Pinpointe - Business Email Marketing Blog » General Tips

Dealing with CSS Styles in Email

Pinpointe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:46:07 +0000

As an email marketer you have probably already discovered that getting your newsletter or email campaign to display as you intended across the main email clients can be a challenge. The most popular email clients in business for example – Gmail (including Gmail for Businesses) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 / 2010 are pretty restrictive and only support about 40% of HTML / CSS styles. Even more challenging for email marketers – HTML ‘Best Practices’ for designing Websites are unfortunately often ‘Worst Practices’ for designing email campaigns, so your most experienced website designer / coder is probably designing email campaigns that won’t display right in a lot of email inboxes. (Hint: Always use the Pinpointe email campaign preview tool to see how your [...]

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Pinpointe — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:39:33 +0000

At Pinpointe, we see very smart customers make mistakes that cause their email response rates to suffer. Here are the most common mistakes we see our new customers make: Not running the SPAM checker Pinpointe has a built-in email SPAM checker that evaluates your email content using the popular spamassassin spam engine, gives you a spam score and provides suggestions to help get your email to the inbox. Wise customers use it before sending any email campaign. Yet some customers don’t run the spam check and confidently send their email campaign to thousands of recipients, only to learn that 25% of their emails were blocked or filtered by spam filters because their spam score was too high. In the Pinpointe [...]

What is a “spam honeypot” or Spamtrap?

Pinpointe — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:28:48 +0000

ISPs and spam tracking services like Spamhaus and SORBS rely on spamtraps or ‘honeypots’ to catch spammers – but what exactly is a ‘spam honeypot’ and how do you avoid hitting them? The bulk of the spamtraps and honeypots today are from dormant email accounts and/or closed domains. The logic is simple: a ‘dead email inbox can’t opt-in to receive email’, so anyone sending email to one of these spamtrap addresses is likely sending unsolicited email. ISPs (Yahoo.com, msn.com, gmail.com for example) review their list of email boxes regularly and disable accounts that have been inactive for a long period of time. They allow the addresses to sit disabled for six to 12 months – during which time any legitimate [...]

How to Embed Video in Email

Pinpointe — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:35:08 +0000

Embedding video into emails has become a hot topic, and there are recent developments that are leading to some limited support for direct playing of embedded video in email. However for today – here’s the best way to get video into your email campaign in a way that will be viewable by virtually any email client. The best method is to change your mindset from ‘how to I embed Video in Email’ to ‘How to I incorporate Video in my Emails?’ (assuming of course that you have determined that your should add video). We’re simply going to add a graphic image to our email that looks like a video to be played, and we’ll include a link to a hosted [...]

Impact of Mobile Devices on Email Design

Pinpointe — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:31:00 +0000

According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their mobile devices. Chances are, your email might look downright awful when viewed on a mobile device. The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their 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 these devices — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. [...]

Hard and Soft Bounces… What’s the Difference?

Pinpointe — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 21:26:05 +0000

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 B2B 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, [...]

Embedding Video in Email – Overview

Pinpointe — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:28:35 +0000

Embedding Video In Email – Overview With over 15B emails being viewed online each month in the US alone, we’re seeing an uptick in email customers asking about embedding video in email. This led us to head off and investigate a few different questions: Can video be embedded in email? If Video can be embedded – how exactly do you do it? How / when to use video in email – will your recipients care? The future of Video in email We’ll cover each of these in a series of posts. Can Video be Embedded in Email? There are a handful of possible ways to embed video with an email – here’s a quick rundown of the possibilities: Flash. Flash [...]

7 Quick Tips to Improve Email Results in 2011

Pinpointe — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:49:27 +0000

With 2011 on the horizon, email marketers can take this time to prepare successful strategies. Here are a few tips to improve performance and increase ROI for a strong new year:

Email Authentication – DKIM and SPF: Which ISP’s are Checking?

Pinpointe — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:38:31 +0000

At Pinpointe, we’ve been using DKIM and SPF for nearly a year for our customers – at no extra charge. If you want to know more about which ISP’s are presently using Authentication and/or Authorization to verify the validity of your email (and thereby decide whether to deliver your email or possibly drop it into Ethertrash) – you can download the full table a the ESPC Coalition site here: A brief summary is included below: Receiver DKIM Domain Keys SenderID SPF AOL XX XX Bell Canada XX XX XX Bellsouth XX XX XX Charter XX Comcast XX XX Cox.net XX Earthlink XX XX XX Gmail XX XX [...]

Which is Better: Person’s Name or Company for Send-From Address?

Pinpointe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:39:02 +0000

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 [...]

Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email

Pinpointe — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:36:38 +0000

What is ‘ALT Text’ and why should you care? As most of us have now experienced, many email clients now DISABLE graphics images by default. We haven’t seen specific metrics on what % of email inboxes have images disabled by default but general consensus seems to be in the 50% range, and increasing. So, if your email includes images, the recipient will see only a box with a red ‘X’ where the image belongs, until they manually enable ‘display images’ in their email client. This has implications with respect to email design. To demonstrate exactly what we mean, here’s what your well-crafted, graphically pleasing email looks like in an Outlook preview pane when image display is disabled: This doesn’t exactly [...]

11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes

Pinpointe — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:15:07 +0000

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 [...]