Email Deliverability Tips

June 1st, 2009 § 2

Article written  by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

    Website URL:
    Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

    Words/phrases:
    Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

    Images:
    Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

    Attachments:

    With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Closing thought from Tom Osypian: With email deliverability so incredibly important, I know I can’t leave it to chance. That’s why I use and highly recommend Aweber.

Twitter Twenius Twitter Enlightenment

May 31st, 2009 § 2

Did you know that movie stars, athletes, politicians and well known people from @SteveJobs to @BobVilacom to @HulkHogan to @SoleilMoonFrye and beyond, are racing to establish themselves as part of the Twitter community.

However Twitter is much more incredible than that. Truth be told, Twitter is a local communication tool too. It’s likely your town government is using Twitter, your local TV and radio news, your local Fire Department, your library, your local college, even the guy that cleaned your carpets last week. If they are not on Twitter today, it’s just a matter of time.

But there’s another audience moving with great interest toward Twitter. It’s an undercurrent of a more serious nature whereby businesses and entrepreneurs are starting to tap the profitable potential of Twitter. When you observe established companies like: @HomeDepot, @comcastcares or @rubbermaid start lining up on the Twitter bandwagon, it’s without doubt time to take notice.

Perhaps this “business phenomena” boils down to the commonly known fact that a lot of business actually occurs in social gatherings, at cocktail parties, on the golf course, or at numerous other social events. Now, through Twitter it’s become possible, if not down right easy, to benefit from the internet version of a non-stop 24 hour, 7 day a week cocktail party of incredible proportions.

It’s impossible to overlook some of these facts and stories:

  • “TechCrunch CEO states “about 1% of our total traffic comes from twitter.” ~BusinessWeek. Do the math and that’s over 14,000 unique visitors per month.
  • “Global Twestival used Twitter to raise over $250,000 as of February 2009 providing clean water for just over 17,000 people in Ethiopia, Uganda and India”
  • “Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month. Zimbio and Facebook followed, growing 240 percent and 228 percent, respectively.”
  • “By a long shot, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook were the top four social media tools used by marketers, with Twitter leading the pack.”

What’s the meaning of all this? It means that if you are an entrepreneur or in any business, you must not hesitate to head over to Twitter and set up a free Twitter account.

Simple enough?

Well, not exactly. Once you have your account opened, that’s when the fog rolls in. It’s a very very simplistic concept, but like a Rubik’s Cube, unless you have a clear strategy, you’ll soon be scratching your head.

Thankfully, there’s help. Internet strategist and social media marketing expert, Dan Hollings has spent over 12 months researching and testing Twitter strategies for business. Along the way, Dan wrote 100 extremely helpful Twitter tips for business. Next he created a browser toolbar for Mac or PC that puts about 240 Twitter tools, tips and apps within one-click of your Twitter activities. Recently, he released his remarkable Twitter training program called, “Twitter Twenius” (that’s Twitter-talk for genius).

Here is a sample Twitter tip, to get your juices flowing:

Follow those who meet TWO of the following FOUR criteria: informative, interesting, dialectical, original.

Naturally, there’s significantly more to learn, however if you’re looking for viable strategies for making money using Twitter or a way to turn-on the Twitter rocket boosters on all your marketing campaigns from local to international, I enthusiastically recommend Twitter Twenius.