The Deliverability Golden Rule: Send only email to others as you would have email sent to you…

Ensuring that your solicited newsletter is successfully delivered to your recipients entails a tricky scuffle in this age where spamming is an intensifying issue. Your newsletter is sent to only those who subscribed to it, but the risk that your email is not delivered and is marked as SPAM is present. This depends highly on the way you format your emails and how you write your subject line. Your email deliverability is an important issue as the acquirement of customers and prospects is intricate and undeliverable emails imply a loss of those subscribers. After having crafted a perfect newsletter, its deliverability as a whole is what matters. Undeliverable emails and email bounce backs are requiring more and more concern. Open rates can experience a drastic decrease due to incorrect spam filter classification. Generally, the CAN-SPAM act applies to commercial emails which are sent to advertise or promote products or services. If your newsletter includes advertisements, the recipient can view it as being commercial and hence the CAN-SPAM act can pertain. So, how can you prevent your legitimate newsletter from being marked as SPAM?

• Never send unsolicited emails. Ensure that people on your subscriber list are willing to receive your newsletter before sending. Provide an opt-out option in your newsletter to allow recipients to unsubscribe if they wish to.
• When collecting names and email addresses from your website, ask the new subscribers to add your email address to their address book. This will prevent SPAM filters from blocking your newsletter.
• Whenever a subscriber wants to be removed from your subscriber list, delete his email address from your subscriber list. Else, you will henceforth be recognized as SPAM.
• HTML emails are becoming more popular and most SPAM is HTML formatted. Thus, differentiating between opt-in newsletters and SPAM messages is difficult. Therefore, if you are sending your newsletter in HTML format, send a plain text alternative newsletter as well.
• Investigate about newsletter advertisers before placing their advertisements in your newsletter. Your newsletter will be filtered in case their website URL has been previously used to send SPAM.
• Your language used in your newsletter should be appropriate. Do not include topics such as making money or pornography which make your email look like SPAM. Do not use extra punctuation or odd spelling in your message.
• Use images scarcely as messages that are entirely images are considered as SPAM.
• Include a link to files via a website URL instead of making use of attachments. With the growing of insertion of viruses in attachments, the recipient can tag your newsletter as SPAM to avoid virus intrusion.

An effective way of ensuring that your newsletter is delivered and not marked as SPAM is to use an email marketing firm to distribute your newsletter. Octeth is a recognized firm and its product, oemPro, grants the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your newsletter will be tagged as SPAM. With features like bounce management and use of strong permission policies, email deliverability will hence not be of high concern.

The most effective way to promote your business and products is to send a newsletter to all your customers and prospects. Newsletters is a tool of dire importance in the internet marketing strategy as they convey information. However if your newsletter is suffering from a low readership, you have to be creative to cure the problem. You need email addresses to send your newsletter, that is you have to find ways to increase your newsletter subscribers. Most businesses gain readers from online sources but subscribers can also be found away from the internet. If the proper attention is given to your newsletter subscriber recruitment, your mailing list can grow larger than you have imagined. If you are contemplating in increasing your newsletter subscribers, have a look at the following tips:

• The content of your newsletter is the key element in growing your subscriber list. Your content should be written with utmost care which will attract subscribers so much that they will be impatient to get the next issue and will even forward your newsletter to their friends and associates. Create interesting content.
• Make use of your website to grab new subscribers. Offer a free subscription link on your website. The enrollment process should be make easy and simple.
• Prompt your subscribers to forward a copy of your newsletter to others. Allow readers to reprint your newsletter or cite about it in other articles or newsletters.
• Maintain your schedule of publication. If you usually offer a weekly newsletter, preserve the schedule. Stay in touch with all your subscribers through regular mailings.
• Whenever you are mailing business prospects, invite them to sign-up for your newsletter and include your free subscription information in your signature. Try to collect as many identities as you can.
• Keep all your published newsletters to your web site to enhance search engine rankings. If more people visit your website, the number of subscribers should increase.
• Lure new subscribers by offering a bonus, such as a free report. The more efficient the bonus is, the more likely they will subscribe. You can also do regular contests where only your newsletter subscribers can participate. Advertise the contest on other websites to boost your sign-ups.

There are other ways you can increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter. Keep promoting your newsletter and it will bear fruits. Concentrate on the content and format as well. Using email marketing solutions like oemPro to create good newsletters which can attract subscribers facilitates your task.

Months are spent in developing your product. If you upload the product to your website and wait for clients to purchase it, the sale rate is very small compared to what you expected. An excellent way of informing registered users and potential customers about your newly released or to-be-released product is to make use of a product release announcement email. It is a primary means of communicating news about your business or company to subscribers and other audience as well. It is considered as a form of publicity. Nowadays, all subscribers rely heavily on announcement email to learn about new products. Your objective of sending one is to have an impact on readers and entice new customers. You should therefore ensure that the information is trustworthy. Obviously, it’s not a good idea to send a product release announcement email when the launch is not certain and has a chance of being delayed.

The release headline is the most important component. It should be written in a way to captivate readers and intrigue them to continue the reading. In the announcement, focus on aspects of your product that distinguish it from products of other companies. You must make sure of including the product name and other key points, such as the cost, and above all how your readers will benefit from your new product. Rather than advertising and showing how great the product is, mention how it excels other products. You can include a short company history section where you can give a brief description of your existing products and how they influence businesses. Real-life examples can be used to back your statement. Another significant thing to note is that your email should be kept short so that it fills one screen. It shouldn’t exceed four paragraphs but should be complete and accurate. The simpler and shorter it is, the better it is. A wise idea will be to provide a link to your website where readers can find additional information.

When sending a product release announcement email, another critical thing is to define your target audience. The content should be relevant to your target and moreover, the announcement email should be sent to likely customers, leaving behind those who don’t show interest to such products. You need to first of all identify people who would be interested in using your product and send personalized emails if required depending on the audience. Your product can assist different categories of people in different ways and these varying benefits have to be emphasized. oemPro helps you send your news or even personalized emails to the right people. Unless you use a sensible marketing solution, the need for vigilance is strictly required about sending your product release announcement email.

Keeping your members active shouldn’t be so difficult, right? Well, in my opinion it is quite difficult to keep them active and loyal to your services without disturbing them so frequently.

There is a very sensitive balance between disturbing and keeping them comfortable in your mail list. If you send out so many newsletters to them, they will get disturbed and attempt to unsubscribe from your mail list.

You must find a good way to keep them active, loyal to your services by sending newsletters but not so often.

In this article, I will give you some examples and ideas for how to keep your members active and responsive to your events.

Competitions

You can run competitions periodically and let your mail list members to attend them. At the end of your competitions, you can offer them free or discounted services or products. This kind of events will let your mail list members to remember you more often and be responsive to your events.

Free Courses or Events

Prepare free, basic email courses which can be completed in a few days. For example, at Octeth, we just published a free email course “5 Secrets Revealed in the Special Report on Mail List Building”. This course takes 5 days to complete and at the end of the course, attendant gets 30% discount for any Octeth product. Visitors and mail list members will only click a link to subscribe to this course. It’s totally free! Once subscribed, they will start receiving one secret every day until the end of 5th day. On the 6th day, they will get a “thank you” email with a 30% special discount. To handle this email course system, we use our powerful and popular email marketing solution, Oempro. By the way, do not forget to personalize your course based on member information. This will increase response rate. Also, always include “unsubscription” link in your emails

Requesting Help or Contribution

If you are opening a new service or releasing a new product, send a short newsletter to your mail list members and describe the coming event on your side. At the end of your newsletter, request help from them by trying your new service or product. You can offer a special discount or opportunity to them for their help. This will help you to introduce your service to your customers and mail list members in a better way.

Whatever method you choose, you must be sure that your newsletter will not disturb your mail list member. You must always include unsubscription link, introduction to yourself and personalization based on your member data. For this, we strongly recommend you to use a powerful, feature packed email marketing and mail list management solution such as Oempro.

Every month, we send our monthly newsletters to more than 40,000 mail list members with Oempro. Each newsletter is personalized according to recipient information and includes very important announcements and news based on member interests. That’s why, our newest service Wridea.com has been so popular just in 7 days and had more than 2500 members and 92,000 search results in Google.

When it comes to email marketing, the favorite statistic is the open-rate. It is considered as being the perfect indicator of how their mailings are received. This metric is important in judging the success of your email campaigns and newsletters. Your task is not only to get the email there but to ensure that it is opened. If your aim is to have your recipients read your email, then you have to achieve a high open-rate. This article will help you in getting a broad understanding about open-rates, how they are determined and whether they are reliable.

How is open-rate determined?

If you use email marketing tools like oemPro to send emails and newsletters to your audience, then the job of establishing the open-rate is not a major issue as it is done by oemPro. The tracking feature of your email marketing solution counts the number of ‘unique opens’, which implies that list members are never calculated twice, despite of the fact that they open the email more than once. Invisible graphics written in HTML are used to track the open-rate. They are placed on the server and when a list member opens and views your email, the graphic is downloaded. All downloads are spotted and the open-rate is subsequently obtained.

Are open-rates reliable?

The open-rate gives you a good estimate of the number of people who are opening your emails. However, two attributes, namely the ‘false negative’ and ‘false positive’ are involved in the ‘open-rate’ jargon, which can cause irregularity and unreliability.

• False Negative In case the email is downloaded from the server and then viewed offline, it will not be tracked and counted as the graphic has not been downloaded. A false negative occurs as the open-rate is actually higher.
• False Positive The recipient might have used the preview feature of his email client. The invisible graphic is downloaded and the email is recorded as opened though it has not been opened and read, but has only been previewed. The open-rate calculated will therefore exceed the real value, causing a false positive.
• With the increased use of anti-spam, some images are blocked to protect the recipient from seeing unwanted images. Therefore, the invisible graphics is not loaded and consequently not downloaded when the email is being opened and read.

You therefore cannot link the success of your email campaigns to only the open-rate. Other metrics should be used in parallel.

Email deliverability is an important feature of email marketing. Since it takes time to get new customer and undeliverable emails can imply a loss of clients, much concern must be granted to email deliverability. You must ensure that your emails are being correctly delivered and attempt to know the reasons behind in case your email deliverability is low. One big worry for email marketers nowadays is the result of spam filters, blacklists and email bounces which have an adverse effect on email deliverability. With the increase of spam, several email blocking and filtering techniques are being utilized to fight against this hazard. Blacklists are lists of domains whose job is to block emails with unknown source but the drawback is that your permission-based emails can be mistaken for spam and deleted or consequently, can be bounced back. Your emails are hence not opened and read, reducing your open-rates.

There are ways which can ensure that your legitimate emails get delivered:

• Your ‘From’ line and subject line should be carefully verified
• Language and tactics which might look as spam must not be used
  • Spam-like words such as ‘free’ and ‘guarantee’, etc.
  • Intense colors like red
  • Headers in all capital letters
  • Excessive punctuation
  • No ‘From’ line
  • Misleading subject line
• Contact recipients only after you have received their permission
• Never spam, else your image will be tarnished and you will be always recognized as spam
• Persuade your recipients to add your ‘From’ address to their address books. This will guarantee deliverability
• Use efficient email marketing tools like Oempro as it administers bounces and reports details about the bounce email addresses. Scrutinize your bounces and remove them from your list
• Remove subscribers from your list immediately when they want to unsubscribe and do not mail them again. Else, your emails will be regarded as spam

Email marketing softwares like Oempro, provides solution to the problem of legitimate emails being flagged as spam by granting the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your emails will be tagged as spam. With Oempro, email deliverability is not a big issue as your emails are delivered using the proper protocols. Octeth maintains strong permission policies and offers bounce management to facilitate your task.

The click-through ratio of your email newsletter comes into play after the bulletin has been opened. If you have achieved a good open-rate, you should now aim at a high click-though ratio, which is the ratio of people clicking the ad to that opening the email. First of all, you should know your target audience and hence provide what they are looking for. Your newsletter should contain pertinent articles to your business rather than loads of ads of no relevance to the reader. You should avoid long theoretical articles and should instead adopt short, well-written and useful guidelines.

The key articles should be placed at the top to grab the subscriber’s attention and make them starve to learn more. Ads can be placed besides high-quality text. The opposite applies if your email’s content is of poor quality. Here, placing the ads at the top will result in a higher click-through rate. The proper positioning of ads on the email has a direct impact on your click-through ratio. By regularly changing the area of placing the ads, you can experiment the region where the reader is more likely to focus.

Another important factor is the title. A good idea would be to give the title according to what it links. This will definitely lure the subscriber to click on the ad if it contains information of interest. Your newsletter must be given a distinct look and personality. A note from the editor can be added at the beginning to entice the reader. Pictures that are clickable and give an explicit image of your business can be added.

A few useful guidelines are included below:

• Your newsletter should be friendly, bear a sense of humor but at the same time be kept formal and professional. Write articles to tempt the user without boasting about your business.
• Talk about the advantages and benefits that are obtained from your newsletter. Your articles should reflect what other email newsletters might miss out. You can include the new features of your campaign.
• Include important events, new products or any other new things to compel the subscriber to read the newsletter. Use appealing words such as “sumptuous” instead of “good”.
• Adopt a new style and use of new words each time. Do not use the same standard wordings for every issue of your newsletter. Moreover, the paragraphs should be kept short.

Oempro provides advanced link and newsletter reporting features which can give you a better idea of what’s happening about your newsletters. You can decide a better newsletter layout based on these reports and increase your open rate and click-through ratio, thus bringing your business to great heights.

Email marketers use a number of ways to measure how successful their email campaigns are, and one of the key determinants is the open-rate, which defines the number of emails which have been opened. If your emails are not opened, all your efforts in setting and sending them are wasted. Your goal of creating brand awareness and boosting your sales remains unaccomplished. Open-rates have declined since the past few years due to SPAM issues. Senders are hence becoming more conscious about this particular metric. All email marketers want to improve their open-rates to bring about an enhancement in their email marketing. So how to optimize your open-rates? Oempro offers some tips which are bound on increasing your open-rates.

Your ‘From’ Line

The ‘From’ line should be made recognizable to all recipients. A good practice is to include your organization name in the ‘From’ line to prevent your emails from being deleted before opening. Your company or brand name in this field minimizes the probability of being recorded as being spam. This field must always be kept the same.

Your Subject Line

A good subject line, which summarizes your email’s content, will provide the recipients a compelling reason to open your emails. Take time to write an effective and creative subject line which will stimulate people to open the email and read the content and make it a priority. Your subject line should be kept short. By including your company or brand name, the chance that your email is marked as spam is eradicated. Never falsify your subject line.

Your Sending Times

Timing is a significant factor which influences your open-rates. The best day and time to send emails differs according to the company and the target. Test different alternatives to figure out which day and time works best for you.

Frequency

How often you send emails is important. If you mail too frequently, people will lose interest and might not open your emails. Mailing not often enough, on the other hand, will cause recipients to forget you and delete your emails before reading. A solution would be to give readers the opportunity to choose between weekly or monthly emails.

Rate Your Newslettter

Oempro provides the ability to rate your outgoing emails to know if they will be marked as spam by recipients. This feature helps in eliminating spamming phrases that trigger filters which can delete your emails before they are read. Your open-rates will considerably hoist.

HTML newsletters have in the last few years observed a huge boost but recently a slight increase in plain (or text) has been noticed. Studies made in 2002 showed that 62 percent of customers opted for text newsletters, while another report contradicted this by saying that 60 percent had a preference for HTML newsletters. But guess which format wins? Whereas some years ago, the answer could have been rather complex, today it comes down to subscriber preference and multipart messaging. HTML of course triumphs due to its eye-catching and attractive nature and usability, though a minute percentage of readers still insist on text.

HTML has gained popularity due to its fancy look which can include photos, graphics and colours and these newsletters can deliver videos, audios and Java applets. They are usually easy to read and include a layout which shows the newsletter’s structure, thus facilitating the navigation process. Publishers expect at least 10-25 % of subscribers to click on links when viewing HTML newsletters, which is not the case when sending plain text newsletters.

According to some readers, HTML email is a useless and unnecessary gimmick that can be put aside. In rural areas and non-developed countries, plain newsletters are preferred since they require less disc space, bandwidth and download time as well. They are unsuitable for subscribers who have slow connections or pay-by-the-minute internet access since they take longer to load. People with non-standard or old web-based email programs, which do not support HTML, will rather have programming codes on their screens. Publishers however consider it as disadvantageous as readers may lose interest when reading text without graphics and moreover, click-through-ratio is very small.

A wise idea would be to use a service which sends both formats of newsletters and detects the best one depending on the type of reader. Nowadays, many email software programs and services make use of ‘sniffing’ and detect if the reader’s email program can read HTML and accordingly delivers a plain text version a HTML version. For subscribers who want plain text newsletters, the version should be made user-friendly, easy to read, tight with fewer words to capture the readers’ minds.

Regardless, the key is to offer subscribers the choice of format when signing-up or provide … Some reliable email technology solutions, such as Oempro, provide multipart messaging to cater for both plain and HTML newsletters readers. Oempro sends the newsletter both HTML and plain text and it’s up to the subscriber’s email client to decide whether to accept the HTML version or present the plain text version. A tip when using HTML would be to keep the file size as small as possible and to always create a text-version for those who prefer or need them using a tool-supporting sniffing technique, or using email technology solutions which provides multipart messaging.

Oempro helps you in managing your email list easily. Whether you have a large list of customer email addresses or you are just starting off, Oempro offers the tools required to make the most of all your contacts. It allows you to identify maximum amounts for email lists and it provides the complete profile and action history of all your email list members, including messages sent, click-through rates and action tracking.

List management features include the building and the growing of email lists. Your email is one of your most precious assets, but building one is a slow process which might be time-consuming and strenuous. However by abiding by the following tips, you can quickly build your email list and increase your email marketing effectiveness by benefitting from communication with your readers.

When deciding to launch an email-marketing campaign, you must not limit your missives, as you will benefit by staying in touch with a wide variety of members and organizations. These contacts should always be kept informed through permission-based email to boost your business. If you already have an email list Oempro enables you to import it and manage the subscribers’ information.

An easy way to collect email addresses is to include a sign-up tag on your home page and other appropriate pages of your company website. You cannot afford to lose a single site visitor. You cannot miss the opportunity of turning visitors into your customers. Another effective method is to send emails to people which whom you already have a business relationship but you should provide a clear way for them to unsubscribe. Once you have built an email list, your highest priority now is grow the list as a larger number of subscribers imply more potential customers. Hence, a bigger list obviously implies a higher impact on your business.

If you do not have a website, you can still find ways to gather email addresses to grow your list:

• On invoices, feedback forms,
• In your guest book
• At functions

Building your list and growing it entail the same steps and are done similarly.