Mail Mule POST

Whether you realize it or not, there’s a price tag attached to every email address in your database. How well you manage the quality of those addresses can mean the difference between:

• A profit or a loss on your email marketing efforts
• A Rolodex of satisfied customers or a costly lawsuit
• A lucrative holiday season or missed sales goals and irate executives

The Financial Benefits of Proper Email Hygiene

How focused is your company on email address quality? If the answer is “not very”, you could be costing your organization a boatload in lost profits. Check out the example from a webinar we spoke at recently.

That’s a 65% improvement in revenue generated per dollar spent on email marketing JUST by focusing on email addresses quality.

How is this possible? Sending to undeliverable, unengaged, and problematic addresses costs you money. Let’s take a look at how:

The Cost of Poor Email Address Quality

1) Negative Impact on Delivery

Just because an address is deliverable doesn’t mean you should send to it. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use both negative and positive metrics to evaluate inbox placement. As a result, deliverable but unengaged addresses hinder your access to the inbox. As engagement drops, so does your ability to avoid the junk folder.

2) Unnecessary Spending

There’s a cost associated with every email on your list:

• Your ESP likely bills you based on the size of your list or the number of emails you send; and
• Your acquisition sources charge you on a per email basis.

Why burn money acquiring and sending to dormant contacts that will never engage with your company? It just doesn’t make good fiscal sense. Without the proper hygiene protocols in place, this is exactly what you’ll be doing.

3) Low Customer Satisfaction

If you can’t hit the inbox, you can’t reach customers with the information they need. Things like promotions, order confirmations, and billing statements don’t hit their intended target. This makes customers angry and what happens next is never good.

• They get annoyed and complain via social media.
• They contact your call centre at a potential cost of multiple dollars per inquiry.
• In the worst case, they just up and leave you for a competitor.

4) Data Breach Liability

There’s a liability associated with every email address in your house file if a breach occurs. Carrying old, unresponsive email addresses creates an unnecessary risk. Minimize your exposure by purging dormant addresses from your database.

5) WORST CASE SCENARIO – You Get Blocked or Blacklisted

Even the most cautious companies can run into big trouble when it comes to email address quality. We recently spoke with representatives from a leading brand that thought they had all their bases covered. Unfortunately, they didn’t conduct any regular hygiene on their database.

This resulted in a deliverability nightmare that forced the company to miss critical seasonal sales goals and took 90 days to clear up and return deliverability to its previous levels.

CONCLUSION

When it comes to email list management and data hygiene, marketers have an obligation to protect their customers and themselves from unnecessary risk. This is especially true when it comes to email list management and data hygiene.

The goal here is to make it impossible for your company to make a mistake. This can only be achieved by implementing a bullet-proof email hygiene strategy.

Why should you use an autoresponder? Undoubtedly you have heard of them. And if you have ever signed up for anything, you have experienced at least some of what they can do. But, there’s much that goes on behind the scenes that you, as a single subscriber, never see. And so in this article, I want to lift the lid on several positive uses of autoresponders.

First and foremost, the reason that online businesses use autoresponders is that it enables them to automate the messages they use to communicate with their prospects and customers.

If you’re a one-man-band, and many online entrepreneurs are, then you need to use your time as wisely as possible. Although you could write every message to those on your list personally, you can do pretty much the same thing with an autoresponder, but only write the message once.

The second reason you should use an autoresponder is that it enables you to tailor your message. I’ve already mentioned that you can use it to make your messages more personal. There’s a wide variety of salutations that you can use. Dear First Name (except that it’s in code) is probably the most popular.

The third reason is that you can time your messages. This can happen in a few ways. One is that you can schedule your message to go out to everyone on a particular date and at a specific time. Another way is to have a message go out on the basis of when people first join your list. In other words, in a 10 message sequence, someone who signs up now will get message five at a later time than someone else who signs up tomorrow. Another possibility is that you can thank those who buy your products at the time that they do so. There are many possibilities.

The fourth reason is that you can segment your message. Let’s say you have five lists. Each is for a different group of people. Some might be prospects who have been through one email campaign, but not another. Another list might be just for customers. Now let’s say that you want to send out a message to those who are on three of those lists. You can do that by selecting the ones that you want and omitting the ones you don’t. This is an effective way to avoid sending emails, that ask those who are customers already, to buy something they already have.

The last reason is that you can reorder your messages. Over time, you’ll find that some messages are more effective when they are sent at a different time in your campaign than you first thought. Autoresponders allow you to change the order that they are sent.

Creating a killer email marketing newsletter or campaign is one step away from useless if no one is opening those emails. For businesses who are struggling to improve the open and conversion rates, these simple five factors can spell the difference between a campaign that’s a flop and one that will leave you flipping out in a good way.

Avoid These Three Words at All Costs

While many organizations understand that the word “FREE” in an email subject line will almost definitely get the message whisked away by SPAM filters, there are another three words and phrases that can be equally dangerous. The first of these is the word “help”. Whether the organization is looking for help from their audience or is looking to help their audience, this word is a no-no. Hit your thesaurus for other, similar words like “Favor” or something else to get your message across. The other two are “per cent off” and “Reminder”.

Aim for Localization Versus Personalization

Many email clients will allow campaign creators to personalize the subject line with the readers’ names. However, this doesn’t show any real measurable, positive impact. So, instead of wasting your time and effort doing this, try using a localized technique. This is still applicable and will resonate well with readers who are in a specific geographic region.

Quit Regurgitating the Same Information

For those organizations that saw their newsletter or email launch open with stellar open rates, when the “new car smell” wears off, open rates begin to tank. If this situation sounds familiar, the problem for most audiences is that too many of the messages and communications are basically all saying the exact same thing. Look for new ways to share your message, new headlines to talk about, new statistics that are coming out or other fresh ways to repackage tired content and information.

Keep Subject Lines Both Short and Simple

While there are occasional exceptions to every rule, campaign coordinators need to keep subject lines short, simple and easy to understand. This means that you should keep subject lines under 50 characters and make sure that any pop culture references or similar text twists are easy for the intended audience to “get it”.

Ask Yourself – Is it Timely? Personal? Valuable?

Take the time to read your email marketing and messaging from the perspective of the intended audience. Look at every single headline and story and ask yourself, “If I was a reader of this newsletter, is this timely? Does it have a personal impact? Will I find this information valuable?” It’s better to edit yourself down to the bare essentials than it is to inundate your audience with worthless information.

While there are hundreds of other tips and tactics available, these five should be enough to make a difference in your email marketing open rates immediately.

If you intend to become a successful online business person, you will need to be aware of the different marketing strategies available for your business. If you have not already, one of the first things you should do is to generate valuable email lists of your customers. The creation and maintenance of these lists are easily done with the help of simple emailing software programs.

The first rule of internet marketing is utilizing successful email marketing campaigns. To do this successfully, you need an emailing software program that will organize your email addresses into appropriate lists and target specific groups with different needs.

A good emailing software program should be easy to use and easy to install. It should also have good references from other users who are not affiliated with the company who produces the program. Review sites and forums are the best places to find this kind of feedback. Examine other user comments to find out the reliability and durability of the program and make sure that all of the features it contains works as advertised.

Check to see if the software meets the following criteria:
– It should be easy to install.
– It should be easy to use.
– There should be positive feedback from other users.
– It should have a built-in database.
– It should be compatible with your editor.
– There should be email verification support.

Make sure the emailing software program you select is compatible with your editing program (such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage) because if it is not, you will have difficulty incorporating it into you business. It should also have a built-in database that allows you to manage different lists easily.

Your selected emailing software program should also have email verification support built in. This will be necessary for opt-in email lists that you will create for your marketing campaigns. Creating email lists from opt-in subscriptions allows you to target users with information that they need and reduces accidental spam.

If your emailing software meets the specifications outlined above, then it will be essential to your business needs. Targeting customers with the right kind of information will help build your relationships with those customers and that will lead to more sales and profits for you.

Professionalism goes a long way in online business, so any tool that increases your level of professionalism with your customers will reap rewards on your end.

Your mailing list will not be worth anything unless you maintain it on an ongoing basis. The right emailing software can streamline the process of maintaining your email lists. The task of maintaining your email lists will become harder and harder as your list grows. You will not have the time to maintain them yourself and keep your business growing. So, spend some time choosing the right emailing software.

There are basically 2 main steps to truly cleaning your email lists. The First is email validation or Scrubbing (or sometimes cleaning? There are many names for it) but essentially what you do here is remove as much known crap as possible. Verification is much costlier part of your overall data hygiene process, so email validation removes as much as possible before you need to verify, which saves you time and money.

When I say ‘Known’ crap I mean your suppression list (this is a list of known dead emails, spam traps, honey pots, complainers etc.) and you basically ‘scrub’ your list against the suppression list and remove any of the bad emails you have on your list.

There are many steps in email validation (removing) your list of harmful bad emails that you do not want to mail to!

Some of the email scrubbing actions should be:

De-duping – or removing duplicates

Role Accounts – removing emails like “info @”, “sales @”,” webmaster @”, etc.

Note: Some people might want to email to these address as they are contacting B2B and these emails address might be who they want contact, but typically you don’t want to mail to this data.

Key Words & Profane – removing an email address with specific words like spam, www, shit, admin etc. However note, that this removes any part of the email address so if you had an email address like spam at domain.com, it would be removed but if you also had an email like joelovespam at hotmail.com, then this email validation too would be removed. So be careful l with this filter if you’re using it.

Bad Domains – as it says, there are known bad domains out there that are associated with spam traps or honeypots, so you would want to scrub against this list and remove any emails you have with these domains.

Domain Extensions – removing emails like .org, .mil, .ru, UK. etc. Basically any email address extension like. ru, UK if you don’t want to mail to Russia or the UK then you remove these or. mil, emails to the military. These are not necessarily ‘Bad’ but if you’re looking to only Mail to say the USA customers, then a. UK would be a waste of time.

Numerical emails – emails that start with only numbers is typically a bad email and for the most part, most only numerical domains as well. Example, <a href=”mailto:1234@domain.com”>1234@domain.com</a> or 1234 at 1234.com or joe at 232.com, typically you would not want to mail to these.

Length of email – sometimes you’ll get an email like <a href=”mailto:234lkd23jj3j2l34234l2lk3j4jl2k3j4l23kj4lk24j3@yahoo.com”>234lkd23jj3j2l34234l2lk3j4jl2k3j4l23kj4lk24j3@yahoo.com</a> or something ridiculous like this, typically most email address are fairly short, on average not much more than say 15-25 characters in total. Ex:

ireallylikecheese at yahoo.com (this email is 28 characters in total) and very long or longer than on average so when I scrub a list I typically choose up to say 40 characters long max, anything longer is deleted.

Now understand the whole idea of email scrubbing your list is to remove as many bad known emails as possible, but it’s very possible you’ll end up removing some good ones! But if you really want to be safe then losing 1%-2% of your good emails is worth not hitting a spam trap or losing your server.

On that same note, it’s a known fact that AOL, for example, puts out upwards of 500,000 honey pots a day from abandoned email accounts so its impossible for anyone to remove 100% spam traps or honeypots as there is a way to many daily being added and impossible for us know that. The large ISP’s do not advertise not pass around this information obviously and if someone claims they can remove 100% of all spam traps and honeypots, don’t trust them any further than you can throw them!!

The last thing, typically if your scraping list or buying lists and have no idea where they are coming from, then you’ll probably see all of these examples. If you have your own opt-in list or they are generally business lists, then you won’t see half of these things in your list, but it’s better to be safe than sorry and email validation is the way to go!

Building your list, distributing email newsletters and grow sales with email marketing is the hottest sales lead generation trend on the web today. Bulk email sending is one of the quickest and cost effective yet tedious processes around. Some businesses choose to outsource their email marketing tasks while others run email campaigns in-house.

How do you choose the best bulk email sender to distribute email newsletters at your own computer? Follow these tips to avoid spending your hard earned money for bad software.

Here are my top 10 questions to ask software selling company so you can reach your goals and benefit from email marketing:

1. Once I purchased software, are there monthly subscription costs? If you have to pay monthly, you’ll get the same features and capabilities for more money than if you paid one time only. Just an example. If you have a list of say 25,000 subscribers, you pay $149 per month using an email service provider. This makes $1788 per year vs. one-time fee of $349 for desktop bulk email sender software.
2. How many email addresses can I send the message to with your software? Ask the company about the list size limitation. If your mailing list is growing fast, you’ll just waste your money if the program cannot work with large lists. And ask them if you need to upload your list to their server or database, or your list will be stored in-house on your own computer. It’s important for your list of privacy and safety.
3. Does your software have a built-in SMTP server? Ask this question if you don’t have your own mail server you can send emails through and if you can’t use your ISP SMTP settings due to email sending restrictions. If the software does not support SMTP free delivery or any other delivery method like Integration with Amazon SES API you could use instead, it simply won’t work for you.
4. Is your program capable of processing bounce email messages? If it’s not, you’ll have to spend more bucks for a bounce processing tool or do this tedious task manually because you can’t afford to send to invalid email addresses. You care about your email list validity and your email sender reputation. That’s why ask the selling company if you will be able to easily process bounce email messages with their software and remove them from your list. Any reputable software must have bounce processing capability.
5. Does your software provide any kind of opt-in link? Never buy or harvest emails on the Internet if you don’t want to end up on blacklists after a couple of sent emails. Ask the company if and how you will be able to collect opt-in recipients using their system. Probably they have some free tool or plugin you can use to place a sign-up form on your website or blog. If it’s possible, wonder how you will be able to send email newsletters to your subscribers. Is there an export option? Or is their software capable of connecting directly to the subscribers’ database on your server?

Make sure that bulk email sender software you choose fits your email marketing goals and target audience, reduces the cost and complexity of your email marketing efforts, and that the support will guide you every step of the way. Follow these tips to ensure you get what you pay for! If not, you could be headed for failure.

A couple of years back there used to be ads all over the place advertising bulk email software. Their ads read “we blast your ads to millions” and on the face of it looked like a wonderful idea. However, the reality is not so rosy. When you send out unsolicited information specially if it is ads and the recipients have not asked you for any information by giving their express permission it is Spam. This can get you into all sorts of trouble.

These bulk email software systems are very dangerous for your business because they send out your ad to people who have never asked for information from you. The emails they collect are from surveys and online questionnaires and some are even harvested illegally. They are often just harvested from random websites and collected from anywhere and everywhere. The emails you send out with this software are definitely Spam and you will get a multitude of complaints and problems.

Here are a few of the dire consequences that can happen:

Your ISP can shut down your business, because of excessive Spam complaints. Anti Spammers are aggressive groups of people who complain to your ISP and also to the program you are representing if you are an affiliate. They will go out of their way to give you as many problems as possible. Your business reputation will often be ruined by these complaints and you will definitely be banned from any affiliate program you may have promoted. In short, it is a sure fire way to ruin your business.

The only way to do bulk email marketing is to make sure that all the people you are sending your message to are truly opt-in. This means that they have given express permission to you to write to them. Without this permission, you are sending unsolicited mail, which is illegal Spam.

However, not all bulk email is necessarily bad. Opt-in newsletters are the best form of bulk email marketing. You can send your messages without fear of reprisals to a large list of your opt-in subscribers who have specifically given you permission to send information to them. This is the proper way to do this form of marketing and as such is very successful. So when you send out your messages think carefully and stay away from offers who are obviously not sending to opt-in subscribers and can harm your business or even destroy it.

Email Marketing is an extremely competitive niche. With people searching every day for ways to make money online they are looking to learn which way is best. You join people’s list and next thing you know you are getting numerous emails daily from different marketers. Some of your emails open and some don’t. Have you ever wondered why? Mainly because one person offered more than the other or what one was promoting resonated more with you than the other. Email marketing is about separating yourself from the crowd and providing the most valuable content you can.

Today, I wanted to discuss some tricks to improve your email open rates once you bring your online business journey of building your very own list.

5 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates

1. Keep Subject Lines Short and Engaging

If you are looking to improve open rates the most important thing is having a captivating headline. Your headline is the first thing people see when opening their email account. You want to avoid using exclamation points and words that are going to get your email sent to the spam folder. Don’t be misleading in your headline because people may open there, but won’t open again if they feel like your marketing tactics aren’t genuine. Do your best to personalize your headline and be as specific as possible when it comes to what the body of your email is going to address.

2. Build a Sense of Urgency

Urgency always improves email open rates. If people feel like there is a limit on something and they are going to miss out, naturally they want to know what it is. Using deadlines like “only available for the next 24 hours” or “today only” prove people’s curiosity. They open because they don’t want to potentially miss out on something never to return again. Announcing scarcity or a limited time improves email open rates drastically.

3. Send at the Right Time

Sending your emails at the right time will improve your open rates. If you are sending your emails during times when your list is sleeping, enjoying their families, or out and about it’s going to be pretty difficult to get them to open your emails. Timing is very important. This will take some testing, but once you have it down you will see your open rates improve. Based off my research typically good times to send an email are 9:00 am and 2:00 pm. But I suggest you figure out the best time to send to your own list through trial and error.

4. Make Your Name or Company Name Stand Out

It’s important that people know who you are. Making your name stand out is key. By using an asterisk around your name people can easily spot your email out through the many emails that fill their inbox daily.

5. Test, Test, and Test

Testing is vital in online business and trying various things should be done to see which results work best. Don’t be afraid to try new things with your list to see what works and what doesn’t work. Segment your list into groups and do A/B testing to figure out the best practices to improve your email open rates and improve sales. Your main objective should be to always provide value and be relevant to the subscribers on your list. These tricks should help with improving your email open rates. Make sure you do a good job with giving your subscribers what they want and leaving them excited to open your next email. You shouldn’t be building a list of just subscribers, but a list of raving fans.

Email is now considered to be one of the top 3 essential Internet marketing strategies. Based on research or maybe little did we know, A single email campaign can be worth $1,000s in sales — in less than 24 hours. And unlike like other forms of offline advertising, there are NO printing, envelope, or postage costs to take a bite out of your profits — email is FREE to send. The problem is unless you automate your email chores early in your business lifecycle, what you’re *saving* on postage and printing costs could be eaten up by 100s of wasted hours.

So, why email automation?

Automation saves a great deal of your time. Those valuable time can be spent to develop more important chores such as developing our content, developing an affiliate system and maybe start another niche product on a different website. You don’t want to spend four to six hours daily just to;

1. Sending e-mail campaigns and newsletters. (some people don’t even know where to start!)
2. Reply to Hundreds of email from potential buyers daily. (This may take Countless HOURS)
3. Sending “customer service” e-mails to NEW customers and subscribers!

(You have to select manually each customer campaign and newsletter series, plus, sent them the

correct email. You can manage this if you have like 5-15 subscribers, but what about

50-100 customer? and when your business starts Flooding in with ‘potential buyers’?

4. Keeping your e-mail list “clean” — to prevent spam complaints! If you use a normal mail client, by sending like ten unoptimized email, you will be considered spamming. So, what is the Ideal Email Solution for your business? Your E-mail Should be able to :

Easily collect email addresses from an opt-in form on your website

Subscribe and unsubscribe people from your list automatically

Import existing lists of opt-in customers and subscribers

Send professional-looking email campaigns — in text and HTML

Manage multiple newsletters from one interface

Automate your customer service with autoresponders

Send automated “follow-up” emails with unlimited autoresponders

Email Automation can work ‘wonders’ if you are a Large Company with multiple clients in different product segments. For example, imagine if you are running an electrical appliances store and also you sell telecommunications product such as cell phone. If you have a database at your customer in each two main product, you can send different sets of email promoting on your next offer. Surely, you can target both sides of your potential buyers. If you run a home based business, it is very helpful, as you don’t have to do all the ‘Time Consuming’ Chores any longer. More and more Internet business owner is shifting into email automation. If you can see these potentials, opting to one of the email automation services is vital for your growth.

It doesn’t matter how big or small your business or company is. Email Automation Software will help you a lot doing all the massive email marketing chores. It is vital to have one in the early stages of your business.

What’s the best automatic email responder? Good question. You’re ready to build your list. But what tool do you use to deliver your messages to your list? Seems there are more choices every day and everyone seems to think they have the best products and sometimes it’s difficult to make a smart decision.

Do you agree?

Great! You’ve come to the right place and hopefully, I can share a couple of tips to help you make a good decision.

Choosing the best automatic email responder can be one of the most important decisions a webmaster can make.

If you would like some help in deciding which autoresponder to use, just follow these three simple keys…

Key 01 -> Find an automatic email responder that gets your message delivered.

Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of autoresponders miss the mark. Not only do they fail to deliver messages on time, sometimes their messages don’t get through the spam filters. There is nothing more frustrating than building a list and not having your messaged delivered on time if at all.

People join your list. They want to hear from you.

So, when deciding on your automatic email responder, choose one that gets your message delivered when you want it delivered.

Key 02 -> Pick An Autoresponder that allows sequential messages.

Some people need 6 or 7 messages before they entertain your offer and then decide to buy. A few people might become a customer after one or two contacts but more will respond as they continue to hear from you, come to like you, and trust you. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about sending out a bunch of messages just for the sake of sending messages. That’s being a nuisance. That’s a shortcut to failure. But, at the same time, sending out mailings at a very infrequent, sporadic pace is a shortcut to failure as well. Either way, you not getting paid.

They key is balance and providing valuable content.

As a very “general” rule of thumb, one email every 7-10 days seems to produce the best results for product promotions… once every 2 days for an e-course and once a month for a newsletter or ezine.

Regardless of the frequency you decide upon, it absolutely needs to be on a regular basis. We want to provide consistency and valuable content on a regular basis. So, you might want to stay away from automatic email responders that only allow you send 1 or 2 messages to your list.

Key 03 -> Choose an automatic email responder service that provides great support.

One of the reasons we use autoresponders is to help us manage our time and deliver our messages to our list. Many responder services have gone to video to help us learn how to use autoresponders. So when shopping for service make sure you get good customer support. We can’t do this stuff by ourselves.

To summarize, the bottom line is this: If you want to maximize the full potential of your list, choose an automatic email responder service that delivers your MESSAGE, allows you to deliver more than one message, and provides great tools and support.