Using Unsubscribe and Physical Address Tags

By Kevin Huxham, on December 13, 2011 - Leave a comment
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In compliance with Canada’s New Anti-Spam Law (Bill C-28), The CAN SPAM ACT of 2003 and CakeMail’s existing Anti Spam Policy all senders using our service MUST include the physical postal address of the sender in their email, along with an unsubscribe tag. Not only is it illegal to send commercial-based email without a valid postal address, it goes against Sender Best Practice of not showing proper accountability to the recipient.

The receiver should be able to readily contact the sender (by any means possible) if they no longer wish to be contacted via email. Failure to adhere to this policy will result in the termination of your CakeMail account.

In order to protect you (and us!) from this happening, we have modified our existing detection system to alert us so we can properly resolve this issue before it happens. In CakeMail 3.2, the system automatically searches for both an unsubscribe and an address tag. If they are not detected, you will not be able to move forward and schedule your campaign.

The user attempting to schedule the campaign will be notified immediately, and if the physical address is missing, you’ll have the option of entering the information in a pop up. Once the information has been edited, the tag will be added automatically for you in the footer of the email. (You will also be notified that the unsubscribe tag is missing and that process will be automatic as well)

 

To read more about this topic, please refer to our Support Document.

The Icing News: Future-proof email marketing, Best email variables to test

By Isabel Lapointe, on December 7, 2011 - 2 Comments
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Six approaches for future-proof email marketing
Once again, Mark Brownlow makes a good interesting piece on the best things to focus on while creating email marketing. Read the whole article to get all the useful links!

  1. Understand the true meaning of value: avoid one-way value, don’t overestimate value, don’t misunderstand value : the value that count is the value for the recipient, not yours.
  2. Be willing to tweak and change:Each new email is an opportunity to test a tweak, and each tweak can have a surprisingly positive impact.
    * Subject line tests that double open rates over time
    * Changes in link wording that produce over 50% more clicks
    * From line tests that pull in over 20% more clicks
    * Link format tests (button vs text) that increase clicks 67%
  3. Respect the basics
  4. Be unique: Valuable content and offers, permission, creative design, relevancy, timing, personalization, customization etc. are important factors that can take your email marketing amplifier all the way up to 10. What takes it up to 11?
  5. Use common sense
  6. Dig deeper in the numbers


Email Research: The 5 best email variables to test
Marketing Sherpa has done research with marketers asking them what are the best things for email marketers to test (and do they test them?)

  1. Target audience: 42% of email marketers believe testing the target audience is very effective (but only 30% are doing it…)
  2. Landing page: 41% declare testing it is very effective
  3. Subject line: by far the most tested variable (72%) but declared very effective by 35%
  4. Call-to-action: very near with 34%
  5. Personalization: also near with 32% of marketers believe testing it is very effective

New to CakeMail – Engagement!

By Kevin Huxham, on November 30, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Spammers are forever trying to find different ways to abuse the system and ISPs are forever trying to figure out new creative ways of stopping them. Engagement is nothing new – it’s actually been around for a while (we’ve mentioned it a few times here, and here) – but ISPs have only recently started making delivery decisions based on this kind of data.

What does this mean?

If the email you are sending does not engage your readers, chances are it’s going to be sent straight to their junk folder if you don’t make some changes.

One of the great things about new product releases is that you get to add all the cool things you wanted to add in previous releases but didn’t quite have time for. And more importantly, you get to include some of the great suggestions we receive everyday from YOU, our customers!

Showing List Engagement is one of the things I advocated for in this new release. Under the Contact Lists tab in v. 3.1 and higher, you’ll now see an active panel that not only displays the number of lists and subscribers you have across all your lists, but the number of total emails sent and the average engagement level of your list:

How does it work?

Our new Engagement measures the quality of your relationship with your subscribers. The average click and open rates for the last 6 months are combined and given a grade out of 10.*

Half a star = 1 point

The greater the number of stars, the higher your engagement, the better the list!

*takes into account Opens vs Unique Opens as well as Clickthroughs vs Unique Clickthroughs.

ISPs also take into account the number of complaints you receive, the number of hard bounces you generate, the number of spam traps you hit and whether or not your content is flagged by their content filters. They look at this data along with 3rd party reputation metrics to determine where to place your email.

How do I boost my Engagement?

Your open & click rates are determined by many things, but on average you should be seeing anywhere from 10%-60% dependant on your reputation, how well you build and maintain your lists and of course, the content you are sending.

The data never lies, look at our basic delivery model. Start by focusing on past campaigns. Did some perform better than others? Ask yourself why. Was it something as simple as the subject line? Did your email contain an attractive offer your customers could not resist? Did you effectively target a specific portion of your list through segmentation to help boost performance?

Tips:

  1. Identify your audience and target your campaigns accordingly – this data should be part of your onboarding process, find out as much as you can (within reason) and use it to your advantage.
  2. Use appealing subject lines – knowing what your email is about before they open it is extremely important.
  3. Learn from your mistakes – finding out what didn’t work is almost as important as what did!
  4. Retire inactive users – people that have not opened/clicked in a while are deadweight. Try a win-back campaign and if that doesn’t work, remove them from your list entirely.
  5. Test – try using A/B Split campaigns to maximize the effectiveness of your content.

Another thing you can look at is your analytics reporting. What happens when the user has opened/clicked through and they are sitting on your webpage? What is their average time on your site? What is the number of page views? Did they convert? Did they purchase something?

“Set a course for the Inbox, Commander, Warp 9 – ENGAGE!”

Bye for now,

Kevin

PS. Sorry for the Star Trek reference at the end there, I couldn’t resist. :)

Blacklist Friday

By Kevin Huxham, on November 25, 2011 - 1 Comment
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Don’t you just love the Holidays? I don’t.

Well, I do love the holidays really, but the truth is that for email delivery folks, it’s a very stressful time of year. Not only do email volumes go through the roof, but people seem to forget (or ignore) some basic rules of email marketing that they wouldn’t otherwise think of doing throughout the year.

Because the lure of sending email to as many people as possible to increase ROI is just too good to pass up this time of year, typically good senders can sometime turn a blind eye when it comes to best practices. They reactivate inactive users, they use lists that haven’t been sent anything in months, they send 5 emails a week instead of the usual 1 etc, etc.

As we all know, Black Friday in the US is the biggest shopping day of the year…but I affectionately refer to it as Blacklist Friday because that is usually what results for many email marketers.

ISPs (and email receivers in general) are constantly trying to find good ways to filter spam. One of those ways is by using blacklists. A blacklist is a list used by receiving networks to judge a given IP and/or sending domain’s reputation. These lists are run by Anti-Spam groups and most blacklistings are the result of sending Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) to addresses that never asked to receive it.

There are many different blacklist providers in existence and some carry more weight in the community than others, but they are all an indication you are doing something seriously wrong. I’ve mentioned this before, but a lot of people think blacklists are the bad guys, when in fact they should be regarded as friends (not foe). The feedback they provide is not only free, it’s an extremely viable way for ISPs to keep spam out of your own Inbox. Getting blacklisted also alerts you (the sender) to problems with your marketing practices you might not be aware of. You should think of it like your child’s report card in school. If your kid fails a class wouldn’t you want to know about it so you can help them and fix the problem?

There are 2 basic kinds of traps, “Dormant” and “Bonafide” traps.

“Dormant” Traps

An email address that once existed, and may have even signed up to your list legitimately at one point but they have since become inactive.

“Bonafide” Traps

An email address that has been created intentionally to catch people scouring the internet looking for any address they can find. These traps do not belong to a real person (and never did) and could never “opt-in” to any list since it is impossible for the address to initiate, respond or give consent to having received email of any kind.

Essentially, ISPs want to know if people are:

  1. Harvesting addresses off the internet
  2. Sending to lists that are very old
  3. Handling & Processing hard bounces correctly

It allows them to judge the incoming mail from that sender so they can add it to their overall reputation score and filter it (if necessary).

An Example:

abc123@hotmail.com is deactivated because the person that signed up for it is no longer using it. From the date it becomes inactive for a period of 6-12 months, it will return a hardbounce if you try to send it an email. So… people that are sending regularly and removing hard bounces from their lists properly will abandon this address in the process. People that don’t do this obviously will still list this address as ‘active’.

After 12 months, Hotmail will stop returning a hardbounce because it feels that any responsible marketer would have already removed this address from their lists.

If you keep sending to it after this time, it could result in a negative reputation at Hotmail and together with all the other stuff they look at.. could mean email from that sender will start going to the Junk box. Blacklists do the same thing, but they also receive inactive spam traps from ISPs, Registrars, they buy domains of companies that have gone under, etc.

Email marketing is far different to any other method of reaching out to your client-base. The actions of one single email address going to the wrong place or the wrong person, can seriously affect your reputation and your delivery. This is the worst time of year to take risks with your sender reputation, risking account suspensions and blacklists with activities like reactivating old lists.

Opt-in check boxes need to be empty, confirmation emails need to be sent and you need to send to your list on a regular basis. This is the only way we can avoid having this issue during the busiest time of year.

Happy Holidays!

The Icing News: Email’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated, It’s the Mobile Wonderful Time of the Year

By Isabel Lapointe, on November 14, 2011 - 1 Comment
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Email’s Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

They’re always trying to scare us, but David Daniels from ClickZ, shows off some statistics that defy those predictions:
- 93 percent of online consumers check their email account at least once a day, if not more frequently.
- About 25% of consumers say that they maintain a separate email account just for marketing purposes, females are slightly more likely to do this at 30%, as much as 41% of consumers ages 38 or younger.

It’s the Mobile Wonderful Time of the Year
Return Path reminds us that during the busy season, people are using mobile even more to stay connected. Here are few more tips to help your emails get to them:

  • How does it look? Take a look at your email campaign on a mobile device to experience firsthand how limiting the 3rd screen can be.
  • Are you flexible? Consider using the pre-header space to offer links to view mobile and web versions of your email, as well as a clickable summary statement of the message content.
  • How big is too big? Review the width of your email – downsizing may improve mobile viewership without sacrificing the web experience.
  • Is your message legible? Images usually aren’t visible (with the exception of the iPhone), so if your message isn’t in a text format, it can’t be read. And, if your links are button-format only, subscribers can’t respond either.

Did Monty Python write your unsubscribe page? 9 tips to make it better
A article from the always funny-tones Mark Brownlow on what not to do in you unsusbcribe form. But some real tips too!
A few example of what NOT to do:

Al Capone fear-based option:
bad unsub example 4
The King Eurystheus method, involving a few Herculean unsubscribe tasks:
bad unsub example 2

And how to deal with those three groups of unsubscribers: the unavoidable, the switchers and, the real problem, the dissatisfied.

The Icing News: Become a supreme being of great subject line writing, Mobile Is Less Forgiving than Desktop

By Isabel Lapointe, on November 10, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Mobile Is Less Forgiving than Desktop
Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design, but their mobile interpretation is much more unforgiving. Read this information from the well-known Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox studies to improve your results with your mobile templates.

How To Write Great Email Subject Lines (And How To Fix Those That Are Not)
Follow these guidelines to become a supreme being of great subject line writing (you know you want to): read the complete text on Email Critic blog.

  • Lead – The subject line needs to lead the person to open the email. It needs to spark their curiosity, however, readers will distrust you and reach for the report-spam button if your subject line doesn’t reflect the actual email content.
  • Relevance – Relevance is the most important element of a subject line.
  • Objectives – Since a subject line is the essence of an email, consider writing it first.
  • Value – People buy value, not products. Encourage the recipient to open the email by displaying the benefits of the product or service. Y
  • Emotion – By tying the tone of your brand together with emotion, you will build a genuine connection between your content and your audience.
  • Test – Perform tests on your subject lines on small subscriber groups before sending out to your full list.

Six questions for analyzing a website
Seth Godin invites you to review your website thoroughly and honestly answer some questions. Among them: What’s the revenue per visit? (RPM). What’s the cost of getting a visit? Is there a viral co-efficient? What’s the cost of a visitor? Because sometimes, «It’s tempting to believe that any website can become a perpetual motion machine of profit.»

The Icing News: Email Remains ROI King, New Hotmail Functions for Newsletters

By Isabel Lapointe, on October 11, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Email Remains ROI King; Net Marketing Set to Overtake DM, Says DMA
Email is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it this year, according to the DMA. A pretty good score compared to catalogs’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile’s return of $10.51.

Hotmail’s new functionalities can affect your deliverability
More then ever, you have to make sure your subscribers love you!
Among the features:
- Hotmail is automatically adding a special category for newsletters
- One-click unsubscribe function directly into Hotmail
- A ‘Sweep’ function: clean up your mail and remove all the old newsletters from that sender, and finally send any new ones that come in to your junk mail until the sender takes you off their list.

Some advice for Launching a New Newsletter to Existing Subscribers

The Icing News: How Email Works (and why it bounces), Building List and Good Forms

By Isabel Lapointe, on October 4, 2011 - Leave a comment
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How Email Works… (and why you have bounces)
An interesting “behind the scenes” look at how email travels and how MTA’s communicate – and why you have bounces.

Marketing Sherpa: Top Email List Building Tactics
A free 12-page report on List Building Tactics.

Eloqua’s Chart of the Week: How Many Form Fields are Too Many?
As you would expect, the less fields required, the less friction for submission. “There is much as 16 percentage points of variation between using 2 fields and 15 fields.”
- The majority of forms: 5 to 10 questions, for an average 40% conversion rate.

Be Cybersafe
October is cyber-safety month. Canadian Government has launched a website on the topic.

The Icing News: 10 sec. to Convince, Mobile Mentality, Marketing Psychology

By Isabel Lapointe, on September 14, 2011 - Leave a comment
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Here are some interesting articles we’ve been sharing at CakeMail lately.

Make It a Mobile Mentality
When you create a campaign, review everything you do in email while considering mobile at the same time. Interesting summary from the eec.

How Your Email Deliverability is Affecting Your Overall Revenue
If you ever needed a unquestionable argument for good email practices!

10 seconds to convince your reader before he leaves the page
Here are a few interesting findings from Jakob Nielsen’s team’s latest study on usability “How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages”? Here are the key findings :

  • Users have time to read only a quarter of the text on the pages they actually visit (let alone all those they don’t).
  • First 10 seconds on the page are critical to stay or leave.
  • Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat.
  • So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll say much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the Web.

Marketing Psychology: The behavioral triggers behind success at Amazon, Groupon and FarmVille
Insight #1. Eliminate small frictions: Amazon.com does a great job of reducing friction around the cost of shipping, “which has always been one of the biggest psychological hurdles to buying online.
Marketing Application: Recognize and reduce the friction points in your conversion process, whether they are related to shipping costs or the number of steps in your landing pages.
Insight #2. Group approval can overpower stigma: A group can greatly influence the behavior of an individual:  Groupon’s success is driven, in part, because its deals are only valid if purchased by a certain number of people (or a “group”).
Marketing Application: Testimonials from people in your audience can show customers that people similar to them have positive experiences with your company.
Insight #3.  Personal investment increases value: FarmVille also leverages the power or reciprocation, a behavioral trait in which people feel indebted to those who give them something.
Marketing Application: Encouraging customers to customize a product before purchasing can make them more inclined to purchase it.
Read the whole article from Wired that inspired this: How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More

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