Un Guide pour optimiser sa livrabilité - for lucky French Readers!
Monday, November 17th, 2008CakeMail vient de publier le guide:
Optimiser sa livrabilité : l’enjeu essentiel du Marketing par courriel disponible gratuitement en téléchargement.
Ce guide vous permettra de découvrir les principales façons d’analyser les envois pour la détection des courriels pourriels, soit les taux de plaintes (et les Feedback Loops), les adresses invalides, l’analyse du contenu des messages, les listes noires (blacklists) et les pièges à pourriels (spamtraps). Mais encore mieux, il donne des solutions en vous aidant à prendre soin de vos listes, en vous assurant d’avoir les permissions nécessaires et surtout, en prenant soin de votre réputation!
Nous en avons profité pour faire une petite campagne de promotion dans la Newsletter Infopresse, une cyberlettre destinée aux professionnels du marketing, de la publicité et des communications que nous vous invitons à découvrir si vous n’êtes pas déjà abonné.
On se fait plaisir en vous présentant le bandeau de la campagne qui commence aujourd’hui:
Merci/Thanks to Matt Vernhout (emailkarma.net) for the inspiration for the line 
Posted in Announcement, Deliverability, Documentation | No Comments »
Email Sender Reputation 101
Thursday, November 6th, 2008Hello again, last month I talked about FBLs, how they work and how complaints affect your reputation as a sender. Today I’d like to go into a bit more detail and help you understand how important your reputation is, explain the different factors involved and what a few of the larger ISPs generally look for.
Reputation is key to delivering emails successfully and the golden rule to maintaining a solid reputation comes down to one thing - send email to people who want it.
If you were being called repeatedly by telemarketers at home every time you sat down to dinner despite telling them you were not interested, what would you do? Complain to the phone company? Disconnect your phone? Think about moving to Siberia? Well, that might be a little extreme, but think about it. Complaining to the phone company is a little like hitting the Spam button, disconnecting your phone would be like cancelling your Internet access or changing Email providers, and moving to Siberia would be a little chilly. Now, what if you had pre-arranged with these people to call you at a certain time about something you were actually interested in? What if they knew a little bit about you, knew your name and could actually pronounce it correctly? What if after telling them you were no longer interested, they never called you again! Would you still move to Siberia? Probably not.. nothing against Siberia of course, I hear it’s lovely, but I think you get the point.
Get to know your customers! Try and get as much information on them as possible and start sending targeted emails you know will engage their interest. If you say you will email them once a week, do it. If you want to start sending more, ask their permission first. Segment your lists and spend the time creating content you know they will be interested in. Email Marketing has the highest ROI by far of any marketing strategy, so why would you risk damaging your reputation by not doing all that you can to make sure your email reaches each customer? With the current economic conditions this certainly makes more sense now than ever.
As I point out on our new Deliverability page, delivering emails successfully is dependant on many things and reputation is a big part of it. Not all ISPs judge reputation the same way, but generally speaking they all look at the following:
- How many of their users mark your email as Spam (ie: your complaint rate)
- How many hard bounces you generate (ie: your hard bounce rate)
- Authentication
- Content
As I mentioned last month, your complaint rate should not exceed 0.25% (1 out of 400 emails), if it’s any higher than this you will start having problems. For more information on lowering your complaint rate, please see my last post here.
Hard bounces are avoided by confirming new leads before adding them to your list. At the absolute minimum you should send them a welcome email which will allow you to remove any invalid addresses in real time and avoid sending to a whole bunch of them at once which will also damage your reputation.
Authentication is important during the initial handshake and will help establish you as a trusted sender. SPF, Domain Keys, DKIM, Sender-ID are all ways of authenticating your emails and although not all ISPs check every one of these, most ISPs will check at least some of them.
CakeMail currently uses all these forms of authentication, but a few of them require modifying your own DNS. For more information on how to set this up, please contact our Delivery team at: postmaster@cakemail.com
Most ISPs have a section on their Postmaster website about reputation:
AOL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/guidelines/reputation.html
MSN: http://postmaster.msn.com/Guidelines.aspx
Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster
As for Content filters, they look at a wide variety of things from the domain you are sending From, to words in your content like [Viagra, Spam, Free, Drugs, Credit, Casino, Debt], to the actual html code itself - so try to avoid calling any image files ‘casino.gif’. If you have a blacklisted domain in your email (even if it’s not the same as the one you are using to send), it might get flagged as Spam. ISPs use content filters in different ways and some will bypass this process altogether if your From address is in the recipient’s ‘Safe List’ which is why it is so important to add whitelisting instructions in your emails and also during the signup process. Another great way to accomplish this right away is to include this in your Welcome Email. If you are signing up people legitimately and they want to receive your emails, they should have no problem with this. For more information on Whitelisting, please click here. If you want a more complete list of ‘Spammy’ words, please contact our Delivery team.
Remember it’s never too late to start improving your sending practices (Christmas is less than 2 months away), don’t make any mistakes now you will regret later!
Bye for now,
Kevin
If you have any questions, Kevin can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.
Posted in Best practices, Deliverability | 1 Comment »
Deliverability FAQ, Whitelisting 101 and more
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008Our email delivery expert, Kevin Huxham, Director of Deliverability recently updated our Deliverability section. There you will find more information and precious resources on this delicate and complicated topic. In Deliverability FAQ, he reviews how Spam traps, Content filters, Blacklists and Feedback loops work and helps you to understand how to keep your email out of the Junk folder. In Whitelisting 101 he gives precise information on how to white-list an email address with major email providers, Webmail services and Spam filters. Feel free to link to this document from your own Website to help your customers deliver their email!
Posted in Deliverability, Documentation | No Comments »
Complaints! Complaints! Complaints!
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008Hello everyone, I must say I am very excited because this is my first blog entry here at CakeMail and boy did I choose some good subject matter!
I really don’t think people know how much their complaint rate affects delivery. If I told you 80-90% of delivery related problems are caused by complaints, would you believe me? Let me start by explaining how we get this data and how Feedback Loops (FBLs) work exactly.
Once upon a time (way back in 2003), the clever people at AOL starting using a little Spam button at the top of their interface that people could click on if they received an email they didn’t like. AOL soon realized they could not only use this little button to help people setup their own personal filters, but it was a great way for them to start keeping score on which emails generated the most complaints. Who better to listen to than your own customers! This complaint data could also be sent back to the sender so they could in turn remove this person from the list and avoid them from complaining again. It also allows ESPs (Email Service Providers), like us the ability to keep a score card of how many complaints we receive for a given client or mailing. People who generate a lot of complaints can cause a lot of problems, especially if they are part of a shared pool used by many customers.
This is an average, but if you are generating a complaint rate over 0.25% (1 in 400) at any given ISP, this is a sign that people are not happy receiving your email and/or there is a problem with how you are populating your lists.
Below is a list of top FBLs that are currently in use:
- AOL
- Abuse.net
- Comcast.net
- Cox.net
- Earthlink
- Excite
- Hotmail/MSN
- Lashback
- Mailtrust
- RoadRunner.com
- Spamcop
- United Online
- USA.net
- Yahoo! (currently not accepting new applications)
Unfortunately, many ISPs do not provide feedback loops to senders primarily because of the administrative hassles associated with them, but they are one of the best ways for email marketers to keep track of their sender reputation and help keep their lists clean.
If you are not getting the open rates you have been accustomed to seeing, or you are finding more and more of your emails ending up in the Junk folder, there is good news! CakeMail is committed to helping you find a solution.
If a given list source has a bad return, perhaps you are wise to stop using them! Generating your own leads and building a relationship with your customers is the best way to avoid generating a lot of complaints. Here are some things you should be doing:
- Avoid purchasing lists (this is number 1 on my list for a reason)
- Send email to those who want it - after you receive a subscription request, send a confirmation email to that address which requires some affirmative action before adding that person to your mailing list. Since only the true owner of that email address can respond, you will know that only the true owner has intended to subscribe. This will also remove any invalid addresses and help lower your hardbounce rate (another problem that affects your reputation). Without this process, you cannot be sure that the recipient requested your email.
- Don’t sign people up automatically and don’t hide behind some Privacy Policy nobody reads.
- Have people sign up voluntarily and keep those check boxes empty so they have to check it themselves. If the box to signup is checked by default, your list is actually ‘opt-out’ not ‘opt-in’.
- Honor the scope and frequency of your sign up process and don’t send them content or bombard them with emails they didn’t sign up for.
- Explain why they are receiving your email and make it as easy to unsubscribe as it was to sign up.
- Use a consistent “From” name and email address
- Make your subject line as clear as possible; people should know who you are, what your email is about and why they are receiving it without even having to open it.
Some of these are easy to do and some aren’t. Some of them will require a little time and money to put into operation, but all of them will help you avoid complaints, improve your company’s reputation, increase your deliverability and boost that ROI! It will also give you an edge over your competitors and you won’t look back once you start seeing the results. Like most things, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
The good folks at MarketingSherpa recently released an interesting study on the top 5 reasons people mark email as Spam. You will see from the chart below that the number 1 reason is because they didn’t sign up to receive email from the sender.
I can’t help but wonder how many of these people simply did not recognize the sender or complained because they were signed up without their knowledge!
Reason number 2 is even more enlightening, 41% of people also complained the email they received was not of interest. If these aren’t signs to strengthen your signup process I don’t know what is. If you make an effort to send emails that want to be received and give people a choice, you will eliminate the majority of user complaints with these 2 steps alone!
This data also shows how important it is for email marketers to stay on their toes and think about how they can make their campaigns more relevant. It shows how important it is to build a solid relationship with your customers from day one and follow best list building practices. In the end, this is better for everyone. Your reputation as a sender will go up and your customers will respond by sending more business your way.
Bye for now,
Kevin
If you have any questions, I can be reached at: postmaster@cakemail.com or feel free to use our Help Desk.
Posted in Best practices, Deliverability | 2 Comments »
