Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

Want to know how a SPAM Firewall works?  Cisco, who makes the IronPort Email appliance, has also put together a short, 8 minute video that explains how their SPAM firewall works.  It Cisco-specific of course, but does a great job of providing an overview of operation.  http://www.ironport.com/products/how_it_works.html

Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, check out our Webinar: Email Marketing 201: Advanced Email Delivery.  its about 55 minutes long and explains in detail how an email is delivered, and explains Email Firewalls in more detail.

We often get the question: “How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist?” Followed by “If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted?

There are several hundred SPAM blacklists but luckily, there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. We’ve included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. We’ve also highlighted one or two of the more prominent SPAM blacklists.

What you need to know to check Blacklist status

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Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces.

A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s on-demand email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’.  Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility).

A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, the recipient’s email server might be temporarily overloaded or offline; the recipient might be over their inbox quota size or there might be a temporary problem with the remote server configuration.  The most common type of ’soft’ bounce reported is ‘Blocked Due to Content’ – you guessed it – caught in a spam filter.  (Tip: Reduce Blocked Due to Content’ errors by running your online spam checker when editing your email campaign.)

Soft bounces are automatically re-tried up to 3 times over the next 4 days, per campaign. After 3 campaigns (a total of 9 retries), if an email is still undeliverable, it is then considered a hard bounce and the status in Pinpointe is changed to ‘bounced’.

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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