “what is an API and why do I need one”; it is instead — “what is my API going to do and when can I start using it”.
People once thought, (maybe some still do), APIs only could be used by those willing to write massive amounts of code. However, people use APIs to gather data using ordinary URLs. The first thing you need to know is how to construct the URL. Each API is slightly different, so you need to review the documentation for the API you are interested in employing. Most of the time, the documentation will include examples you can tweak to get the desired output. This does not mean every API can be used without any programming skills, but using many of the APIs made available by services on the internet is not as difficult as you may think.
Keep in mind most APIs have some kind of rate limit, which means you only can make so many calls to the API from a given IP address or account in a given amount of time. This is to prevent people from abusing the API and placing too large a load on the servers.
API keys — some APIs require you sign up for an API key. This is customarily used to keep track of your requests, and you should think of it as a password that should not be shared with others. In many cases, an API key is what the API uses to rate limit your requests.
With some additional programming, you can start to combine these APIs to obtain some interesting information that cannot easily be gathered in other ways.
Internally, you should examine your core competencies. What makes your business unique? By doing this, you will discover what people will want to utilize through an API.  Once you decide, a straightforward design and precise documentation are essential in successfully adopting and API.
*Did You Know? The motivation for revealing APIs to partners differs from business to business. For major companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, APIs can be used to drive increased usage of their services, through the creation of innovative third-party applications that attract a large audience, which can then be monetized through advertising.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Improve email marketing campaigns, Newsletter Tips, Tips | No Comments »

Email Marketing Turns Prospects into Clients

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

In Email Marketing, it is ALWAYS about Communication — the importance of building customer relationships through communication and nurturing your customers through time by learning and remembering their individual preferences and interests. The acquisition of customer information directly from customers through personal interaction is the key. Then you must keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis ensuring them their needs and success remains in the forefront of your mind.

Continual communication can be expensive and time consuming. It is said to take more than six contacts before you can turn a prospect into a customer. This is why email marketing is an essential part of any company’s marketing. Email marketing is affordable and has a significantly higher response rate than direct mail and banner ads. Email marketing is the most effective way to increase sales, drive traffic, and build customer loyalty.

With email marketing your communications can include newsletters, promotions, sale announcements, service updates, invitations, and much more.

Besides the aforementioned cost benefits consider the following:

Email is fast – an email marketing flier can be built up in hours and can be distributed instantly. You can choose the exact moment to send it. The relevance (in terms of your marketing strategy) of email marketing allows you to capitalize on events and the factors that may impact when your audiences wants to buy, be notified, etc.

Email allows you to test – email marketing is a wonderful way to test and get immediate answers.

Added value in exchange for more information – you can use email marketing to gather additional information from your audiences. Having them fill out a survey or a form are just a few examples of how to execute this tactic. You also can provide instant benefits for your readers when they click on an ad within your newsletter.
So considering all the advantages isn’t it time to start (or continue more effectively) your email marketing. You need to address and practice the following (if you are not already doing so):

Have an email form on your website — offer customers a way to register through your website. It is the best way to build your list. A registration form can be added to your website with ease. The placement of an email registration feature on your website has an impact on conversion rates. It should be prominently placed on your website. If your website uses a content management system then the newsletter registration feature should be included.

Begin marketing a newsletter — sending newsletters to your customers is an effective email marketing technique. The newsletter can be weekly, monthly or quarterly. A newsletter provides an excellent opportunity to communicate with your customers on regular basis and to market your products and services.

Here are some simple methods to improve awareness about your marketing newsletter or email list and encourage people to register:

Include a link to register for emails in all email correspondence.
Include information about your email newsletter in invoices and company documents.
Include an email registration link in a prominent place on your website.
Let your team know to inform customers about your marketing newsletter.
Create an incentive to subscribe to your email or company newsletters.
Follow the rules — it is imperative you respect customer’s privacy and take all the necessary steps to protect customer data collected by your email marketing campaigns. Do not share information without prior consent. Your email marketing list should be opt-in. When customers register their email address they are agreeing to receive marketing emails from you.

Send quality emails – do not send out a poorly designed marketing email to customers. You should plan your marketing campaign in advance. The content of the marketing should provide value to customers. It is fine to promote your products but you should offer a variety of information. A well balanced email is more likely to succeed than a purely promotional email. Therefore, always focus on quality over quantity.

Select suitable subjects for your emails — a quality subject line for your email is vital in deciding how many are opened and read.

Layout and Design — the layout should be organized and easy to read. The design should be clean and modest. Any images used should be optimized for fast loading time. Also remember the design should reflect your brand.

Call to action — an effective email should encourage users to take action. A call to action in your emails can improve the chances of conversion.

Additional activities you should be doing — cleaning your email marketing list, which means performing basic list hygiene tasks periodically. Test your email marketing campaign properly before you send them out, i.e. perform a spell check; make sure any links in the email are tracked and not broken; another good technique is to send a copy to yourself first. Finally, measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns — monitor delivery rates, response rates, click rates, find out how many were opened and how many links were clicked.

*Did You Know? The oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic. The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave, dating to around 30,000 BC.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Email Lists, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Tips | No Comments »

The Truth about Delivery v. Deliverability

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

The language delivery and deliverability are consistently used in the email marketing industry. The problem is people use them as identical terms, but there is a significant difference between the two. The reason this is important to you is because understanding this distinction could bring considerable change to your ROI and your bottom line.

All marketing shares a common goal: conversion. You are usually trying to get the customer to sign up for something or buy something. You can do a lot to influence conversion long before the customer clicks that buy button.

Every marketing medium takes your customers down a different path to reach a buying decision. Internet marketing and email in particular allows a surprising number of measurement points that let you see how well your customers are responding to your message as they travel the purchasing decision path.

Delivery is the acceptance rate of all mail sent to an ISP. This includes mail accepted to inbox, junk, and mail that gets black holed — which includes a DNS based black hole list, a fake email account that is set up using Hotmail, Yahoo, etc., or disposable email addresses that are used when registering for something so future email (often SPAM) is routed to that address. There is a program, called Black hole that is used to route SPAM to separate folders so it can be checked by an IMAP client). Just because an email is accepted does not mean the user saw it. Think about it — do you read every piece of mail in your junk box or are you like everyone else and scan for important items and then delete all, leaving many messages unread?
Deliverability is the amount of delivered mail that goes to inbox. IP reputation, from name, content, user interaction, are all part of deliverability and determine if you will be allowed into the inbox, sent to the junk folder, or be forever forgotten in the black hole.

A good way to track deliverability is what we call Seed accounts. Seed emails are email addresses placed on a list to determine what messages are sent to the list and/or to track delivery rate and/or visible appearance of delivered messages. Seeds may also be placed on websites and other areas of the Internet to track Spammers’ harvesting activities.

You can get a rough estimate of how much of your mail is going to junk or inbox by sending to your seed accounts. However, be careful when using your seed accounts because some ISPs have rules to discipline people who try to inflate their open score by doing this on a large scale, which will negatively affect your reputation.
You also can see a direct impact, positive and negative, with deliverability in your eCPMs — Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) is the amount of revenue you can expect to earn for every 1000 impressions shown on your site. To calculate your eCPM you need to determine the number of impressions, or number of times the ad was shown. For example, over the past year the advertisement may have been viewed 10,000 times. Then determine the amount of earnings the ad made. For example, over the past year, an ad may have brought in $50 of revenue. Finally, divide the number of total earnings by the number of impressions and multiply it by 1,000. The sum is the effective cost per thousand. In this example, divide 50 by 10,000 and then multiple by 1,000 to get $5.
If your delivery rate stays the same and you are seeing an increase in clicks, revenue, or whatever your metric is and you have not made any additional changes, you can attribute this to improved deliverability. Keep a close eye on fluctuations as this can be an early indicator of improved or reduce deliverability.

If you have a 90% delivery rate but only a 40% inboxing rate, this means something is not right. If you only focus on delivery and not deliverability you are missing a huge part of the process. Start focusing on deliverability if you want your users to see your mail, and want to increase your value to the user. If those things are happening you should ultimately increase to your bottom line.

Email marketing has become a science so do not become overwhelmed with all the aspects you need to consider to become truly successful at it. What you need to do is consider using the services of a company that specializes in helping companies with email campaigns.

*Did You Know? Only 81% of emails sent during the first half of 2011 reached consumers’ inboxes. The Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report found that 7% of emails worldwide were classified as SPAM and 12% were missing.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Improve email marketing campaigns, Inbox Delivery, Tips | No Comments »

Can Your Subscribers Read Your Emails?

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

The rules are changing for email marketing creative materials (i.e. fliers, newsletters, announcements, etc.).  The one-size-fits-all approach is not the best practice anymore.  Now you may need to adopt the responsive email design method. You can design your email to automatically reformat and resize to optimize for whatever screen size your recipient is using to read your email. You also can make sure the main call-to-actions of your email campaign are easily found. In addition, you can alter other elements including text size and color, images, backgrounds, and more.
Since more and more email is being read on mobile devices, companies are striving to find ways to make them appear as sharp and professional as possible in that environment. In web design, there has been a movement towards responsive design which allows you to create one website that reformats itself for optimal viewing on different devices. The same process can be applied to email design however, like many things pertaining to email what might seem easy on the surface can include numerous technical challenges.
The way responsive design works is by checking the width of the device’s viewport by using a line of code within the head tag called a “media query”.

Media Queries are used to find out the current max resolution of the screen, and they allow you to use a different CSS for this state than a normal CSS. This is what is called responsive design it discovers what resolution the visitor currently has and responds to this by the use of Media Queries.

In the past the only way we could adapt a website to any resolution was to use a fluid page design but media queries allow you to do much more. With media queries you can hide the sidebar of the page on smaller screens to show more of your content or you can increase the size of the font on bigger screens.
What this does is check to see if the screen width is less than 480px wide (which is equal to an iPhone in landscape orientation) and then activates a set of specified styles that would be listed within the curly brackets. As an example, if you wanted to target tablet screens you could have another media query that looks for a max-width of 768px. In addition you will need to set the Viewport Meta Tag, which means adding another line of code to the head tag.

So, do you need to be using media queries?

Studies show by June of this year, more people will read email on a mobile device than on a desktop computer or webmail client. So, you want to make your emails as readable as possible on these small screens. The simplest approach that has become the minimum standard for developing mobile-friendly emails is to use a font size large enough to be readable on both desktop and mobile browsers but it can be difficult to create one design.
The biggest advantage of using responsive design in emails is the ability to set different font sizes for different screens. This is most beneficial in text-heavy emails like newsletters.

The most basic use of responsive email design is your email layout. Let us say your typical email format is a 3-column layout. Using responsive email design, you can now design two other versions: a two-column layout for tablets and a one-column layout for mobile devices. This will ensure your reader is always seeing the most important parts of your email, no matter what size screen they are using.

This all sounds great and interesting, but remember you need to plan. If you have to go back and retrofit media queries into an email that was not designed for it you are going to find yourself redesigning, rebuilding, and rethinking what you have already completed. Also, even with proper planning you are going to find yourself putting in more time into design and development than you normally would for a simple email. So be prepared.

Another item to remember is you still have to create it the old way. If you did not know, Gmail strips out any stylesheet information you put in the head tag and this includes media queries. So, to accommodate for Gmail (and other email browsers that do not support this) you need to cover all your bases and still build the email using inline styles in combination with classes and ids that we can call with the media query. This means that even when you are using media queries you still have to go through the trouble of making sure your email works on mobile screens without them.

There is a lot more to say on this topic, and we will in upcoming newsletters.  For now ask yourself this — is responsive email design right for your company?

The answer to this will depend primarily on three considerations:
Audience: If a large portion of your audience is reading email on a mobile device, responsive design may be a good idea.
Budget: Additional design and development time will be required.
Content: Text-heavy newsletters will benefit from responsive design, while with graphic heavy emails it may be easier to design one email that reads well across all devices.

*Did You Know — Morgan Stanley’s analysts believe that, based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop Internet use by 2015.

Posted in Are you Optimizing your email marketing, Building Email Relationships, Email, Improve email marketing campaigns | No Comments »

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