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!

I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a fairly controversial post. However I think it is worth to write it. At least the essence of a blog is to be as transparent as possible. So here we go…

One of the things several prospective customers ask our sales team is: “What if one month we don’t need to send e-mail with your product? Will we still be charged the monthly fee?” People asking this, almost always refer to August or the holiday month of their choosing, where they are not going to send any e-mail at all.

We at Krasis offer two ways to purchase our hosted service: monthly fee or Pay-as-you-go.

In the first case (monthly fee) you know approximately how many e-mails your company is going to send each month, so you choose one e-mail interval (eg.: 5.000 mails/month) and pay a fixed fee that lets you send each month as many e-mails as the maximum indicated. Additionaly if you purchase a whole year (12 months) in advance you get one month for free (so you don’t have to worry about not sending anything on holidays). You can change the interval contracted at any time or even punctually for just one or two months for extra needs, and only get charged for the difference. Not used e-mail credit is not accumulated for the next month, so you must choose the right interval to fit your needs.

In the Pay-as-you-go model (available only for 10.000 e-mails/month or higher), you only pay for exactly the e-mail quantity you have sent the previous month. If you send, for example, 38.137 e-mails, you get charged exactly for this volume. However, as your company is not assuring us any predictable income, the cost per e-mail is slightly higher, but you have total freedom for sending any volume of e-mails you need each month. If one month you don’t send any e-mail you get charged nothing.

So, these options will fit almost any needs you may have regarding e-mail volume planning.

But one question remains implicit in this entire pricing model. One that many customers want to know: Why your price refers always to month?

Well the answer is quite obvious for the main part, although there are a few subtleties that I think it’s important to highlight.

Obviously our main cost items are always supported in a monthly basis: salaries, data center fees, bandwidth, supplies, electricity and many more. This is a common to the majority of services companies. And all of this must be reflected in some way in our incomes, so it’s quite obvious why the price structure of every provider of hosted software in the market is defined in this way.

The not-so-obvious issues regarding this monthly price model are the secondary services around e-mailing that some customers don’t take into account when they think “this month I’m not going to send e-mail”.

E-mailing is not only about sending e-mail in bulk. There are a lot of other things related that are very important too. For example all the statistics related to the mailings. Although one month you don’t send any single email, if you have sent a lot of them previously, that month the infrastructure still needs to be on-line and working in order to keep receiving all the reading and click stats, serving RSS and RSS stats, serving images and contents, and other related services. Aditionally, of course, although you don’t send e-mail, you can be preparing new campaigns or have questions about e-mail marketing that our support services will be answering too in that period.

So in these cases we still are working for our customers, even if they are paying nothing to us.

This doesn’t happen in other kind of services, although the thing is essentially the same.

A good example will be your fixed phone line monthly fee. Although one month you don’t make any single call you still get charged by the phone company. In fact it's correct as long as they are providing you with a service (the line and the possibility of receiving and making calls) although you don't use it. So almost everyone feels it’s fair to get charged for this. In hosted services like email, this should be true too, don't you think? :-)

Another day I’ll comment on the way the sending of a high volume of e-mails in a short period impact the cost model of a hosted solution in a quite technical way. I think everyone using this kind of services should know well.

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! :-)

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.

The word "spam" originally referred only to one of the brands of Hornel Foods Corporation, specifically to a kind of canned meat.

Following a 1970 sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus, the term was adopted in the 90's as a way to refer to unsolicited bulk mail, and is part of the general slang all around the world.

If you see that sketch you'll probably understand why this term was adopted:

:-)

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.