Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

During each of our Email Marketing Webinars, we get questions about CAN-SPAM regulations, so I thought it would be useful to review the CAN SPAM laws.  You will note in this post that, contrary to popular belief, ‘opt-in’ is surprisingly not a legal requirement.

Offering additional impetus for the timeliness of the topic: we just passed the five-year anniversary of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act becoming official.  It boasted overwhelming approval by the U.S. congress after six years of debate, creating the first federal law regulating spam.

The CAN SPAM law went into effect January 1, 2004. Here’s a quick rundown of the law’s main provisions to keep in mind while sending out your email marketing campaigns. We’re not lawyers,  but following these recommendations will definitely keep you clear of the 100 known SPAM operators list.  Here are the requirements:

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Clicks can be tracked for both HTML *and* text based emails (and multi-part emails too since that includes both HTML and text).  How?  Pretty easily.  When your email campaign goes out (assuming you have selected ‘enable tracking’), Pinpointe automatically converts your actual link to a link to a Pinpointe redirect program.  When a recipient clicks your link, they’re redirected from our server to your original URL (in the blink of an eye) and we track the click. That helps us generate our slick, real-time campaign reports telling you which links your recipients clicked and when.  It doesn’t matter whether the email is in HTML, Text or Multi-part – the operation is the same and we instantly record link clicks.

This post explains how Email opens are tracked …

Click tracking and Link tracking are built in to Pinpointe, so you don’t have to do anything to generate nice campaign reports to show these results, but it helps to know how these features work.

Tracking Opens

To track an “open” in an HTML email, we embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of the message – it’s called a “tracker image” or “web beacon.” Whenever your recipient opens their email, the tracker image is downloaded from the Pinpointe servers, and this is instantly tracked as an email Open.  That’s the way things are supposed to work.  There’s one glitch here though.  Nowadays, thanks mostly to massive amounts of graphic porno spam, as many as 40% of recipients now, by default, will *disable* image displays.  Since the beacon or tracker image is just another image, if images are disabled and the recipient actually opens the email but doesn’t enable image viewing, then that open is not tracked.  As a sender – encourage your recipients to white list you (or add you to their address book) – this ensures your email gets delivered *and* that images will always be displayed.  This is why most people will tell you that you can’t track opens unless it’s an HTML email, and why open tracking results should be taken with a grain of salt. That’s only partly true.

Another tracking phenomenon is … Read the rest of this entry »

Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ focus on straight-forward tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.  The followup webinar can be downloaded here or at the bottom of this post – “Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Issues“.

In this Webinar, (aka “How Email Delivery Works“) ProspectDB and Pinpointe take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical and ‘deeper’ than our previous webinars – you might want to point your IT team to these slides. Our goal was to not only leave you with a dozen or so specific tips, but to help you understand all the places where your email can get tripped up before finally hitting the recipient’s inbox.  Topics include:

• Review CAN-SPM Requirements
• Update: How current Enterprise Email Filters work
• Tracking an Email from send to delivery: possible pitfalls along the way

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck at the bottom of this posting. And hey, please Diggit!

Here’s an overview diagram – you can also download the slide deck and on-demand version of the presentation here…

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