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 [...]
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Which is Better: Person’s Name or Company for Send-From Address?
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 [...]
11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes
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 [...]
CAN SPAM Act: Update
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 [...]
Can I send out a series of messages over time when a user subscribes to a list?
Of course. Pinpointe supports sending of automatic sequential emails that are triggered when a user subscribes, sent in specific time intervals, eg. After 1 hour, or after 2 days etc. These sequential emails are referred to as Auto-Pilot campaigns, or ‘autoresponders’ and can be accessed using the Autoresponders section from the main menu. Pinpointe also supports custom Auto-pilot campaigns that are triggered by specific custom fields. Lets say for example, that you have a custom field called “Title Level” and an Autoresponder setup to send out a specific email to all ‘Director-level’ contacts. When the contact fills in their details in the subscription form, and selects ‘Director-level’ from the options, they will receive this auto-pilot response. You can create different auto-pilot campaigns with different [...]
