Frequently, unexperienced customers or prospects ask us about the possibility of sending mailing containing big attachments.

This is the kind of task that seems trivial when sending just a couple of e-mails, but that immediately reveals as a not-such-a-sensible-idea when viewed from the point of view of someone that sends thousands of e-mails.

First of all let's consider how long it will take to send out such a campaign. For example, we need to send 5,000 e-mails with a 5 MB attached .doc file. Let's do the numbers.

Attachments are encoded using Base64 (for sending binaries as text). This in average leads to an increase of 37% in the size of the attachment, so considering a total size of 5 MB (we consider content size as irrelevant here), the size when the email is sent will be:

5 x 1.37 = 6.85 MB

Now, we have 5,000 e-mails to send, so the total size of the information we need to transfer is:

5,000 x 6.85 MB = 34,250 MB --> 34.25 GB

This is equivalent to transferring 49 CD-ROMs through the wire!! (and we're not considering some extra synchronization traffic that is needed for the sake of simplicity).

If our server is placed in an advanced datacenter and has, for example, a 6 Mbps symmetric connection to the Internet (which is very good and is quite expensive), which is equivalent to 750 KB/sec (or 0,75 MB/sec), this implies a sending time of:

34,250 MB / 0.75 MB/sec = 45,666.67 seconds --> 12 hours, 41 minutes, 7 seconds

A regular 5.000 e-mailing will take around 4 minutes or less. Bufff!

Other important thing to consider is deliverability to the destination servers. If you send an e-mail with a big attachment to, let's say, a couple of accounts at hotmail.com, you probably will not have any problems. But, how many recipients can you have in your list with a hotmail e-mail account? 20%, 30%?. Probably more. Say hotmail, say yahoo, say one of your big customers in a B2B list. The point is that when a server sees a lot of big e-mails coming from the same IP, they usually block the sender because she is eating up a lot of their bandwidth. A lot of ISPs don’t have bandwidth enough to support getting a large number of emails with big attachments. So you probably will get a lot of deliverability problems if you do this.

Some recipients will have limited account storage, even in these times of almost unlimited account space. A lot of corporate servers limit the size of the incoming e-mails for their employees, so you get a chance or not getting them delivered and receive a lot of soft bounces (with more bandwidth usage in your server, by the way).

Even if you get to your recipient's inbox, if they don't know you well, you probably will get a lot of spam complaints or very low open rates for fear of getting a computer virus. Besides this, nobody likes to receive big e-mail attachments without being warned in advance.

There is an added benefit or not sending attachments: you can put files in your web server and add a direct link in your email to these files. This way you avoid the problems stated above and, as a plus, you get detailed information about which recipients clicked on it, getting very useful data that you cannot obtain from attached files.

We can allow you to send attached files in MAILCast, but we don't recommend it. Drop us a line to get a quote if you need this kind of service :-)

Very often we attach too many files in our emails without asking us if it was really necessary. In many occasions, the same information could be included in the message body or some other way shared by sender and receiver by clicking on a link inserted in the statement.

Although the possibility to attach a document in the email means a great advantage as a vehicle of information, also have a distinct disadvantage: their poor vision in a PDA, introducing virus into computers, making the e-mail as spam in server destination…

If it is really necessary to add an attachment, it is desirable to warn the recipient in the subject or in the body of the message about what is sent, so he decides whether or not opens the email

When using images in our email or web, we must take care about its size to ensure a fast download, even with the slowest connection speed.

But remember: don’t create emails which consist in just one image with all the information. Always insert text in your emails. Why? For two reasons: to avoid be considered as SPAM and to give some information to your recipient before downloading images, so, test your email without images to ensure that your message is comprenhensible and readable.

There are many image formats available, but only a few will work properly  on web and email. They differ in some important properties, and you should learn how to use them in the best way  to optimize your web or email size and weight, and get a higher download speed.

The first you must know is that there are two kinds of image compression, lossy and lossless.

Lossy compression means once you decompress the compressed data, you will not get the exact same image as the original (you lose information when compressing). However, this will only be visible at a closer look. Lossy compression is good for web and email because images use small amount of memory.

Lossless image: When you decompress a lossless image, you will get exactly the same image as the original. This compression uses greater amount of memory, so at times it may not be good for web, but for print.

Common image formats for web and email

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

The extension for this  format  is .jpg (or sometimes .jpeg). This image type is lossy, and you
can control the compression level in image editors.

It is good for saving images with millions of colors, like photographs, drawings with shades, gradients, etc.

GIF

This format is a bitmap, which means it's a grid made of tiny pixel squares. Data about every pixel is saved (so it's lossless), and you can save up to 256 colors. Pixels may also be transparent. GIF may contain more than one frame, so it can be animated.

Since image programs can control the exact number or colors stored in a particular image, it is a good format for saving images with less colors, like charts, small graphics (bullets, buttons), images containing text and other important details, flat-color drawings etc.

PNG

This format was created to become a new and improved GIF, because GIF was
patented, and thus not free nowadays. PNG has greater color-depth than GIF, it can
store partial transparency, and can achieve greater compression. It gets the best from JPG and the best from GIF. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 and less versions doesn’t support PNG transparency and a small hack is needed.

It's better to save images in this format when it's both needed to preserve transparency and large amount of colors, or partial transparency. Since it's a lossless format, these images are often not small enough for displaying on the web.

Image file sizes for web and e-mail

Which file size is recommended for images in web or email? Well, there’s not a specific rule but I recommend this as guideline:

Anyway. Before choosing which image format we need, whe  should  set properly image dimensions in pixels to get  an optimized image size. I’ll talk about it in the next article.

Recently the Communications Technologies National Institute (INTECO) has presented a study about Internet usage in connected homes in Spain.

This study reveals that the most used Internet service is e-mail, despite spam and other annoyances. It almost doubles P2P downloads, and on-line gaming.

Curious enough, Internet search has decreased 2.2% in the last 12 months. Participation in forums increases, and e-commerce and on-line payment maintain the same level.

For me it's very interesting to see how Skype, Videoconference and other means of get poeple connected have not been massively adopted.

And this study comes to confirm a fact we already knwo: e-mail continues to be the Killer-app of the Internet :-)

Read the full study (Spanish)

As you already know most of the current e-mail clients (either webmail or desktop) will disable the images in your e-mail by default. Unless your recipients decide to show images or to add you to their white list, images will not show in the screen.

This is a challenge for e-mail marketing design, because you must take this into account and create designs that work well even if images are not shown.

A quick way to test your creativity when images are turned off is to use a couple of web developer tools. In fact they are very similar, but you must choose one or the other depending on what is your browser of choice (Firefox or IE). This tools are very powerful and a must-have for every web developer. They both have a lot of features that I'm not going to describe now, but take my word for it and give them a try. I'll stick to the couple of things that will help you to test your designs.

If you're using Internet Explorer there is a tool called IE Developer Toolbar that you can download from here. When installed you it will show a small arrow icon in IE's toolbar:

If you click on it a small aditional window will appear at the bottom of IE's window with a lot of options. Search for the "Images" menu as shown:

If you disable images you will have an immediate feel of how your design will be shown in an email client with images turned off. You can even modify your HTML directly in the tool's window and see changes in real time.

A very similar tool is available for Firefox, and it is even easier to use. It's called "Web Developer" and you can download and install it from here. Once installed you get a wide toolbar just above the current webpage with a plethora of menus and buttons aimed at the web developer. The equivalent feature in this tool is located under the "Images" menu:

This has been just a quick tip on how to test your designs without images, but if you have HTML/CSS working knowledge and give both tools a try, as soon as you start to scratch the surface you will find fantastic features that will easy your work a lot.

A recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa (read in Marketing Charts) reveals how the meaning of the term “spam” has lately changed for users, in a way with high impact for us as marketers.

The survey sought to determine consumers’ perceptions of what spam is, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.

The main conclusion is that now spam means “unwanted e-mail”, in contrast with the traditional “unsolicited commercial e-mail”.

That’s a huge difference for us. This means that, now more than ever, your content must be relevant. You must engage with your recipients or will have a big chance to be blacklisted by the most important ISPs, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

The reason is that, according to the study, people misunderstand the implications of hitting the “Report spam” button omnipresent in all mayor webmail apps. Take a look at these figures and start to tremble:

• 43% of consumers, miss advertiser-supplied unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe from an advertiser’s list - regardless of whether the email fits the consumer’s definition of spam.
• 21% use the “report spam” button to unsubscribe from email that they specifically do not consider spam.

“What this survey uncovered is a major disconnect in consumers’ understanding and use of the ‘report spam’ button, as well as consumers’ definition of spam from ‘I didn’t sign up for it’ to ‘I don’t like it’—all of which signal that the current system of email spam filtering is a broken process” said Matt Wise, president and chief executive officer of Q Interactive.

Q Interactive suggests that ISPs’ “report spam” button be replaced with those that more clearly indicate consumers’ intentions, such as an “unsubscribe” button and an “undesired” button.

And that means a lot more of effort for marketers too: much more targeted and relevant content. It has been the better way to go in the past and, naturally, it has become the only way to go now.

Read the full review at Maketing Charts.

A recent survey taken by the e-Commerce and Direct Marketing Association of Spain (FECEMD) on 400 companies in the IT business reveals some worrying information about e-mail and spam filters.

The study shows that a 30% of e-mail sent by these companies to customers or prospects is rejected by corporate spam filters. This includes marketing emails, newsletters, and transactional messages. The study also estimates that this situation leads to a 20% decrease in sells for those companies.

Too much restrictive e-mail policies in the default configuration of filters is the main reason for this to happen, according to this study. In fact the FECEMD does not discard to file suit against those spam-filter companies that not take more seriously the effect of these restrictive policies, as long as this is a hurdle in the development of the Internet in the country.

You can check the study at the FECEMD website (automatic translation form Spanish, sorry) :-(

The original document in Spanish.

What do you think? Are they exaggerating the problem? Is due to bad e-mailing policies or it really has to do with those spam filters? Leave your comments.

Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.

The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.

One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.

Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.

So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(

While operators in Europe and the US are struggling to get customers to switch over to 3G devices to make better use of the infrastructure, Japan comes out and says that for the first time in history they've sold absolutely 0 second generation devices (read this article at AFP).

This is very interesting to me. I'm always telling everyone that the use of mobile phones that we do here in Europe and the States is already very simple, and we are not taking this devices to their real potential. I envision that in a few years from now mobile phones will be in fact much more: your own small Personal Computer, in the sense that they will be our main and only computer. They will be contstantly connected to the Internet through high speed networks and Wimax, we will have our files on the cloud, small folding flexible screens for using on the go, and we can just enter our office or home (or anywhere), plug the device on some kind of docking station and start working the usual way.

In a world like that (which is nearer than you may think) SMS will have no sense as a marketing mean. In fact in Korea and Japan SMS have dissapear several years ago and they use only e-mail (check this at iSchool Research, and this at Huawei.com).

E-mail marketing use only can increase :-)

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.