The Whitelist

As an email marketing vendor, we’re excited to be participating at such a high caliber event. The first day is over and I just finished the Landing Page Optimization Professional Certification course put on by MarketingExperiments. If you haven’t been exposed to these two organizations (MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments), you’re missing out.

Optimizing landing pages are essential for any email marketer. But as a seasoned Marketer, I’m astonished at how much I learned on this topic — I can’t wait to go back to apply what I’ve learned to what ClickMail is doing as well as to our own customers’ marketing initiatives. (more…)

Another nugget from Merkle’s new email marketing whitepaper says that line of text asking recipients to add your company to their address book really does work!

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).
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Another nugget from Merkle’s new email marketing whitepaper says that line of text asking recipients to add your company to their address book really does work!

As an email marketing advisor, we at ClickMail are firm believers in doing everything you can to improve your email delivery rate. As we’ve pointed out before in an earlier email marketing blog post, even a slight change in your email delivery rate can add up to significantly more email marketing ROI. That’s why we encourage our email marketing clients to do everything they can to improve their email delivery, even if that means switching their email service provider (ESP).
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Sure you might feel a bit overwhelmed by all the authentication methods out there: SenderID, DomainKeys and DKIM. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore them, especially DKIM and especially now. Every email marketer knows maximizing email delivery is critical. Authentication helps.

In November, AOL announced plans to start using DKIM in early 2009, and they were true to their word. That means they join Yahoo and Google in using DKIM to measure sender reputations…including yours.
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Last week we sat in on ExactTarget’s email deliverability webinar, ‘Getting to the Inbox: Why “Send” Is Not the End and Reputation Is King.’

The webinar pointed out that as concerned as email marketers are with maximizing their email delivery rates, they still aren’t paying enough attention to reputation.

According to the webinar, actions taken by email marketers to improve email delivery in 2008 included:
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Confused by SPF? Here’s help from the SPF project, including an FAQ and best practices.

Although you might be discouraged by yet another email marketing hoop you must jump through to get your emails delivered, these hoops will benefit email marketers (and your email marketing ROI) in the long run. That’s because they are designed to keep spam out of email inboxes, thereby reducing cynicism on the part of the consumer, and they make it easier to protect your reputation…which affects your email delivery, so you can get into the inbox in the first place.
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McColo, the world’s largest spam factory, has been shut down, and no one could possibly be happier than us here at Clickmail.  

We’re in the business of sending email people want.  Spammers cost business and industry billions of dollars, a chunk of which is spent working to deliver mail to people who want to get it.  

Spam hurts our business.  Anyone working to clear out crooks so the postman can do his rounds and make sure every piece of mail gets delivered, is a Good Guy.   (more…)

CAN SPAM. Love it or hate it, it serves a purpose. The real problem isn’t the legislation itself, it’s the fact that we need it in the first place because so many email marketers don’t live up to the standards of email marketing vendors like ClickMail and email marketing people like you.

But the unsubscribe option—required by CAN SPAM—isn’t all bad. Sure it lets people opt out of your email marketing in-house list, but guess what? If they’re opting out, you don’t want to be marketing to them anyway. They’re actually doing you a favor because they’re helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not in your permission-based email marketing initiatives.

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Even with a superior deliverability rate, is your email marketing ROI everything they could be? Getting your email delivered is only the first step. Your emails must arrive in a manner that encourages action on the part of the recipient.

Now you can learn how and improve your email marketing ROI with the latest whitepaper from ClickMail: You’ve made it to the inbox. Now what? This whitepaper addresses the key factors of email marketing that matter after your email makes it into the inbox, to encourage more opens, more click-throughs and more conversions.

Of course you can’t make a prospect or customer do anything. But this whitepaper talks about aspects you can control to encourage more opens, more click-throughs and more conversions. It covers topics like:

• How to get your emails opened
• Making the most of the Preview Pane
• Knowing your email will render the way you want it to in your customer’s inbox
• What to do about image suppression
• What percentage of HTML to images works best

Download your copy at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/resources/whitepapers.html.

We all know, or should know, that writing subject lines is hard work. Just a few little words can make or break the success of your email marketing campaign. And not just by impacting your open rates. What goes in that little box can affect your deliverability too.

Even if you’re diligent about avoiding words like Viagra in your subject line, you can trigger spam filters with little things you probably didn’t even think of, like punctuation.

What’s a smart email marketer to do? Have no fear, here’s a great little tool that any email marketer can use to check an email subject line for spamminess: http://www.localnews.biz/subjectline/validatesubjectline.asp.

Just type in your subject line and the tool will check for word usage, capitalization, punctuation, numbers, length and more. It only takes a minute and might save you a bundle in lost revenue from your next email marketing campaign by making sure you don’t negatively impact your deliverability!