Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

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26 INFRASTRUCTURE DM News • E-Mail Marketing Guide 2007 to increase their open rates. It is especially important for small businesses to build reputation through consistent e-mail behavior and a good permission-based list. Negative results such as spam reports and bounce rates affect reputation and negatively impact deliverability. Your recipients’ behavior (whether or not they report your mail as spam) is important to your reputation with them and their ISPs. Anything out of the ordinary may convince recipients that they have been spammed: Even opt-in mail becomes spam if a recipient labels it as such. Therefore, small businesses need to make developing trust and recognition a priority. The first step is to organize your contact database. To ensure a good reputation, you should keep your distribution lists updated and your e-mail relevant. ■ All e-mail lists should be opt-in Ellen Siegel Constant Contact only. Let people know they can easily unsubscribe at any time and adhere to their requests. ■ Monitor your bounces and keep your list up to date. Mailing repeatedly to a bounced address can hurt your reputation with an ISP. The second step in building reputation is exhibiting consistent email behavior — make sure your recipients understand how often you’ll send them e-mail messages. Additional steps to increase successful delivery include the following: ■ Be sure recipients recognize you as the sender. The name next to your “from” address must be clearly identifiable to your subscribers, bearing in mind that in many cases your company’s name is more recognizable than those of your employees. Encourage recipients to put your “from address” in their address book, trusted sender list or approved sender list. ■ Content matters. Help ensure your recipients won’t delete or report your mail by making the subject line clear and relevant. Also avoid “spammy” words, excess capitalization or use of exclamation points that may trigger ISP content filters. ■ If you use an e-mail service provider, improve your reputation by making sure they have solid, long-standing relationships with the major ISPs. If they look good, you look good. Finally, follow industry best practices. Stand behind your e-mail and protect your brand by using e-mail authentication. Honor unsubscribe requests promptly. If you use an ESP, leverage its expertise and infrastructure in these areas. By taking these simple steps you will be well on your way to developing trusted relationships with your recipients and ensuring your e-mail communications not only make it to your intended contacts’ inboxes, but are also actually read. Ellen Siegel is the principal technologist at Constant Contact. She can be reached at esiegel@constantcontact.com. CAN-SPAM, four years on BY JEREMY SAIBIL In December of 2003, President Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act into law. The CAN-SPAM Act set rules for sending commercial e-mail, including mandatory inclusion of an opt-out mech- anism, adding a physical address to the message and using a legitimate subject line. So four years later, what is the assessment of the CAN-SPAM Act? Government officials, Internet service providers (ISPs) and e-mail service providers (ESPs) generally agree that the law has had a positive effect. Genuine marketers are not seen as major contributors to the SPAM problem. Still, it is a criminal element that continues to be responsible for much of the harmful SPAM being sent today, and the US government still sees SPAM as a pressing issue and is focusing on enforcing the law, rather than changing it. The good, the bad and the evil Let’s start with evil: many experts agree that an increasing portion of SPAM is related to illegal activities. Some common examples: ■ Pump-and-dump stock scams ■ Identity theft and fraud ■ Scams (I am the widow of an African dictator…) Unfortunately, many people are still falling for these scams and fuelling the spammers’ fire. The good: ESPs and ISPs have worked well together to put in place standards and technology that prevent forged e-mail and better allow recipients to manage what mail they want to receive. In the past few years, the sender policy framework (SPF), sender ID and domain keys, (authentication protocols supported by such products as Campaigner) have been developed and are now widely adopted. In another example, ISPs have set up feedback loops with ESPs so that SPAM complaints can be transmitted to senders in real time. Strong authentication tools are needed to establish the reputation of individual senders. Eventually, like on eBay, recipients will be able to see a sender’s reputation before agreeing to engage in a relationship. As a marketer, it is important to start thinking of Jeremy Saibil Campaigner ESSENTIAL GUIDE your e-mail reputation, if you are not already. Many ISPs are already providing filtering tools to their users. AOL pioneered the “report spam” button in its mail client and others followed. Yahoo has a “this is not junk” button, and Hotmail is working on a way to let people unsubscribe using a tool in the Hotmail interface instead of the link in the message itself. The trend giving more control to recipients is one that will continue. This brings us to the bad. Some marketers are still not following all of the best practices put forward by the industry and rules required by law: Get permission, provide an opt-out, and include a physical address Another factor affecting your reputation is the relevance of your content. Despite having opt-in status, if you are sending offers that are only of interest to a segment of your list, you may be receiving complaints. So target your message to relevant segments and spare the rest. Take a common-sense approach and your reputation will be fine. Jeremy Saibil is director of deliverability at Campaigner. He can be reached at jsaibil@campaigner.com.
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