Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

(Updated 12/15/09) This is the first in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. The interactive session demonstrates tips to improve delivery and email response rates for your well crafted HTML emails. We also cover tips to help ensure your email gets read once it actually makes it to the inbox.

Email Marketing 101 focuses on email content and covers the following topics:

• Update on CAN-SPAM Requirements
• Designing for the Inbox: Think “Above the Fold”
• 21 DOs and DON’Ts – Tips to Improve Email Delivery

The total play time is 55 minutes; the on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are below.

You can download the on-demand version and slide deck below… . And hey, please Diggit, Fave or Tweet about it!

		Download Slide Deck: “Email Marketing 101: Tips to Improve HTML Email Response Rates” (.pdf format)“
		Download 8 page Question and Answer Summary (pdf format)”
		Download the Quicktime (mpeg 4 / .mov) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 17MBytes -downloads before playing)
		Download the Windows Media (.wmv) on-demand presentation (57 minutes / 21.5MBytes)

If you’re interested in more advanced topics – check out Email Marketing 201 Webinar (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) where we 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.

We ran multiple experiments on subject lines and summarized one particular case study example in our recent webinar: “Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses (you can download the slides and view the on-demand version).

Here are the email subject variations:

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Email authentication is a way to say, “This email is from Pinpointe’s servers, but it’s being sent on behalf of me, so you can trust it.” It basically prevents your email from looking spoofed (like a forgery).  DKIM is the e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to address one of the Internet’s biggest threats: e-mail fraud.  As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, at least according to the Online Trust Alliance (www.otalliance.org). DKIM is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail, because DKIM makes it hard (i.e., almost impossible) for evil, fraudulent spammers to send emails where they pretend to be someone else – like your bank – asking you to update your account information. Email protocols (like SMTP) do not include Authentication support, so a recipient of a message has no confidence that the message they are receiving is from whom it claims to be from. DKIM is a way to permit a receiver of a message to validate that a message is, in fact, from whom it claims to be from.

DKIM, which stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail”, lets an organization insert a cryptographic signature on outbound e-mail and associate that signature with its domain name. The signature travels with the e-mail regardless of its path across the Internet. The recipient of the e-mail can use the signature to validate that the message came from the organization’s domain name. (If you’re a Pinpointe customer – you don’t have to worry – by default we use DKIM signing for all of your emails). DKIM won’t eliminate e-mail fraud altogether, but it will help companies that are targets of phishing scams to give their customers a way of ensuring they sent a particular message.

DKIM is a merger of two protocols: DomainKeys, which was created by Yahoo, and Identified Internet Mail, which was created by Cisco. These companies along with other ESP’s and ISPs work with the IETF’s DKIM working group on technical specifications.  DKIM has been under development since 2004 and it’s finally reaching a critical mass: we expect to see Enterprises implement DKIM through 2009-’10.

DKIM Usage will Boom in 2009-10

DKIM adoption is accelerating, especially among banks, mortgage companies and insurance companies. It’s pretty easy for a corporation to go out and deploy DKIM because there are now enough commercial products that have DKIM support, and many Email Service providers (“ESP”s), like Pinpointe are now supporting DKIM authentication. Now that the standards are complete and compliant products are readily available, many enterprises will implement DKIM in their email systems in 2009. In order to ensure your emails are not blocked by these domains, you’ll want to ensure your emails are being sent with DKIM enabled.

If you want to learn more, we cover authentication and authorization (DKIM and SPF) in our recent Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery Topics.  Here are a few examples validating that DKIM  is quickly gaining critical mass:

• BITS, a group of 100 of the largest U.S. financial institutions, last year recommended that its members adopt DKIM by October 2008. The fact that 100 large financial institutions are throwing their weight behind a standard together is going to help drive rapid DKIM adoption.
• BITS also recommends either Sender ID Framework (SIDF) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to validate that a received e-mail originates from an authorized mail server within a particular domain. (Read our Blog Tutorial on setting your SPF record correctly.)
• ISPs are adopting DKIM because they want to protect their customers against spam and phishing scams. E-mail senders are tying to protect their brands, identities and customers from phishing scams.
• Ebay, PayPal and banks in general have always attracted fraudsters and “phishers”, so PayPal and eBay are signing their e-mails with DKIM to battle what are called Phishing attacks. [link] Yahoo will block e-mails claiming to be sent by eBay and PayPal that haven’t been signed through DKIM.

This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers.  You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email delivery’. 

If you are using an Emails Service Provider (ESP) like Pinpointe, Constant Contact or Exact Target, then this applies.  If you are just sending outbound emails from Outlook, then this does not apply.

What is “SPF” and what does it do?

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework”, and helps to control forged e-mail. SPF is not directly about stopping spam – it is about giving domain owners a way to say which mail sources are legitimate for their domain and which ones aren’t. While not all spam is forged, virtually all forgeries are spam. SPF was created in 2003 to help close loopholes in email delivery systems that allow spammers to “spoof” or steal your email address to send bzillions of emails from another company’s domain (like yours). 

SPF is an open standard – it isn’t owned or controlled by any one body or company.  More information about SPF can be found at:

• http://www.openspf.org/Project_Overview
• http://old.openspf.org

Why do I want to have SPF records for my domains?

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Our goal as marketers is to develop a ‘relationship’ with our audience.  Generally speaking, people respond to people better than they respond to ‘things’ – like your company.

Based on our split testing, we’ve found that in most cases, you’ll see better results by using a specific contact person (yourself for example) vs. a general address like ’support@’ or ’sales@’, or just using your Company name.

Your recipients take only a second or two to decide whether or not to open your email. If they do not recognize your company, they are likely to skip over the email. Also, general addresses are less personal, which reduces open rates.

Actual Results

Based on analysis of various campaigns across our system we have seen that using a specific personal name vs. a general email address as the send-from’ address can improve the net open rate by 15% – 35% (or more), with a similar coresponding lift in click-through rates.

According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices.  Chances are, your email looks downright awful when viewed on a Blackberry or similar.

The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their mobile devices / smart phones to do real-time checking (often skimming) of email, and make a quick decision whether to keep the email and read it in more detail later, or delete it. They then go back and review / act upon more important emails from their desktop.

The survey also indicates mobile email users don’t click on links from their Blackberry or PDA — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. Users don’t make online purchases via these devices either (well, not in the US anyway – Europe and AsiaPac are different markets altogether).

A Few Tips for Emailing to Blackberry Users

This is common sense stuff but follow these quick tips, and you’ll improve responses overall:

• Deliver brief, interesting messages in multi-part MIME (both regular HTML and text-only versions).
• Revise your Goal: Aim for the Follow-up.  Since Exec’s using a Blackberry are only skimming and not clicking – make sure the value proposition is concise, clear and uncluttered, and you might as well do away with the links.  Entice the reader to review the email in mode detail when they return to their desk.
• Don’t put links to graphic images at the very beginning of your email.  Depending on the device’s settings, the recipient may simply see an a bunch of links.  The recipient either has to scroll forever (a major source of thumb-cramp syndrome) or more likely, they’ll just delete your email.
• Include a link to the web-version of your email. Most ESPs have this feature – when you create an email, an HTML version is automatically created and hosted on the ESP’s website. Try sending a text-only email with a brief introduction and a link to view the message as a Webpage. This also allows users to view the HTML version when users later view the email on their computer.

If you send email campaigns long enough, you will run into spam filter issues.  As a legitimate email marketer you can still expect 20%+ of your emails to just get lost in cyberspace, mostly due to overzealous spam filters. 

SPAM filters / firewalls use multiple techniques to determine whether your legitimate business email is SPAM .   Today’s filters rely heavily on your domain and server reputation, but most filters still factor in your email’s content, and are based on the spamassassin engine.  Content-based filters review your content and assign points each time they see something that looks like a spammy phrase, and certain criteria get more points than others.  If your campaign’s total “spam score” exceeds a certain threshold, your email is sent to the junk folder.

So “what’s the threshold I need to stay under?”

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Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ were focused on more straight-forward tips to improve delivery, with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control.  In this Webinar, (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) we 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. 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. The 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
• Designing for the Inbox

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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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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At Pinpointe, we just started using Twitter – our page isn’t too impressive yet, but you can find us at www.twitter.com/Pinpointe. 

Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. Nearly 4 million times a day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000+ weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006.

The marketing opportunities on Twitter are obvious.  For example, when we post a useful tip in the Pinpointe blog, schedule a new educational webinar or post an on-demand Email Marketing best-practices video, we take 60 seconds to also post a “tweet” about it, and even though we just started, we’re starting to see visits to our website from Twitter.  It’s simple to share headlines and updates about products and services to our growing list of devotees who want to be plugged into up-to-the-moment tweets through pretty much whatever Web or mobile technology suits them. And Tweets can have a compound effect – creating a kind of “ambient awareness.” For me, it’s the same feeling as when I move from email to instant messaging: instant response vs. emails’ delayed response.

Social media keeps blurring and redefining communication lines, and Twitter is a perfect example.  It’s free, simple, informative, useful and for many, an extraordinary way to never unplug. And as you’ll soon find, it’s addictive.  Twitter gives us marketers yet another channel to communicate with our prospective audience.Twitter might not stay free for marketers for long. Mr. Williams replied to Fast Company’s question earlier this year: “When and how will Twitter start making money?”

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