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 [...]
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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 [...]
Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email
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
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 [...]
Tracking Clicks for HTML & Text Emails
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 [...]
Using Google Website Optimizer to Increase Conversion Rates
Our theme for the start of 2009 is – squeeze every bit of performance out of every campaign. The only way to do that is to test, measure, optimize, and test again. Since one of the cool new features in Pinpointe 2.0 is split testing (so you can automatically optimize campaign results), I thought it would be a good time to talk about split testing. Here’s a screen from Pinpointe 2.0′s Split test campaign feature: For example, if you have a list segment of 100 contacts you can send one campaign to 33% of your list, another to the next 33% and another to the final 33%. You can then see which had higher open/click rates and send that to [...]
Can I have different ‘senders’ for each campaign?
Yes. When you set up a campaign and then again when the campaign is sent out, you are asked to provide the sender information and the ‘reply-to’ information. Pinpointe will then send the email out with the From and Reply-To headers set to your preference. Here’s an excellent use for this feature. Assume you have a regional sales team in say, New York City and your sales team will be attending (or running) a local event or trade show. Use the ‘send on behalf of’ feature to send personalized email invitations from your regional representative to the prospects in his/her territory or region. You can set up the entire process for the regional team and prospects can even reply directly to the salesperson.
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