Best Practices for Email Deliverability:

The following is a list of best practices for increasing the deliverability of your email messages. Deliverability means that your legitimate email gets to the inbox of the recipient, and is not stuck in spam filters.

• Never buy a list of email addresses - That is the best way to get yourself blacklisted for lots of domains, and guarantee that your email will not be delivered.
• Send from a clean IP - If your sending mail from an IP that has sent spam email in the past, chances are your mail will be blocked. Also never use a SMTP server on a dynamic IP address, or on a dail-up, dsl, or cable modem.
• Remove bounced emails from your list - use some software to remove bad email addresses. Domain’s such as AOL will block you if you try to send to too many non-existent addresses. You should immediately remove all hard bounces.
• Use the same from address for all email - If a recipient is using a challenge response system they will typically add your newsletter address to their whitelist (a list of allowed email addresses) the first time you send them an email. If you send from a different email address every time the recipient may not keep adding your address to their whitelist.
• Setup SPF records in your DNS - Sender Policy Framework, or SPF are very simple records that you add to your DNS records. They identify which IP addresses may send email on behalf of your domain, many spam filters will give you positive points if you have these setup correctly. By creating an SPF record your also allowing Microsoft Sender-ID to be used.
• Validate HTML before sending - Invalid HTML or poorly formatted HTML can have negative effects on deliverability.
• Don’t use too much HTML - Some spam filters will give you a negative rating if the ratio of content to HTML markup is too small. Recommended file sizes not to exceed 50-75 kilobytes.
• Don’t link to too many different domains - Spammers often use several different domain names for each product they are pushing.
• Avoid punctuation in the subject line - Especially exclamation and question marks.
• Never use all caps - Besides being annoying many spam filters will pick flag this as spam.
• Don’t use currency signs (eg $) in subject
• Don’t use a large font size
• Don’t address your recipient with the word Dear - Especially not Dear Friend!
• Personalize content - If you give the user personalized content it is more likely to pass through their personal spam filters. For instance if my email address is pete@example.com and you use my last name, chances are I gave you my last name, and it is a valid email.
• Get Whitelisted - Some ISP’s such as AOL have whitelists that you may be able to get added to. Additionally you can pay to get added to some, such as BondedSender.
• Lowercase From address - make sure your from address is lower case
• Don’t have numbers in your from address
• Use a name in the From header - don’t just use your email address, also include a name. A large percentage of spam simply uses an email address in the from header.
• Don’t put the recipient’s name in the subject
• Include To, Subject, Date, Message-ID, headers
• Avoid words that commonly appear in spam – you should avoid the following words in your email, and especially in the subject such as:
  • enlarge
  • click here
  • big bucks
  • long distance
  • dear
  • loan
  • free
  • offer
  • money back
  • targeted
  • incredible
  • spam
  • drug related words - viagra, etc.
  • sex/porn related words

Notes from our President, Uncategorized

One of the most important issues for email marketers is making sure the message makes it to the “inbox” of the intended recipient. While there are several key factors to achieving this objective, the focus of my blog post today will be on the “Subject Line”. Not only does the subject line play an important role in getting delivered, it is imperative to accomplish the main objective of getting your marketing message opened and read by the user.

To begin I would like to share my process in writing effective Subject Lines.

First, it is necessary to define your target audience. You should create a profile of this group using the following questions, and then dive into their minds putting yourself in front of their computer. By defining the audience this will help guide you through creating the right copy for your Subject Line.

Second, I say use the “teachers dress” methodology, short enough to keep it intersting but long enough to cover the topic! Copywriter’s say you must write it in seven words or less, I say the Subject Line needs to be the right length, to capture attention but also to entice users to open the message.

Third, continue to test different subject lines on your lists and measure the results. A subtle change in a word here or there could lead to increases in the campaigns overall effectiveness. If you are targeting demographically, your subject line can be modified to be gender specific or age specific, or both.

Finally,

When you think you have it mastered, push yourself even further and you will find that while this is difficult and teadus work versus just blasting away, true online marketers will benifit from understanding the importance of the subject line.

Jeff Stanislow
Motor City Interactive

Notes from our President Advertising, Internet, Marketing, Social Media

After spending a decent amount of time in this business and seeing a lot of twists and turns for the holy grail of marketing nirvana, I have a theory. I call it the “Indiana Jones” theory. You go through hell getting to the grail, and then it slips through your hands and you realize it will never be captured. But you also realize it is a good thing because if it is found, everyone will see it and win. I believe marketing is like the grail, you have wins and losses, you test emerging opportunities and “hype rewards”, and support “existing or safer” known areas. It is what is left after the hype is gone that you should truly put your time, energy, and money into, but you must understand what is emerging as you do want to be aware of market opportunities or other diamonds in the rough.

Web Sites are still going strong and each day about a billion more are launched, spin-off of web site models like micro-sites and landing pages continue to be a strong for marketers, and with applications going online the trend continues. Web Sites are “IN”

Email is still here and dominant while proponents of RSS feeds once touted the end of email, but, it just didn’t. Email marketing is still a very effective marketing tool, and continues to evolve in its own native environment.

Banner Advertisements are still kicking around with lower click-thru rates the once darling of the “surfing” days is really still a good way to market. Users are “session” or “task” oriented, so, when they do click on a banner ad, you better bet the click is more valuable than the days when you clicked to “shoot the duck”. The hype in recent years has to be Pay Per Click advertising, and Google made history and a few dollars buy building out contextual based advertising model. What an amazing company but I will save some time to talk about Google in the near future, and how their applications will once again change the way we live.

Recently a lot of hype has been flying around about Social Marketing…

Many people and now companies are saying “Check out my Tweet, Blog, FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIN page.

While it is a little early to comment, I can see where this model could be interesting in the near future, it is really tough to cut through the clutter. I recently read another blog which indicated Social Media allows brands to talk back and that Twitter was a PR persons dream…

I think a lot of it is really just riff-raff and provides no value, I actually just read a Tweet from a friend and colleague and he basically said, “Hey, I am doing nothing”. I think we are going to see a lot of this in the near future, but, these groups and networks will continue to evolve and only those who have time and something relevant to say will continue to support the “Social Networking” craze. Businesses will be able to capitalize by using such strategies to build loyal followers and begin to think of these users as stakeholders in the company who will be a great sounding board, test group, idea generator, de-bugger, and more. However, I suggest that you just don’t go guns a blazing because a false strategy will easily be snubbed by customers, spend time understanding what some other businesses that maybe more applicable for this media are doing… You don’t want to come off as hey, I found another way to sell to customers.

Stay tuned for another year or two, watch, test, play, and determine what approach if any is right for you and/or your business.

Notes from our President, Uncategorized Advertising, Internet, Marketing, Social Media