About a month ago I wrote a post about buying lists in the Internet and why this was a bad idea.

Today I received a question from one of our customers about renting a list and the convenience of doing this.

Rented lists are different from selling lists in that, in the first case, you don't get access to the data in the list but the provider sends your email on your behalf to its own list of recipients. You must trust a lot the provider or otherwise you can not be sure that the list has a good quality and the recipients have given permission for receiving this kind of e-mails.

Companies that grow lists for renting generally get their recipients from vertical portals or from some specific websites. Probably this people give permission to these portals to send them e-mail from them or their customers and partners, but think about the consequences of the owners of the list sending an e-mail on your behalf: The recipients will not know you and probably get annoyed and click the “report spam” button. And most important: they didn’t give you explicit permission to send them any e-mail.

Sounds this familiar to you?  Yes, it's the definition of spam: unsolicited e-mail.

Does this mean that this against the law? Not necessarily, but the point here, as always, is not only if it’s against the law (that’s supposed to be), but if it is against your own interests.

You will probably pay a good bunch of bucks for using the list, and you are surely getting a real low response for the emailing, and therefore a small ROI from the investment. And worse, your brand could be damaged if people think you’re a spammer. You don’t have a clue if the list is heavily used and consequently people in the list are angry about receiving your e-mail.

So the conclusion in (again) that you must not rent lists for emailing.

If you really need to grow your subscriptions’ list fast you can try to advertise in a vertical portal newsletter, co-brand it or make co-registration. But renting or buying a list is always a bad thing to do.

As always, I recommend that you grow your own in-house permission list (some tips here and here). It’s slow and painful, but it’s the only way to get results. In e-mail marketing always think in quality, not in quantity (more is less), and don’t forget that the most important asset you have is your brand and reputation, so don’t get a chance to drive it to a dead end.

In case you don’t want to hear my advice please review this interesting article by Jeanne Jennings: “Renting E-Mail Lists: What to Ask Before the Send”, and the ten rules of thumb for rented lists of Marketing Sherpa.

A recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa (read in Marketing Charts) reveals how the meaning of the term “spam” has lately changed for users, in a way with high impact for us as marketers.

The survey sought to determine consumers’ perceptions of what spam is, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.

The main conclusion is that now spam means “unwanted e-mail”, in contrast with the traditional “unsolicited commercial e-mail”.

That’s a huge difference for us. This means that, now more than ever, your content must be relevant. You must engage with your recipients or will have a big chance to be blacklisted by the most important ISPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

The reason is that, according to the study, people misunderstand the implications of hitting the “Report spam” button omnipresent in all mayor webmail apps. Take a look at these figures and start to tremble:

• 43% of consumers, miss advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe from an advertiser’s list - regardless of whether the email fits the consumer’s definition of spam.
• 21% use the “report spam” button to unsubscribe from email that they specifically do not consider spam.

“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button, as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive.

Q Interactive suggests that ISPs’ “report spam” button be replaced with those that more clearly indicate consumers’ intentions, such as an “unsubscribe” button and an “undesired” button.

And that means a lot more of effort for marketers too: much more targeted and relevant content. It has been the better way to go in the past and, naturally, it has become the only way to go now.

Read the full review at Maketing Charts.

Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.

The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.

One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.

Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.

So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(

Internet Explorer General Manager , Dean Hachamovitch, has announced that Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2 Test in Standard Mode . This is a great new for web designers and developers, because means full support to html and CSS 2.0 standards. So, congratulations!!!

In the same post, Dean promises telling us more at MIX08 and releasing a beta along the first half of 2008.

Acid2 Test is a test designed by Web Standards Project to check standards support in browsers. When a browser passes it, shows an smiley and the legend ‘Hello world!'.

If IE8 works as well as said at the post, would we great recovering it as render engine in Outlook instead of current Word's engine and take a step more to html standard in e-mail.

At this time of year everybody receives a lot of Christmas holidays greeting cards. Most of them consist only in one or more images with some snowy view or something like that, sending us the best wishes of providers, customers and friends.

This is great. But, not surprisingly, many of them end up in the spam folder right as they are received. Why?

Well there are plenty of reasons depending on the way the e-mail was sent, and in fact all this issues are related to the same flaws that most commercial e-mail has.

In this post I’m going to talk only about a couple of issues that have influence in the deliverability of your e-mail, but they are important ones, and not only for greeting cards, but for every single e-mail that you send.

First of all there are images. I know that is easier to create a very visual e-mail using images, but you get a real chance for your message to be considered spam. That’s because your message will in fact have no content at all, and this is serious. In addition a lot of spammers send e-mail that consists essentially in images. And even worse: most of the e-mail clients in the market today won’t display images at first chance, letting the recipient to decide if she wants them displayed, so they will not see anything at all.

For example, just a few minutes ago I received a greeting card (as a customer) by one of the world’s largest banks. This message went directly to the spam folder. When I opened it the only thing I could see was this (click to enlarge):

Nice, uh?

Well, this is obviously not a good practice.

But as I inquired a little bit more I got another clue for knowing why this message was considered spam. When I took a look to its headers I found that I was delivered from the IP 213.229.186.XX which corresponded to the domain ly10.XXXXX.com (I will keep the guilty anonymous). But the “return-path” header for the e-mail was responses.megabank.com which has a MX IP address assigned that was not related in any way with the sender IP. And it also has a sender header with an address in the domain emailings.megabank.com with another unrelated IP.

Well, the fact is that this bank needs to choose a technically wiser provider, because as long as the contents are plain wrong and the basis of the DNS infrastructure are very bad set-up, they are losing a lot of e-mails in the spam folders of their millions and millions of customers.

Summing up: you have to put stress in the content you send to your recipients, and that’s your part. But you have to choose a solvent provider so that you don’t end up losing a huge percentage of your e-mails and, worst, without even noticing it.

Happy new year for everyone! :-)

There are a lot of options out there if you want to do e-mailing. You can pay for a hosted (pay for use or SaaS) service like MAILCast, or you can download and install one of the milliard desktop bulk mailing programs that exist. In this case you even have several available for free.

You must choose wisely.

Choosing between a hosted service and a desktop program is like choosing between connecting to the electric grid and having your own in-house power plant. Yes, sure, you can have your own generator and work with the energy it produces. You even will have more sense of having the control. 

But it's not true and you surely can have a lot of trouble too. What if the small power plant get damaged on weekend?, What about the complexities of plugging it to your home's grid so that you don't get any of your small appliances fried? You could spot a lot of these "gotchas" yourself...

The same is true for complex software like e-mailing applications.

First of all there is the infrastructure regarding to deliverability and speed. You cannot download an e-mailing program, install it in a "Next, Next, Next" way and expect that everything will work. It simply is not that simple (pun intended). You need to set up some DNS infrastructure so that the e-mails get correctly delivered. And, if you're going to send more than a few tens or hundreds of emails, you can't rely on using your usual external e-mail server (as several of these programs do) without having it blocked for hours. If you choose this kind of desktop product, count on having a lot of your e-mails rejected. Besides this, a lot of servers reject e-mails directly delivered from DSL connections, and the upload bandwidth you have in one of these is very low (128 or 256 Kbps if you're lucky) which leads to long delivering time spans.

Then there are the stats. You need a permanently connected computer with a static IP in order to collect stats for your e-mailing. And usually a huge database too. What if you suffer a blackout? You'll miss stats. What if you receive thousands of reading stat request in a few minutes? Repeat after me: "I will miss stats". And that's without taking in account that you probably must serve graphics too through the same connection.

A hosted service will take in account everything for you. As it's usually said "The cobbler should stick to his last". Emailing is the core of your business or it's to sell or to make campaigns for your customers? So, why are you trying to setup your own emailing infrastructure? When you need to go from London to Seattle on a business travel, do you charter your own plane? Even though you do this travel frequently?

And finally there are support and service... e-mail marketing is a fair technical discipline and you will need support, advice and a good service level.

There is a long list of issues like those in this post, but I've only reviewed the most apparent and important ones. And I don't even have touched the economic part of the decision and the amount one can save using a pay-per-use service, which would be interesting enough to deserve a whole post by itself.

Choosing a hosted service is the wiser of the options and the less risky too. Stick to your core activity and let the professionals handle the technical challenges, and keep your deliverability in shape.

There a two ways of sending pictures within an e-mail:

1) The one you usually use with desktop e-mail clients (like Outlook), which consists in embedding pictures in every e-mail sent, encoded as Base64.

2) The way every e-mail marketing software (like MAILCast) in the market uses, that is, leaving pictures on the server for later downloading.

Why every e-mail marketing provider in the market chose the latter option?

There are several reasons for selecting this option, but mainly these important ones:

• If you embed pictures in every e-mail you send, they will be much bigger in size, will consume a lot of bandwidth, and (worst of all) maybe some recipients will not receive it due to size constraints. It is even possible that you'll annoy some of your recipients for sending them big mails that maybe are not of their interest.

• You have more chances of being considered spam by some spam filters because all these images are, in fact, sent as attachments (and probably you will generate a lot of attachments), and this could trigger the filters.

• Some e-mail clients don't have support for embedded images, most of them webmail.

• A huge amount of people catch their email on the move, whether it’s a blackberry, Windows Mobile or one of the more recent propietary handsets. HTML emails with embedded images are not suitable for this kind of devices because they take much longer to receive, and on some mobile networks that charge for data transfer costs a lot.

• Very importante one: If you don't leave images on the server is not possible to do tracking of the e-mail

As a personal thought I think it’s not a good idea to embed images in emails for the simple reason that it reduces the chances of your email getting through, which is the whole point of sending an email in the first place.

A fast tip: Many people send massive e-mails using standard e-mail software such as Outlook. This is a mistake, and not just because the time it takes, but also because the danger of sendig  the recipient’s list  if you aren’t careful with the fields that you use.

To avoid this, when we are  writing an e-mail message we can specify the recipients in any of the 3 following fields:

• To: field recipients are the audience of the message
• CC: (Carbon Copy) Recipients added to this field  are others whom the author wishes to inform of the message
• BCC: (Blinded Carbon Copy) Field recipients will discreetly  receive the e-mail and won’t see any of the other addresses.

So, if you send a massive mail using ‘To’ or ‘CC’, you will show all the adresses to all the recipients whom may consider you as a spammer. And this is not the worst: you may be going against the law, because you are publishing personal data.
 
Click on ‘To:’ or ‘CC:’ button to sort the addresses between the three fields:

 
You can also enable ‘BCC:’ field in Outlook 2007 by clicking on ‘Options’->’Show BCC’:

Anyway, the best choice for massive mails  is a specialized software as MAILCast, which will help you to manage, and hide ;-), all the addresses while saving up time composing and sending your e-mail.

In life, most of the times, things are neither black nor white, but grey. And so it happens in e-mailing.

You have probably heard of the terms Whitelisting and Blacklisting. Both are special kind of lists you can have in your e-mail client (or even in the server). There, you note down e-mail addresses of people who you always trust or who you don't want to hear of, respectively.

In this way you keep a couple of lists to separate the good from the evil. When you receive an e-mail which is clearly spam, you add the sender to the blacklist, so that you will never receive anything from her. On the other hand, you add to your Whitelist the e-mail addresses of friends, colleagues, and everyone who is always welcome to your inbox.

These kinds of listings are very ineffective for several reasons, mainly because:

1. - It's a pain to keep them updated.

2. - Spammers generally use random generated sender addresses (name and domain), so the effectiveness of Blacklists is very limited, because each time the same spammer could be anyone.

3. - A lot of viruses and e-mail harvesting malware use the infected user's e-mail address as the sender for their e-mail. So, if one of your trusted senders is infected you will receive a lot of spam or viruses and your Whitelist will do nothing for you in this case.

So, what can we do?

There is a mid-term solution which is neither white nor black: it's grey! It's called Greylisting. It works this way: the first time someone send an e-mail to your server she gets banned with a transient error. Legitimate servers always try to deliver again e-mail several minutes later, and this second time the receiving server will let the e-mail go in. In addition it will put the sender in a greylist for a couple of days, and it will be trusted during this period. This works extremely well with spam because most of spam programs (and a lot of other not well designed bulk e-mail programs) just do "fire and forget", and if e-mail is not delivered at first chance they will not retry later.

So, again, grey is always better than black or white, and with such a simple trick you get rid of a huge percentage of your spam.

Of course, MAILCast supports grey listing retrying so that you will never miss the chance of delivering your law-compliant e-mail to your customers.

A few days ago CSS-tricks  posted an entry about what clean and semantic html code looks like, and gave many tips about how to compose it, using a wonderful example.

It’s really great  to compose html as in that example, and not just to be cool, but to be standards compliant , save bandwidth and time redesigning and don’t forget that search engines will love your site (and when I say search engines , I mean Google ;-))

Unfortunately, for Web Designers and Html coders specialized in e-mail marketing this is just an utopia, because composing an e-email in html is, the most of times, like crossing a virtual mines field:

• Don’t use a tableless Xhtml+CSS  layout: Instead of, use basic html with tables and, at most, inline CSS.
• Be careful with images: If you send too many images, your e-mail probably will end into the spam folder of spam filters. Also, your recipients won’t receive anything (but <alt> tags content) if they don’t download them.
• KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid):  You can make fewer mistakes when coding keeping your layout simple. Complicated cool designs won’t help you anything.
• Test, test, test and test it again: Test your e-mail in several clients (as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird...) and webmails (Gmail, YahooMail, LiveMail...), each one has got its own weak points and just the experience will teach you how to improve your skills in html for email.

Nowadays a lot of people receive e-mail in their mobile phones (400.000 in Spain alone). Most of them used to be business travellers that use Windows Mobile devices or Blackberrys. But no anymore...

Today, given the small fees you must pay for GPRS/EDGE connections and unlimited e-mail plans, a lot of people is cathing up. At current SMS prices, you only need to send as few as 34 SMS mesages in order to equal the average unlimited e-mail plan fee. This leads to e-mail being considered cheaper and more useful than the far-limited SMS format.

In Japan, for example, they have been using e-mail in a regular basis for several years, and SMS almost has disappeared.

The current mobile e-mail usage it's expected to soar in the next years, being duplicated in two years, and being twenty times bigger in a 5-years time span. As soon as 2010 are expected to be at least 350 million mobile e-mail accounts worldwide. And these will not be only corporate accounts, but GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts too in a high degree.

What does it mean to you as a marketeer?

Well, the conclusion is clear: you must take in account that many of your e-mail marketing recipients are going to read your mails through mobile devices. And this is now, not in two or three years.

Fortunately MAILCast has built-in support for this kind of situation. When you are creating your new campaign content notice that you have a tab that read "mobile version".

There you can enter the text you want your mobile recipients to receive when they download the e-mail in their cellulars. You can customize the content too.

Click to enlarge

If you not enter any content in this especial tab MAILCast will generate a simplified version of your full featured e-mail for you. This version will have all the text contents of your main e-mail so that at least people can read it in their phones. However we recommend to generate a shorter, summary, down-level version yourself.

Back in their desktops they will download the full-featured e-mail for easy reading in Outlook or other e-mail client.

You will never have to be concerned again about your customers not being able to read your e-mails while on the road :-)

One of the most influent factors in your email marketing campaigns’ success is your database. Your subscribers’ list is your treasure. Your mailing´s effectiveness and sales conversion depends on your database, and not only that…as well your reputation.

What I mean is that if you don’t care about your database, then it may be a big number of your emails bouncing-back, and therefore the email service providers will include your IP in their “suspicious” lists of spammers, affecting to our reputation…and if this practice goes on and on, then we´ll end up in the serious black list. What means that our mailing campaigns will be never accepted by some email providers, even if our subscribers have given us permission and accepted to receive our communications.  How many people do you know who is checking their “Junk folder” daily, given that they actually receive hundreds of spam emails in their inbox? Hmm…great! So what can you do?

You should check, clean and update your database. How many times? As much as you can! This will depend on how often you send email campaigns. After every mailing, you should delete duplicated emails addresses, spelling mistakes in the domains, and don´t forget to analyze your soft and hard bouncing.

Check the reasons of your soft bounced-back emails.  Your subscribers may have changed their email account for many reasons. Try to get in touch with them and confirm their details and their interest on receiving your newsletters.

Delete your hard bounced-back emails. No fear let them go!! Because they will ruin your IP reputation and the effectiveness of your future email campaigns, let them go, no pain.