Things To Consider When Switching Your Email Service Provider

The conventional marketing suggestions are making way for the new online techniques of marketing. The reason for this revolution is based on the reality that most of the organizations have reached a high-level of growth via online marketing and this growth has been obtained at a very quick rate. The swiftness of online marketing cannot be coordinated by the traditional or conventional techniques of marketing. Therefore, the business world selects to go for the online method of marketing. Large and small organizations all look for first-rate email service provider that gives network based suggestions for marketing that will help them take their business to a much-advanced level.

Your e-mail marketing plan’s victory relies upon a number of issues like your content, artwork and targeting, but one very essential factor you may not have measured is your service provider’s status.

If you are planning to change e-mail service providers in the future, keep this archive in mind as you make the conversion from your previous technology to the innovative one:

  1. Substantiate internet protocols: Confirm that you get either dedicated or shared IPs from your new service provider. If your previous service had troubles supervising bounces and unsubscribe requirements, a shared internet protocol environment will suit you better in the short-term. When going for a dedicated IP environment, you are more inclined to blocking if your messages make a point in user’s unsolicited complaints.
  2. Corroborate validation: Verify that validation methods are rationalized to reflect you’re new outgoing email IP addresses. If you did not use validation before the switch, work with your service provider to set it up.
  3. Describe reporting: To evaluate your existing service to the new one, ensure you realize how reporting statistics are assembled and any distinctions in the service you are moving to. Open rates are occasionally calculated from the whole number of users sent, and sometimes from the number of users missing after bounces are eliminated.
  4. Ascertain standards: Set aside your past reporting data. To evaluate perfectly, record your report’s genuine numbers rather than the service provider’s percentage. This will help you in analyzing and estimating the latest services and adjust your program according to requirements.
  5. Revise your content: Make sure all unsubscribe and member update purposes are still active when you move to a new email service provider. If your sender ids changes, be convinced to renew the address-book directives with your latest address.
  6. Gradually work up e-mail: This is mainly significant if your bounce dispensation was less than planetary or you have not emailed to your lists in over three months. Strive your first send above the track of a few days to a week, and split the list up into minor pieces. You want to stay away from a big spear of bounces and unsolicited complaints that could get you obstructed.
  7. Check before moving live: Run trials of all of your marketing interactions via new program before driving your first advertising campaign, email newsletter and sales promotions to observe how graphics and functionality differ and to uncover any blocking problems.
  8. Finest practice sessions: Take benefit of your new service provider’s finest practice training sessions, seminar and tutorials. These practice sessions will provide you additional insight into how to boost your deliver-ability rate and augment results from your e-mail program.

At last, if your email service provider is trustworthy and hard-working, each of these instructions should confirm all interested parties are conversant and your email gets conveyed as quickly as possible. Hope, these steps will help you complete the switch without noteworthy surprises to your deliver-ability, performance, and own pressure levels.

 

 

Email Open Rates – What Are They and What Do They Mean?

There is a chunk of ways by which you can measure your success in internet marketing. Obviously, the best measure is to look at how much money you’re making! But before that, a good place to start is with your email open rate statistics. Your email open rate is just what it sounds like – the percentage of people who have opened the email you’ve sent them. It is a measurable statistic that you can track through your autoresponder. When your email is sent out, it is embedded with a tag. When someone opens the email in their browser, it’s recorded as an “open”.

Your email open rate is figured by dividing the total emails opened by the number of emails sent minus the bounces. For example, if 100 emails were sent and 30 were opened, your open rate would be 30%.

It goes without saying that your emails need to be opened before you can get people to act on the information in your email. You may want them to buy, read your newsletter, take a survey, or some other action. The more emails opened, the better chance of getting the outcome you desire.

Email open rate statistics are important but are not totally reliable. Some email services have a “preview pane” and the email can be read without clicking on it. This would not register as an open. Also, your email recipient needs to be able to view HTML with images for the email to be considered an open. If you send text-only emails or if the recipient has images turned off, it wouldn’t register as a viewed or opened the email. Still, you can look at your open rates as a general guide, and use the percentages to watch your overall trends.

What open percentage rate is considered average? There are a lot of different opinions out there, but I’ve seen more and more comments lately that 20-30% is a typical average.

Open rates can be influenced by many factors:

  • If you’re sending information to a specific niche that requested that information.
  • If the information is time-sensitive.
  • If the reader anticipates your emails.
  • If you have a good subject line.
  • If you send emails too frequently.
  • And much more…

Generally, a newsletter that the reader has subscribed to will get opened more often than a general email about, say… insurance.

It’s interesting to note that AWeber autoresponder did a survey of their clients’ open rates and determined there was a difference based on the size of the client’s list. Lists of 5000+ subscribers had open rates ranging from 19-40%, while lists with 1000 or fewer had open rates of 60-95%. This could be because smaller lists tend to be newer and more personal, plus they may have a narrower niche focus.

It’s not very encouraging to find that your open rate is a low 10%, after all the work you put into your email, but remember that your open rate is something that can be tested and improved upon. It’s not a stagnant thing – it grows when you do something right. A good piece of advice is to test, test, test different variables of your email with split-testing. Always change just one thing at a time, look at your results, and then change another thing. Taking time to do this could really cause your open rate to go up.

 

Email Deliverability Best Practices

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Email deliverability is a big issue for any business owner or online marketer who is using email as a marketing channel. It’s important to understand “email deliverability” in the context of the other email marketing metrics.

Email deliverability is the first line of defence when it comes to getting your subscribers to open your email messages and take the desired action. In other words, if the email message is not delivered in the first place, inbox vs. junk folder placement is a non-issue nor is whether or not they open the message, read it, or click on a link inside of the email message.

So, before we can look at any of the other metrics to help judge the effectiveness of your email marketing, we need to look at email deliverability best practices.

These 6 email deliverability best practices will help ensure that the ISPs don’t turn your messages away before they reach your subscriber.

  1. Email Authentication– this is really just a fancy way of saying “to prove that the email is coming from the person or entity that it says it is”. There are a number of methods used to authenticate a Sender’s domain including SPF, SenderID, DKIM (DomainKeys identified mail), DomainKeys, and more recently DMARC (domain-based message authentication reporting). It is important that these are in place and set up properly.
  2. List Hygiene. List hygiene is, perhaps, one of the most important email deliverability best practices to pay attention to after proper email authentication. List hygiene is also something you have total control over whether you are hosting your own email client or using a 3rd party provider (ESP).
  3. Register for Feedback Loops. If you are hosting your own email program, you’ll have to register for feedback loops manually for each of the ISPs. If you’re using an email service provider, they will handle removing subscribers from your list who click the “spam” button. However, it’s not enough to just remove complainers from your list. You should also be monitoring your complaints. Which types of messages generate the highest complaints?
  4. Be Consistent. This is an area that is most overlooked. Yet, it goes hand in hand with email deliverability best practice #2 and #3. If you send to your list sporadically, you’ll have higher numbers of unknown recipients as people change their email addresses fairly regularly and turnover is pretty substantial. In addition, if your subscribers haven’t heard from you in 3 months, they’re more likely to hit the spam button because they either don’t remember signing up for your list or are no longer interested in the messages.
  5. Pay Attention to Engagement. Engagement metrics are essential when it comes to email deliverability and this one issue is going to play a larger role in the future. It’s not about the size of your list, but rather the quality of your list. For any subscribers that haven’t taken some sort of action in the last 3-6 months, consider sending your campaigns from a different IP address AND instituting a re-engagement plan for those subscribers. Keep your most active subscribers separate to ensure the highest email deliverability rates (and highest inbox placement rates).
  6. Check Your Domains. There are 3 main reasons messages get blocked before they ever get to your subscribers. These include IP-reputation issues, message content, and blacklisted domains. Unfortunately, most email marketers don’t know that domains in the email messages can be causing blocks. And if you’re using an ESP, they virtually never tell you. So… it’s important to pay careful attention to every domain in the message and check each of them against known blacklists prior to sending.

These are some of the best email deliverability practices that you need to pay attention.

8 Tips For Choosing the Best Email Software

Email software is a necessity in maintaining your mailing lists. Keeping track and making sure that you live up or exceed the expectations of your customers is not as easy as a walk in the park. It requires a reliable software solution to be able to produce the best results.

Email software is one of those tools you can use to improve your marketing. Just like when buying any tools you need to know what you want from that tool. You need to be clear on your objectives so that you can make the best decision.

There are different types of email software available. Some you can install on your own server while others are hosted solutions. In this case, they host all your data for you and provide you will everything you need to get your email campaign underway.

The latter tends to be the most popular choice among online marketers. The goal of an online marketer is to market and not to spend time maintaining servers or harvesting data. For this type of application, you would need to have some technical knowledge.

One of the advantages of having email software on your own server is that you can import a list of subscribers from a third party list vendor. This can be a problem for a hosted solution as they fear to get spam complaints.

At the end of the day when you start making serious money, you could have both and have a programmer handle all the administration and technical details for you.

Choosing the right emailing software is crucial to the success of your internet business. It can make or break your campaign. So here are a few points to ponder on when shopping for your emailing program.

  • Choose one that is simple but will deliver results
  • One that is easy to install will also be of great help
  • Check out feedback from people who have used the program you are thinking of purchasing
  • Make reliability and dependability your bases for choosing
  • Look for one that has a built-in database to help you manage your list better
  • It has to be compatible with your editing software
  • It should have an emailing verification support
  • It must be a match to what your online business’ needs

With these in mind, you can make a sound judgment. You will be confident that your customers’ needs will be taken care of.

The right emailing software, the solution will enhance your credibility to your customers. It will reinforce the trust that your company lives up to its promise and this trust will be your key to more sales and profits.

To continuously make your customers satisfied with your services or products, you have to build a stronger relationship with them. There is no better way to that than by getting to know them and personalizing your approach.

A good relationship with your customers will definitely boost your profitability because you are satisfied and a happy customer will be your living testimonies of how good your services and products are.

Success will not come overnight, but surely, the right emailing software will

Verify Emails Online – 4 Reasons You Should Opt for it

The internet has changed the way we communicate. Emails have replaced letters as the primary means of communication. Each day, there are thousands of new emails being created. But not all of them are genuine as there are a dozen methods to create email addresses. To add a few more may be incorrect and others non-operational. It becomes the personal responsibility of the sender to verify emails online.

The verification procedure involves identifying whether the email address is valid and deliverable. Every single email address is verified. Here are 4 valid reasons for you to do it.

  1. Create a list that delivers

Often, companies request website visitors to provide their email addresses as part of the marketing strategy. It might happen that the id provided is incorrect – a typo or an intentional mistake. If you start sending out emails to such inaccurate addresses, you will only have an equal number bouncing back. If the email account is no longer operational, the message does not get delivered; however, you are under the impression that it has been delivered.

It is a sheer waste of time and effort. You will be sending out emails, but none of them will convert. If you choose to verify emails online, you can fill in this glitch.

  1. You won’t be blacklisted

Did you know that your online activity is being monitored? Email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail keep track of your mail server reputation. This includes the number of emails reported as spam, the number of bounce back emails and successfully delivered emails. It is as good as saying that you are building your reputation with every email sent.

If you have a negative reputation, there are chances you could get blacklisted.

  1. Business image and performance

Business-wise emails are used for a lot of important communication. This includes information about new orders, order confirmations, order tracking etc. If you have the wrong email address, this data does not reach your customers in a timely manner.

  1. Peace of mind

As a business owner targeting potential customers, you can be assured that there is an actual person behind the email address, and not some idiot trying to play the fool with you. It is commonly noticed that people who wouldn’t like to receive promotional emails are the ones who provide email addresses with a missing or additional character; very few are a typing error.

This way you can filter high-quality contacts from the low-quality ones. You know which customers that are genuinely interested receiving notifications and those not interested. You can prevent yourself from becoming a spammer. You can also keep your list up-to-date.

For all the reasons above, it is necessary for you to verify emails online. A good online email verification service can help identify and remove invalid email addresses and can make your email campaigns successful. There are several hosted software programs that allow such verification. Choosing the right one can make your work easy. At the end of it, you will have a clean list that you can leverage for marketing and promotional purposes.

 

Start Your Online Business With Bulk Email Software

Starting an online business could be a laborious and gruesome task specially if you are just creating your first website. Maybe you are struggling to know some tricks and tips of the trade. One resource that many businesses are using to assist their ventures online is web-based bulk email software for proper can-spam compliant sending. If you want to reach out to your customers actively, a bulk newsletter campaign will be able to help you to keep in contact with your current and future customers almost instantly. It has been a very powerful and effective way to promote businesses online, as it enables marketers to connect with a lot of prospects and customers, as compared to previous traditional methods.

Without bulk email software, it may be expensive, time-consuming, and a hard daunting task to promote your business online.

When it comes to actual emails, lots of factors are going into constructing the body, subject and purpose. The content depends on the type of impression that you want to make about your business among your targeted audience. Research has shown that the response time originated from 3.5-10 per cent more than any of other ways to promote your business online.

If you have large lists and suspect you might have some bad email addresses and have a desire to clean your list, the email verifier programs are very useful for verifying the addresses by the software and check if they are fake or genuine. A good verification software will remove the duplicate addresses, removes, and carry out many more operations to ensure good list hygiene.

Most software for email marketing is very easy to use and it consists of wizards that will help you if you are just getting started in the world of online marketing. The strategy of bulk marketing can increase the presence of your business online by making casual visitors be a part of your list. A complete campaign will help you not only to make your customers aware of your existence but also enable you to know them better. Bulk email software will help you in enhancing your brand presence and sales. Marketing with lists and proper software is one of the most cost-effective ways to send your corporate message out to potential customers online. A good quality targeted email list can allow you to pinpoint only specific consumers that have an active interest in your product or service as you continue to build your contact databases.

Bulk emailing has become a necessary tool to facilitate sales generation and customer relations at the least cost possible. If you are considering bulk email marketing, there are several software programs on the market that can help you. They provide solutions to any problems you may encounter at the beginning or during start-up.

 

 

How can you monitor your email response time?

Are you aware of your email response time? Have you noticed how some people always manage to respond immediately to your calls or messages? And have you also noticed how some people never respond in spite of repeated calls? How do you feel about that person in both the scenarios? I am sure you would want to deal with people who are quick responders. Well, the answer lies in something even more fundamental than just the response time management of these people. It’s all about respecting other people’s time and communication.

At the turn of the last decade, with the arrival of mobile phone technology into our palms, all of us suddenly became available 24 hrs to the rest of the world. Gone were the days when one would book a trunk call 15 days in advance. We had moved way past the painful process of standing on our porch waiting anxiously for the local postman to complete his round of homes only to be disappointed if he missed our doorstep to deliver a letter. We were now wired to everyone around us and even those who didn’t care we existed.

Respond to calls and emails within 24 hours of a business day.

And if you can’t then put your emails and calls on an autoresponder.

When you respond within 24 hours you send out the following messages to those who want to connect with you.

I respect your time.

I know you will reciprocate the same to me too.

Your relationship is important to me.

I understand your urgency

I am not taking you for granted.

I am a professional.

I am not careless/frivolous.

And when you don’t respond within 24 hours you send out the exact opposite message of the above points. Many times people do not respond because they do not have a suitable response or they do not want to entertain someone. The solution is to be straightforward and speak your mind. When you avoid you present yourself in the bad light.

But many simply fail to understand such an important aspect of Communication ethics and have a list of excuses when confronted. Some never feel sorry and the defiant ones happily justify their misbehaviour with volumes of fake imaginative stories about how their life is so jam-packed with merciless obligations and responsibilities. They act as if everyone else is sitting idle and they are the only ones who are actually working. Such unprofessional people must realize that what goes around comes around. They too will have to face some rogue unprofessional guy someday who would not attend their calls or messages when they need him the most.

So the message is clear – No matter how busy you are, you must acknowledge the emails and calls you get with a quick response within 24 hrs. You may take time to take the necessary action later on but the response and acknowledgement must be within 24 hours.

Do you have a scant idea about email verification?

Email verification can be defined as the process through which the validity of email addresses is done. If you value email marketing or you are an email marketer, then you should understand how wasteful it can be to send out emails to addresses that are not valid and this makes the verification process very important. The verification is generally in two forms.

Pre-emptive verification – It is a process that checks whether addresses are valid and correct when getting entered into the system that uses or stores the email addresses. It is an effective verification process especially for business owners who want to check email address entries of staff members or customers if they are real and correct.

Retrospective verification – The process check addresses that are already in your business database to ensure they are still current and valid. Third party processors are used and various technologies applied to identify dead or closed email accounts without sending any emails to them.

Email verification benefits

As a business, every effort you put into your marketing strategy should pay off in the long run which is why it is important to be sure of the strategies that you put in place. Email marketing can be a success especially when you embrace email verification. Here are some of the benefits that you stand to enjoy when you take time to verify email addresses before sending out any emails.

  • It saves you money on email delivery fees because the list size is reduced to relevant and valid addresses only. You do not have to pay any extra fee for sending out your messages to dud emails.
  • The verification process can save you from encountering problems with email service providers who are very strict about bounced email thresholds. Remember that some have specific amounts allowed before closing or suspending your account especially if you are a new member.
  • When you verify the email addresses, you work on improving your deliverability in the sense that you greatly reduce the number of expired emails. Your emails can be degraded by your ISP if you have an increasing percentage of expired or unknown users. When you have a clean email sending list using the verification process, your sender reputation score will be enhanced.
  • Email verification can help you keep off spam traps. ISPs usually recycle expired email accounts for spam trapping purposes and it becomes very easy for you to be blacklisted if you still have such addresses on your mailing list. Proper verification will help you keep off such trouble.

To enjoy all the benefits of email verification, you would have to choose a process or a verifying tool that uses innovative technology to intelligently clean up your mailing lists. Find out what the tool can help you achieve so you can produce the best results with the verification process. The more it can do for you the better it should be for your business. You also want to choose software that’s easy to use.

 

 

The Benefits of Email List Management Makes All The Difference

There are a number of different email campaign tools on the market that will assist you in planning and running a successful email marketing campaign no matter which industry you serve. While email list gathering and template creation are extremely important to develop at the onset of a campaign, business owners must invest and automate an email list management process that will track results and clean up inaccurate contact information and data. While some business owners have created their own data storage file and manually update each contact, management software has become very popular in growing databases with expansive prospects. Consider the benefits of these software programs and increase the efficiency of your email marketing campaign with the right tools for management.

Email software with features to manage lists automate otherwise laborious tasks that are involved when deploying and tracking a campaign. Because the features in these software programs cut down on the time and money spent to effectively monitor a campaign, they have become a popular and appreciated asset in the sales and marketing departments of all businesses advertising their products and services for sale via email.

Some more additional advantages are

No more time constraints

You no more need to have any constraint on your time availability as this mass email software would make you almost free and relaxed with a lot of time to concentrate on your leisure work and relaxation.

Easy work done with no more pressures

You need to no more think about your work pressure as the software simply does all your vital jobs and leaves you the work of validation. This would almost draw a big smile on your face making you think that you are the happiest and luckiest person.

Easy reach for both the company and the customer

Apart from the benefit for the company, this mass email software also helps the customers to find the company they are looking for their needs easily and smoothly.

One of the most preferred features for list managers in email campaign software is the choice for recipients to unsubscribe in as little as one click. By unsubscribing, the list will be automatically updated and the host will be notified that this contact was changed to inactive. With this, you no longer have to spend hours on end removing contacts from your list manually.

Another preferred feature in software offering list managing tools is the List Hygiene feature. This feature will automatically correct common errors found in email addresses such as syntax errors. By correctly a provided email address from hotmall.com to hotmail.com, more of your messages will reach recipients for a larger potential of sales.

Your marketing strategy must focus on several different factors to reach the level of success you would expect. Focus on not only targeting the proper audience but also create a capturing template that will have customers thinking of your product or service. With proper tracking and clean up, you can expect more responses and positive results.

 

Essential Factors To Achieve Higher Email Response Rates

An email list is a foundation for internet business success and therefore the answer of how to increase email response rates should be studied and acted upon by everyone seeking to create and build their own internet marketing business. If your email response rates are lower than expected, here are four factors for a successful email marketing plan.

You may think that the content of your marketing email is great and why should the reader not click on the link you provide to a recommended product or service or to some resource? A problem of connection with the reader can happen because you may not be imagining yourself in the position of one of your prospects who will be receiving and reading it. Where you should have previously undertaken the research to find out the exact details of the typical prospect in your niche, you now need to write for them, in their language addressing all the factors that you have researched about them.

So what are the four factors to increase your email response rates?

The first is to ensure that your writing style is engaging. Why would you go to all the effort to plan and write an email when it is unappealing, cold and boring to read? You need to engage with your email list members, so let your personality shine through, stamp yourself on your emails rather than just be another author of yet another email in their inbox.

Secondly, remember that the prospects have signed up because they want to learn more, be kept informed and have a desire to progress their interest. Therefore your job is to enlighten them in their quest to do just that. Attempt to lift the fog that may be making it hard for them to progress. Make your emails worthwhile opening and reading by giving something of value in what you write.

Next up of how to increase email response rates is not to forget that you can also be entertaining. Your content doesn’t all have to be deadly serious, but rather put a light-hearted slant on what you say if that is possible. Try and keep the tone of the language light such as writing in a style as if you are having a one on one conversation with the reader.

The last of the four factors is to continue the process of education. Raise awareness of important factors for achieving progress and provide the first steps to undertake this, plus also offer to fill in the blanks in the basic knowledge of the subject. You are in the process of warming up the prospect in order to convert them into a customer where they will buy your product and get all the information that they are seeking.

Keep these four factors in mind when seeking how to increase email response rates. If the recipient knows your style and type of content then they will be far more inclined not just to read your emails but also take the action you want. Once you have managed that, you will see your profits increase and your internet business grow.