Essential Guide to E-mail Marketing - Haymarket

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.