Octeth

Delivery Checklist

30th Jul 2008, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing No Comments »

We decided to write a checklist article for anyone who is interested in sending opt-in mass emails but worry about the email delivery. If you are targeting the highest delivery rate, we strongly recommend you to follow this check list.

• Mail Server IP Address(es)
  Use a consistent IP address to send bulk email. Be sure that your mail server IP address(es) are clean and not black listed. Use http://dnsstuff.com/ for detailed reporting and monitor daily.
• Reverse DNS
  Be sure that valid reverse DNS records for sender IP addresses set correctly. This is a must-have.
• From: Email Address
  Be sure to use the same “From:” email address for your emails. Never change from email address when sending bulk emails. You may be banned from email services and considered as a spammer.
• SPF/SenderID Records
  Publish SPF record for your sender domains (http://spf.pobox.com/wizard.html)
• DKIM/DomainKeys Authentication
  Sign your domains with DKIM/DomainKeys (http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys and http://www.dkim.org/)
• Unsubscription Link
  There should be clearly described and noticeable unsubscription link inside your emails. Don’t afraid about inserting remarkable unsubscription links inside your emails. Let your recipients go if they don’t want to read your emails. Otherwise, you will let them to mark your emails as “spam”. Unsubscription process must be a single-click process.
• Bounced Emails
  Ability to filter and delete bounced email addresses. Never send emails over and over again to bounced email addresses.
• List-Unsubscribe
  List-unsubscribe email header. This header will let your recipeints to unsubscribe with a single click through their email clients or services usch as Hotmail/Live Mail.
• Recipient Email Address
  Explicitly indicate the recipient email address inside the newsletter. By doing this, you may avoid misunderstandings when the recipient forwards your email to a friend.
• Reply-To Address
  Be sure that reply-to email address is being monitored. All replies will be sent to reply-to email address. So, be sure that it’s being monitored.
• Multi-Part Email
  Be sure to include plain version of the content if you are sending HTML newsletter.
• Bulk Sender
  Precedence:bulk header should be included. In this way, email services will consider you as a bulk sender and it will decrease the chance of marking you as a spammer.
• Individual White Listing
  Request recipients to add the “from:” email address into their contact lists. This will help you to pass spam filters easier.
• Abuse Registration
  Include abuse email address in the email body. And don’t forget to register your abuse email addresses in http://abuse.net/
• Domain Life-Time
  Be sure that your sender domain WHOIS record information is up-to-date and on abuse.net. Be sure that your domain expiry date is not close as this will decrease the reputation of your domain.

We hope this checklist help you to maximize your email delivery. Every item in this list is a must-have for professional email marketing.

Addition to this check list, don’t forget to follow all terms written in http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Update To CAN-SPAM Law! Brief Information

03rd Jun 2008, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing No Comments »

There are updates on CAN-SPAM law that has happened past week. We thought that it will be good to break it down to plain English and point some important new regulations:

• Postal Address: From now on, a valid postal address must be included in the content of your email. PO boxes are accepted
• Businesses and individuals are now fully responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance for all commercial email they send
• If you don’t include your sender information (postal address, contact information, etc.) inside your email and if you send an email with advertises inside it, then your advertisers are fully responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance, even if your name is in the from header.
• If you are advertising on another email newsletter, be sure that the sender includes the sender information. Otherwise, you will be responsible for CAN SPAM compliance

Some other requirements are;

• Reply-to email address must be working in your emails
• Your email can not be false or misleading.
• Your email can not have a deceptive subject
• Must comply with the SEXUALLY EXPLICIT label
• Unsubscription link should be straight-forward without any “confirmation” steps
• Unsubscription link shouldn’t include any surveys

For more information about CAN SPAM law, please click here

Even if you are not located in United States, it’s good to comply with CAN SPAM law to make email communication channel a better system for everyone.

Affordable SMTP Service For Oempro Customers

21st May 2008, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing, Octeth 3 Comments »

We noticed that several shared hosting customers are having big problems about sending mass emails through their shared hosting mail servers. This kind of problems are quite normal for shared hosting environment because almost all hosting companies “limit” the sending in shared hosting to avoid any service outage.

We established a special business partnership with leading SMTP service provider company SMTP.COM and now we offer affordable highly reputable SMTP servers to our fellow Oempro users.

If you are having email delivery problems, having huge spam filtering issues, you don’t need to struggle with technical issues and settings to make your mail server redundant. Our new SMTP service will let you to send emails easily and provide you the highest delivery ratios.

For more information about the new SMTP service, please visit Octeth.SMTP.com website.

We integrated Octeth.SMTP.com feature into Oempro v3.6.7. Please check our next blog post about how to set it up in Oempro v3.6.7.

The worst hosting environment for mass email sending

21st May 2008, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing 3 Comments »

I think this is the best header for attracting the attention of email marketers and individuals who are interested in sending permission based mass emails to their lists.

The common misconception is the easiness of sending mass emails. Most of the people think that they can send emails through their “shared” hosting environments. This is a big mistake and will cause your email marketing campaign to fail.

Shared hosting accounts share the IP address of web server (and mail server) with tens or hundreds of other websites. This means that, all other accounts on the same shared hosting will use the same server resources and IP address(es) to send out emails or display website pages.

This kind of shared environments will cause your email not be delivered to the final recipient. Mostly, they will be “blocked” or “filtered” by email services because,

• Other website owner on the same server with you might have sent a spam email and caused your server IP address to get black listed
• The reverse DNS of your mail server IP will not point back to your domain. This will be a big headache for you and cause your emails to get rejected by major email services such as Hotmail.com
• Unable to set DKIM/DomainKeys validation on your server. This is another reason to get your emails filtered by Yahoo!, AOL, etc.
• Your server will probably get overloaded because it will be serving to tens of people at the same time while trying to send your emails

Several more reasons can be listed similar to the above ones. Even shared hosting is cheap and quite affordable, it’s a bad idea to use them as an application server (ex: running a PHP script which uses too much resource just like email sending) or mass emailing.

Our suggestion is to setup at least VPS (Virtual Private Server) or get a dedicated server. There are several hosting companies which offer quite affordable VPS and fully dedicated servers. They are more expensive than shared hostings but in the long-term, they will make your email marketing campaigns successful.

If you are still not convinced about reasons to move your applications to a VPS or dedicated server, read our next blog post which is an ideal solution for shared hosting users for sending mass emails.

Hassle Free Email Design Preview Opportunity!

30th Mar 2008, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing, Product News No Comments »

Being an email marketer or email service provider is a big trouble in todays world, especially when there’s no standard between email clients for rendering the HTML email same.

Testing the design of your HTML newsletter on all email services and clients is a frustrating and time consuming task to do but a must-have procedure to maximize the success of your email campaign.

To help you and save time/money on this procedure, we built up a new online service for everyone who send HTML newsletters and worry about the readibility of the newsletter on different email services.

PreviewMyEmail.com is a free to sign-up service which let’s you submit newsletters and take screen shots of your HTML newsletter in various popular email clients in just a few minutes. You can test unlimited newsletters for only $9.95 / preview.

At the moment, PreviewMyEmail.com takes screen shots of your email in the following email services and clients:

Web Based Email Clients

• AOL Web
• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Yahoo! Mail

Desktop Email Clients

• Outlook Express
• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007

We will be adding more email clients to the list in the near future.

Why should I use PreviewMyEmail.com? Can’t I just do this myself?

Yes you can! But this will cost you both time and money! For every change, you will need to send an email to all of your email accounts taken from these services and you will login to each one of them to see if there’s a problem on your email design or not. You will need to create test accounts on all email clients and pay them annual fee to be a premium user. Beside of this, you will need to setup virtual/phsyical machines to test desktop email clients. Probably, this will cost you at least $7,500 USD and lots of time.

What kind of features does PreviewMyEmail.com offer?

When you test your email design through PreviewMyEmail.com, we will take screen shots of your newsletter on various email clients including web based and desktop versions. In just a few minutes, we will show you the screen shots of your email in both images on and images off both. You can submit your newsletter to PreviewMyEmail.com by uploading, copy&paste or sending email to your special account email address.

How can I sign-up?

So easy! Just visit PreviewMyEmail.com and click sign-up button on the top menu. In a few seconds, you account and special access address will be ready for you at no cost. You only pay when you preview your email.

What’s the cost?

Each test package costs $9.95 (discounts available on volume purchases - see sign-up page). We accept credit card and PayPal.

Do you offer API?

Yes, we offer API functionality. You can integrate PreviewMyEmail.com service into your existing application/website by connecting to PreviewMyEmail.com API. You can offer our service as a rebranded service to your customers through API. For more information about API access activation, please visit sign-up page at PreviewMyEmail.com

How do you provide this service?

This service has been developed after several months of research and investment. Octeth has put great human and money resources to this project for offering affordable, highly useful email desing preview service to all email marketers around the world. It’s been hosted on Octeth’s powerful dedicated server clusters.

Who is using PreviewMyEmail.com?

PreviewMyEmail.com is a brand new service but already being used by tens of users and email marketing services including Sendloop.com. In a short time, we will be integrating PreviewMyEmail.com into Oempro3 and Oempro4 series.

Any questions?

Don’t hesitate to contact us via sales {at} previewmyemail {dot} com or contact form.

Free Email Marketing Articles

17th Aug 2007, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing, News, Resources No Comments »

Hi Everyone,

As most of you know, we are publishing useful easy-to-follow email marketing articles on our website. However, we noticed that still some of our users are unaware about this useful resource. So, I decided to post a quick notice to our blog and let everyone know about this section.

We usually post one to three articles every month to this section. There are more than 17 articles in this section.

Here is the list of email marketing articles on our website:

Creating Newsletters

• Importance of Good Subject Lines
• How to Create an Effective E-Newsletter
• Components Of Effective Newsletters That Work
• Importance of Headers and Footers in Newsletters
• HTML versus Plain Newsletters

Mail List Building and Management

• Dealing with your inactive subscribers
• Keeping your mail list members active and loyal
• Five Secrets Revealed in the Special Report on Mail List Building

Readibility and Deliveribility

• Holiday Email Marketing Tips
• Tips to Increase Email Deliverability
• How To Interpret Email Open Rates?
• How Often To Send Your Newsletter?
• Announcing Product Launch with Your Newsletter
• How To Ensure That Your Newsletter Will Not Be Marked As SPAM
• Factors Which Can Improve Your Open Rate
• How To Increase Click-Through Ratio in Your Newsletter?
• Best Days to Send Out Your Newsletters

To see the full article list and read these articles, visit our article section:
http://www.octeth.com/resources/articles/

 

 

Which Fonts To Use In Your Newsletters?

30th Jan 2007, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing, Resources 1 Comment »

We thought that the following research article will help you to choose the correct font for your newsletter.

The article is written by A. Dawn Shaikh, Doug Fox and Barbara S. Chaparro.

In the article, three fonts (Calibri, Comic and Gigi) have been compared and a huge perception difference noticed.

We strongly recommend everyone to read the article at:

http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/91/POF.html

New legal requirement for UK Companies

05th Jan 2007, Posted by Cem under Email Marketing, News 1 Comment »

Hi Everyone,

This is a very important reminder for all UK based companies. As mentioned in The Register, UK based companies must now include the following information in their emails and their websites:

• Company registered address
• Company registration number
• Place of registration

You can read more about this new legal requirement in the following address:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/21/new_web_email_regulation/

Take care everyone!

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