I've always stressed the importance of a home grown list, done with care and tenacity.

The growing of this kind of list, as harder as it can get, must be done in the right way: one that complies with Law and that make our would-be subscribers confident about us and our brand.

One simple way used by many marketers for quickly growing a list is what is called opt-out subscription. With this method they simply gather e-mail addresses from anywhere (commercial trade shows, the Internet, every kind of contact they make...) and add them to their list. If the recipient it's not willing to receive more e-mail from you they have the option to unsubscribe anytime. Although this is a method accepted by many companies, it's not very advisable. Many people, angry or simply not recognizing your brand, will mark the e-mail as spam causing harm to your brand (and your send reputation). In fact this is a kind of unsolicited e-mail and you could be fairly considered a spammer, and in some countries (in Spain, for example) if you send more than three e-mails in one year to a recipient without consented permission you could face important fines. 

Another way to get someone subscribed to your list is single opt-in subscription. In this case the recipients go to your webpage and use a sing-up form to enter their e-mail address. Automatically they're added to your list and start sending your messages. This is a better approach but has a lot of potential problems:

· You're not ensuring that the e-mail address entered is correct. One single character mistyping is enough.

· You have no way to check that the person who is subscribing is the owner of the address. This can lead to very bad situations such as you contributing to "mail bombing" operations (someone get subscribed to many e-mail lists by other person).

· Your list can be poisoned by malicious competency or by a cracker just for fun. This consists on adding to your list several spam-trap e-mail addresses. When you send e-mail to them you could end up in several black-lists without even noticing. Very bad situation :-(
· False subscriptions of people who only want to get to your content but are not willing to give you a real address in exchange.

A variant of this method is called notified single opt-in. This is simply the same as the previous case but sending a notification e-mail to the new subscriber. If she doesn't want to receive your e-mail she can automatically unsubscribe by clicking on a link. This don't avoid many of the problems I've just spotted, so I don't recommend it either.

The best way to grow your list is by using double opt-in or confirmed opt-in. With this method your new subscribers don't get added to the list until they confirm their subscription clicking in a link in an immediate e-mail they receive. In this way you are sure that the address is correct and that the new subscriber is willing to receive your e-mails. This is the best way to go, although it is not without problems if you don't have the right tool to automate the process.

Fortunately MAILCast has built in capacities in order to customize your subscription process, letting you chose the exact way you want to go.

In a future post I'll show you how to automatically handle and customize the subscription and un-subscription process with MAILCast.

Also used by some marketers as Point Of Action or POA, this term refers to the words or graphics (or both) used in an e-mail to encourage the recipient to do take a specific action.

Typical examples are “Click here to know more”, “Write to us”, “Go to our website to get your free whitepaper” or anything that try to lead the reader to you.

Every marketing message you write must always have at least one Call To Action. Keep this in mind while writing your texts.

Apart from sending people to pages you’re interested in them to view, as long as this CTAs are always links, you get a lot of interesting information through the click stats of your mail marketing platform (By he way, do you know MAILCast? ;-) )

Soon I’m going to write several good tips surrounding Call To Action messages. Stay tuned!

Phishing, as you may know, is a kind of fraudulent e-mail that tries to steal your authentication data supplanting the identity of your bank or other provider you trust. The attacker sends you an e-mail telling you that, for security reasons or whatever, you must click in a link and enter your credentials.

I'm suspicious every time I get an e-mail with words like "Important security notice" or similar in the subject. A trustworthy provider (your bank or on-line retailer) is never going to ask you for your security credentials, so be suspicious of those emails that tell you to do so.

A couple of days ago I received one of this phishing attempts, and then decided that I'd like to analyze it briefly in order to show you the basics of its behavior. You will learn how to identify it easily.

I received an e-mail supposedly from Amazon.com, an on-line retailer that I use a lot. Here you can see the full text of the e-mail (click to enlarge):

As you can see it's a classical phishing message. It tells you about a supposed security problem, and asks you to fix it by the means of login to your account and notify. The smart thing about this message is that it says that someone attempted to login to my Amazon account several times from a foreign IP. I buy a lot in Amazon.co.uk (although not in Amazon.com) and my IP is foreign to them because I don't live in the UK, so it makes sense.

However one always needs to be smarter and take a second and more profound look.

If you move the cursor above the link in the e-mail, you'll notice in the status area of your browser (see the red rectangle in the picture) that the real URL it is pointing to is very different from the original. A clear clue for phishing. This is difficult to spot in a non-webmail client such as Outlook. If you click un this link you will find a clone of the original Amazon.com site, so you probably won't notice the difference. Danger!

The other important thing to notice is that, although the sender reads "Amazon.com", if you see the real address (moving the cursor above its name) it's, in fact, zfuzvq@lycos.co.uk, as you can see in this picture:

If I'd had clicked in the link and entered my credentials I'll end up giving them to someone (probably) in the far east who will get access to all my information in Amazon, and probably would have charged some books into my account. Imagine what she could do if the phishing were related to my bank account! :-(

Conclusion: be extremely careful with e-mail about security issues. Before clicking on a link always check the real URL it is pointing at. And check the real sender of the e-mail too to be sure that it's from the same domain as your provider.

You'll see this term in a lot of interactive marketing books and papers. It just means something simple: the part of an email message that is visible without scrolling.

That's is.

Traditionaly it refered to a printing term for the top half of a newspaper above the fold. Content in this area is considered more valuable because the reader sees it first. 

Unlike a newspaper, email "fold locations" are not easy to determine because it depends on the users' preview pane, monitor resolution, or any toolbars in the e-mail client.

The opposite is "Below the fold", or the lowest part of the 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.

Click-Through Rate or CTR is usually defined as the percentage of those recipients of your e-mail communication who have clicked on any link.

To determine the click-through rate, divide the number of click-throughs by the number of emails delivered (multiply this number by 100 to express the result as a percentage). Let's do an example: You send an e-mail to 1,381 recipents, with 6 bounced and 523 read (no repeated, nor errors). There have been a total of 298 people who have clicked on any of the 23 links it contained. So the CTR is:

CTR = total clicks / (Sent - Repeats - Incorrect - Bounced) x 100

CTR = 298 / (1381 - 6 - 0 - 0) x 100 = 21.67 %

So, of the total possible people who could click on your e-mail (one click per recipient), almost 22% percent of them have actually clicked. That's not bad. In fact is a very good figure!

Everything above 10% is considered very good.

As you may guess, MAILCast does all this calculations for you in every campaing or newsletter sent:

If you drill-down in the information you can calculate the CTR per link, which is actually more interesting. It's the same as the other CTR but calculated for every link you have in your e-mail.

They are typically lower than the global CTR we have just seen, because they are calculated for only one link and with the actual clicks that it has received.

Anything above 1% in the particular CTR of a link is considered to be a very good mark. MAILCast calculates this ones for you too when you drill down in the stats.

CTR is a very accurate measure because it always works for any e-mail client and the recipient is always connected when clicking on the links (otherwise she couldn't navigate to the URL specified). So it's the most valuable information you will get from e-mail marketing.

Open Rate is the total number of emails opened divided by the total number of emails delivered, usually multiplied by 100 to express the result as a percentage.

For example, if you send your e-mail to 1,400 recipients, 32 e-mails were more than once in the list, 5 are incorrect adresses, 10 have bounced back, and you get 594 read notifications, the open rate is:

Open Rate = Read / (Sent - Repeats - Incorrect - Bounced) x 100

Open Rate = 594 / (1400 - 32 - 5 - 10) x 100 = 43.9 %

So, you get read notifications for almost 44% of the total mails delivered, which is not bad at all.

MAILCast will do all this calculations (and many more) for you with all your mailings at once:

(Names blurred to protect our customer privacy)

Yo can see our current example in the first line. You could click on any of this columns in order to drill-down into the information, or export it to Excel, print it...

What's the real value of Open Rates?

And now the bad news: Open Rates are very inaccurate, so you can't trust them.

Wait a minute. So what? Might I ignore this metric?

Not exactly.

Every e-mail tracking system in the market obtains read notifications through a simple trick that is to include a unique hidden image (in fact a very small -1x1 pixels- one) in every mail sent, which "calls home" when it's displayed in e-mail clients.

The problem with this trick is that if your recipients read your e-mail when they are offline, or have the images blocked, or read it through a mobile device, and so on, these notifications never get to the stats server, and they are not tracked as reads, although they must be.

So, open rates are intrinsically inaccurate and you can't relay on them directly.

The point is that you must always use open rates comparing them with similar e-mailings you had done in the past. So if, for example, you send two similar e-mails to very similar groups of people (or the same group), and you perceive significative differences between the two open rates, then probably you have done something that has direct impact in the interest of your target (eg: the subject line).

This is the way to go with open rates: always use them as a comparison pattern, not as an absolute value.