I think it is time to talk about Christmas :-)

More and more, I  receive more corporate digital Christmas cards than tradicional postal cards. I notice it, at least. And you? Personally, I've been "crossed" to e-cards to wish the best to family and friends too.

Maybe you're thinking about changing your Christmas greetings system or, at least, you have doubts whether do it or not. I believe that today you can send  traditional corporate greeting or digital postcard-but customized, of course-. Nowadays, both of them are valid.

I invite you to ask us personalized advice and learn how we can help you wish your clients a Merry Christmas in an elegant and effective  way.

Ho, ho, ho!

After having spent several weeks using Google Wave, and after all the hype surrounding it has ceased, I think I’m in the mood of writing my own opinion on this product.

Just in case you have living under a rock for the last few months, Wave is an instant messaging and distributed editing in real time application that uses only your browser for working. If you want to learn how to use it, check this interesting on-line book.

When I first saw the Google Wave preview video for developers in May I was totally stunned. It really seemed like a true revolution, and an e-mail killer on his own right. I longed for weeks for a chance to grab my hands on it, but no luck. Finally I get an invitation approved by Google a couple of months ago or so. Several friends and colleagues have Wave access to, so I can test it well with them all through these weeks.

My first advice to you would be: Just don't believe all the hype around Wave.

Sure, it’s a great product for collaborating, an impressive piece of programming, and a good mix between email, chat and so on. But in my opinion it’s not definitely a “killer application” neither the “e-mail killer” nor “e-mail if it was invented today”, as you may probably have heard. It is also no related at all to social Web, and has nothing to do with Facebook, twitter and the like.

Almost everyone I know that had the chance to test-drive it has the same opinion as me.

I find Wave as a good tool for collaborating in real time and keep track of everything that was written and even reproduce it whenever you want. But you can get almost the same today with a lot of other tools. Sure, you have Wave agents and bots that can check your spelling, translate your text on the fly, and so on, which are pretty interesting to have, but everything with added value in Wave is related to real time collaboration or interaction.

Real time typing is interesting, but is also dangerous, and I think that a “draft mode” or something like this will be very useful too. Probably it will have this feature in the near future, and in fact it lacks several important ones that are still to be incorporated

For me the real issue with Wave is that it is chaotic. This leads to difficulties when working with several people at once writing in a wave. And is difficult too to find the new snippets as long as anyone can write and add information in any place she wants. In a long wave this leads to confusion and, in my opinion, makes wave very unproductive at this scale.

Another limitation is that you can’t control what people makes in a wave although you have initiated it, so if you pretend to use it with lots of people (like customers, for example) prepare to have a real chaos. Upon this anyone can start a wave with you, although you don’t know her or have authorized her to do it.

From the e-mail marketer perspective I think that Wave in its current state is not suitable for the kind of communication we expect with customers and stakeholders. Maybe it’s suitable for product support or specific "few to one" communications, but definitely not for massive ones. In that case traditional e-mail marketing and social tools like Twitter or Facebook are much better.

What do you think?

Surely, applying this mathematical formula in your e-mail campaigns you will achieve your marketing goals. Although I am not designer, I would like to talk about this matter from another point of view: corporate communication.

I thought about this when I received an email that was composed of only an image, and it was a deformed image on top of that!. What I had in my inbox was an e-mail marketing  "disaster": you could not see the product, you could not read the text because it was distorted too and, in short, the corporate image of the company seemed very inappropriate.

I think that comming of Christmas  promotes the growth of e-mail marketing, especially about promotional gifts, Christmas hampers, printing works and similar articles. I believe this is the reason why the quality of mailings go down and their amount increase .

If you're thinking about making e-mail marketing actions to these special dates, do not neglect the ways and ask professionals. And remember: text,is  text; image, image.

Here we are ;-)

We often say not to use Outlook or any other email client to send your e-mail campaigns. All the email marketing software are specifically created to achieve effective results and the other ordinary email clients don´t .

Anyway, if you use Outlook for that, please, do not use the option "High Importance". When you send all your messages with high priority, they stop being all important; so when messages are really priority, nobody takes it as important. The email can be deleted without open. Dou you remember the fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"? It is the same essence.

For example, on September 18th I received an email with "High Importance" asking me to enroll a course whose registration period ended ... on October 5th! I think this time the symbol is dispensable. Don´t you think?  If we add that the subject line was written in capital letter, it seemed the announcement of the imminent arrival of a meteorite ;-)

Be careful with this...

I normally use several e-mail accounts for work and for personal issues. One of my personal e-mail accounts is from Gmail, one of the most widely used free e-mail providers.

GMail has more than 146 million monthly active users, and it’s only the third largest provider, behind Hotmail (343 million) and Yahoo (285 million). So, as you can imagine, the chance of someone having an email address very similar to mine is huge.

Each week I receive a lot of email that is not targeted at me, but is received in my Gmail account. I receive newsletters, party invitations, invoices, business documents, passwords to access all sort of on-line accounts, and so on. All this crappy e-mail annoys me a lot, and what is worst, when I try to unsubscribe to some of these newsletters, there is no option at all to do it :-(

This kind of problem arises from bad practices building subscription lists. We’ve already written about the problems of single opt-in. This bad practice is not only terrible for the owners of e-mail accounts (as myself, as yourself), but for marketers too, because you can contribute to mail bombing, or see how your e-mails are trapped by spam filters if a competitor or cracker subscribes honey-pot addresses to your list.

So, if you are using building a subscriber list in your site, please, please, please, use double opt-in. It’s good for you and it’s good for innocent people like me who are blasted every day with tons of emails aimed at other people :-)

MAILCast, of course, has built-in support for double opt-in signing, allowing you to decide the exact contents of each step involved in the process.

From time to time you send an e-mail using your conventional e-mail client and, suddenly, you get a bounced e-mail as a response.

For example, take this one that I received today in my Outlook inbox:

What people usually do is just ignore and delete this kind of messages, but you should not do that. They contain very interesting information about the causes that lead to it, so you can know why the email get bounced and if this is a temporary or permanent failure among other things. You should look for this information in the body of the message (like in the previous image, surrounded by a red line) or in an attached text file.

The status code always consists in three numbers. They are standard SMTP codes defined under the RFC 1893 document.

As you can check by yourself in that document, for example, my bounced e-mail indicates a 5.1.1 status code, which means the following:

· 5: Permanent Failure
· 1: Addressing status (that’s is, something related to the address)
· 1: Bad destination mailbox address

So, obviously, it's an address that does not exist, although we already know that just looking at the "User unkown" sentence just after it. However not every email server in the Internet behaves in this same standards-compliant way.

Some SMTP servers return codes not totally compliant to the standard RFC and sometimes cause strange errors that can led to confusion. For example, a few days ago I receive a bounced mail with a status of 4.0.0. If you check the RFC you get this meaning for the code:

 · 4: Persistent Transient Failure
 · 0: Undefined Status (it does not give information about the problem)
 · 0: Other undefined Status

So actuality it says nothing at all about the cause, and no SMTP server should return a 4.0.0 code, but there are several of them out there that wrongly do this. For example I checked the full status message for the bounced address and got this response from the server:

      4.0.0:  user over quota

Hey, that's just a crowded inbox, as long as we trust the returned message. But according to the RFC this situation should be it indicated by the standard status 4.2.2 which means specifically that the mailbox is full or over-quota.

I checked other server that returned other "strange" 4.5.2. code, and I got the following message:

      4.5.2: Recipient address rejected: user over quota

Which is a totally wrong code because the meaning of this 4.5.2 is something related to the protocol, no t related to problems with the mailbox:

· 4: Persistent Transient Failure
· 5: Mail Delivery Protocol Status
· 2: Syntax error

Which is a crazy behavior from the mail server.

Normally you should not get 4.0.0 status codes, but if you do normally they are received from very unprofessional emails services, and normally they mean that the address does not exist. Our MAILCast service automatically handle and interpret all this bounced emails, and shows you a classified list of them that you can even export to Excel to do further processing on your own:

Besides the e-mail address that bounced and a short explanation, there is the received status code too (when is a hard bounce), so that you can check its meaning by yourself. We have studied a lot of oddities like the one I describe here to try to guess the real status of misbehaved servers, but it's virtually impossible to have them all correctly interpreted as long as some servers behave in a non-standard way. We're pretty accurate but, when in doubt, you know can see for yourself the meaning of any specific bounced email.

Just check the code in the RFC link above. It's easy!

The eMailing Experience gives you warm greetings in this "back to school," especially to all those who, like me, are still "landing" and reading the mail in our inbox ;-) 

My inbox is full of interesting emails for analyze, what about yours?

We are 100% to continue writting about good tips, new tips and, the best and the worst we found in our Inbox. You will make your e-mail marketing more effective.

Recently I received in my inbox a newsletter. I had not subscribed to it. They asked me to send by postal mail my personal information to unsubscribe. What is this?

First, I do not want to receive their communications ; second, I do not want to spend my money and my time to undo something that I do not do.

I sent them an email asking for my unsubscription and telling that I did not send anything by post. They never send me anything else. I think this is a very, very bad marketing strategy. Why did they want that I receive their newsletter if I will never contract them? In fact, they have created an angry no-customer.

To avoid this kind of situations (and you are identified with this sure) note:

-Try to make that  your recipients give you their information.
-Include an "unsubscribe button" at the bottom of each e-mail you send
-Tell your recipients reply your e-mail to ask for the unsubscription
-Do not ask for difficult things to unsubscribe. Why do you make it complicate? You only will get that check all your e-mails as "spam" 
-Obey the laws that protect your recipients´ information

I think that this kind of situations discredit e-mail marketing and the company that make it. Do not fall into this mistake :-(

The Spanish Association of Electronic Commerce and Marketing (AECEM)  has published a White Paper about Electronic Commerce. The book (in Spanish) deal with interesting online marketing practices.

Whether you have an online store or not, I recommend reading this book. You will see many ideas about how to sell online and communicate your products and services.

Section 6.9 talks about e-mail marketing in a clear and concise way. You will find many useful advices that we expand in The eMailing Experience: databases, open rates, subject line... There are four pages with very specific points to keep in mind the essence of e-mail marketing.

Tell us what you think about the book!