I hate to admit it, but in some business scenarios e-mail is flooding people, who cannot pay attention to (or even almost read) everything that goes into their inbox. And although e-mail is by large the most effective way to reach your focused audience, there are alternatives that will lead to better use of your information. And you can get added value too.

The alternative I'm talking about is, of course, RSS. Despite all the hip surrounding this TLA^* these days when almost everybody seems to know it very well, 4 or 5 years ago (when we introduced RSS support in MAILCast) it wasn't that way. So, now that the knowledge barrier is very low, it's a very good time to start taking advantage of RSS possibilities.

RRS is very suited for situations where you produce a large volume of information that is difficult to deliver to the right people. You can slice this info in several specialized RSS feeds, and keep your e-mail newsletter active for anyone to subscribe.

This way, people really interested in all the content you produce on a specialized issue will keep receiving it by e-mail. But people who prefer to be more proactive or who is not interested in everything you published on every channel, will have the option to subscribe to your RSS feed and will be kept informed at their own pace. You'll gain some extra readers for your info, because these people probably wouldn't get subscripted to your newsletter anyway.

And you get some free extra features too.

For example: you can use MAILCast's RSS footer content in order to enter any information you want your feed subscribers to read. This can be a simple slogan or copyright notice, or even advertisement banners (check the news displayed in the frontpage of Krasis.com or campusMVP.com). This content will not be shown in the e-mail newsletter when you send it (with automatically layout) to your e-mail subscribers. You gain an extra path to keep in touch with your customers.

Another interesting thing is the fact that you can get anonymous reading stats for your RSS feeds. You get a clear view on how many times your feed is read and by which IP addresses (you can easily restrict which IPs have the rights to read it), and even more interesting, what are the most popular news or articles within the contents your publish in your different RSS. You can even know how people get to your content (through a search engine query, direct subscription, an on-line RSS aggregator...).

Click to zoom

Just give it a chance and integrate it with your Website. You will not regret.

^* TLA: Three Letter Acronym :-)

I have just seen this comic strip about marketing on the Internet and couldn't resist to post it here.

It's just so fun :-)

Enjoy!

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.

Sometimes when I talk to people unfamiliar with e-mail, and tell them that my company has a platform for doing e-mail marketing, one of the questions I frequently get from them is like "uhh!, do you send spam?". It makes me sick, but I understand that is very easy to misunderstand it or even mix concepts for someone who is not in the industry.

Despite all the fears and concerns about spam, competition of instant messaging or RSS feeds, the fact is that e-mail is still the killer application of the Internet, and much more even in the corporate world.

A well conducted e-mail marketing campaign, sent to customers or permission lists, is often much more effective than any other means of direct marketing, and much more effective than massive marketing campaigns or advertising.

E-mail has several advantages over traditional direct marketing, wich include:

· Everyone reads its e-mail frequently and if you have permission for writting to them and use targeted and relevant information or offers, they will open it.
· It's inmediate.
· It allows instant segmentation for targeting.
· You can measure results inmediately without having to wait for weeks and without having to resort to coupons, discounts or free offers to get people answering you.
· You get a lot of valuable data in a way easy to use.
· It's a good complement to other channels or as a tool to build loyalty, trust and awareness with your customers.
· Promotions sent through e-mail can generate inmediate actions like downloading of brochures, sales, registrations, etc...
· It's a lot more cheaper than traditional direct marketing. Compare the cost of producing and delivering 2.000 or 10.000 paper brochures to prospects with the designing and sending of 2.000 or 10.000 e-mails.

However, not everything is as easy as it may seem. E-mail marketing is a fairly technical and complex marketing discipline. You can't simply take your marketing knowledge from traditional media and move it directly to e-mail. This blog is, in fact, a way to help you in this transition, but don't forget to search for the help of an expert who coaches you in your first campaigns, and a good designer who knows the exact problems she must cope with (just an HTML course its not enough).

And don't forget law and ethics. It's not smart, nor advisable start sending e-mail as mad to people you don't know or don't know about you or your business.

Keeping this in mind, e-mail is your best option to do effective direct marketing.

And now, just for laughs, a little bit of humour... This great comic strip from Dorktower shows the way spammers think of us ;-)

It would be really fun if not were for the problem spam really represents these days :-(

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.

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.

It seems to be a common practice now in the US among "cool" techie people. They post, on the wild in the Internet, the e-mail adresses from the PR people that annoy them and write e-mail that they don't want (or like).

The last one has been Chris Anderson, editor in-chief of the mythical magazine Wired, following the trace that others such as Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing left behind.

He is fed up with receiving e-mail from people that don't know who are writing to. he receives 300+ e-mails a day that are not spam, so he states in his blog:

"Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can't be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they're pitching. Fact: I am an actual person, not a team assigned to read press releases and distribute them to the right editors and writers."

I can understand him, but I think that publishing all these e-mails publicly on the Internet, at the mercy of spambots harvesting all of them for their evil activity, is very unfair and in fact, in Spain (the country I'm currently living) is illegal. C'mon man, just black-list them, but not publish their e-mails.

In Spain the LOPD (simmilar to the CAN-SPAM act in the US but a bit more restrictive) will fine him with about 30.000 euros (around US $42.000) for each complaint received by each one of these people. Wow! He would have thought twice on doing that! :-)

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 :-)