When you write an email you must pay close attention to this first pieces of content. Apart from the fact that they are the ones that catch the interest of your recipients (so that they keep reading the rest of the document), there is an important consideration that is not usually taken in account by marketers. It's the fact that several e-mail clients show these two first lines to the reader without her needing to even open the e-mail!

How is this?

Well, take a look at GMail for example:

As you can see in the picture above, GMail shows the first words of the email automatically to your recipients. And notice that I've said "the first words". So, even although you have several images before the first word in the email, GMail effectively will show them in its small preview. GMail will fit in this space, the first 15 to 20 words in your email. If the recipient reads those lines and didn't get hooked-up then your message will probably end up in the trash folder.

But GMail is not the only example of this behaviour. Outlook does the same thing when "Enable automatic preview" is enabled (which is, by default), so your e-mails will look similar to these:

Outlook fits in its preview pane about 50 to 60 words, so it's even longer than GMail's. And the effect is the same.

So the conclusion is this: choose wisely the first words you enter in your e-mail so that people who read them will know exactly what it is about, and can get interested in the content.

Corolary:  If you personalize your e-mails so that the first name of your subscribers goes in these first words, you get more chances for it to be read. A tool like MAILCast and its powerful personalization features can do a good job with this kind of issues.

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.

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.

MAILCast, besides being able to maintain its own basic recipients lists,  allows you to upload any Access database or Excel spreadsheet containing data, that you can the use to send, customize and/or filter.

This VIDEO TIP shows you how you can easily create an Excel file to be used by MAILCast:

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.