Friday, January 29, 2010

Email Marketing Basics

Email marketing isn’t that much more difficult to do than sending out regular email. There are only a few things that you need to be aware of when sending bulk emails.

Most ISPs and web hosting services do not allow you to send out tons of emails all at once as they view this as possible spam. For the most part, there is a cap on what can be sent out. Usually around 200 – 250 emails per day and not more than 50 emails per hour. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, they are exceptions rather than the rule.
The more images you include in the email, the more likely it will be caught as spam. To save on bandwidth, most bulk email messages use images stored on servers rather than attached to the email message itself. Doing this will increase the likelihood of being caught as spam.
Outlook 2007 will really mess up formatted email. Microsoft decided that with Outlook 2007 that they would use the Word engine to render and compose email in Outlook rather than the Internet Explorer engine. Problem is, Word is not 100% compliant with internet style standards. So messages created in anything else, including many online emails services, look terrible when received in Outlook 2007... and about 25% of email users use that program for their email.
If sending to recipients on Yahoo or Gmail, there is a good chance your email will be flagged as spam. If received by too many recipients at Yahoo or Gmail, your domain and/or ISP may be flagged as spammers and blacklisted, which could mean other email servers may start rejecting your email.

That’s probably about it for things to watch out for. Here are some suggestions to overcome this issues:

To get around the send limit, you can use a relay service like AuthSMTP. Link to the site is http://www.authsmtp.com/mailing-list/index.html. Packages start at $24.00 /year if sending 1,000 or less messages per month. Setting them up is similar to setting up an email account, and then you just send your messages using your regular email application (ie: Outlook). Just be sure to select this account when sending, or if you only have one email account, set them up as your main SMTP server. Or, you can continue to use your regular email account and just throttle the number of messages send per hour and per day. To get around the limit of 250 messages per day, you don’t want to send more than 10 or 11 messages per hour. You can use a program called Easy Mail Merge. This is an Outlook plugin. The web link is http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/mail_merge.html. Then just compose and send your emails in Outlook. Only thing, you will have to leave Outlook on all day until the messages are send. However, other than the initial cost of the plugin, around $39.95, there are no other expenses.
Don’t attach images unless you absolutely have to. Perhaps just your company’s logo and the message. Write the messages as you would write to a friend and try not to include too much “selling”. Including (attaching) as small logo will help to ensure your messages don’t get flagged as spam as much as linking to an image on a server will.
Create your messages in Outlook to ensure they show up as you intended. Soon I will have mail templates included on my site which will be compliant with Outlook 2007. But you don’t need to use a template. The more structured the template, the more likely your email will be picked up as spam.
Try not sending email to Yahoo and Gmail recipients if possible. These online mail services have buttons that the use can use to report spam or mark as spam. The problem is, many of these users mark messages which are not technically spam. The user may have signed up for the newsletter or whatever and forgot or decided they didn’t want to receive these messages anymore and instead of unsubscribing, they just hit the Yahoo or Gmail button to mark or report spam. Eventually, the sender’s email or domain gets blacklisted.

And you may want to create a domain name and email address using the domain name so your email looks more professional. I see so many emails from businesses with emails addresses like: mybusiness@hotmail.com. Your business image will look a lot better if your email address is: myname@mybusiness.com.

Sending email this was you won't be able to track opens or click throughs, and you'll have to create a way for subscribers to unsubscribe. We'll tackle this issues later on.