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!

Interesting video to watch from the german agency Scholz & Friends about changes in the world of marketing since the old golden days and, above all, the raise of the Internet. It deserves to be watched :-)

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!

In my last post I was talking about the importance of a good segmented database in e-mail. This is also true for other media too.

Take for instance banners and on-line advertising.

Now, you're probably wondering "Why in earth should I segment my banner advertising?, There is no database in this case...". And probably you'd be right. But if you offer different discounts to different targets you must be pretty sure that you segment the different ads so that they do not show up at the same time in the same portal or webpage.

Take this example I've seen in The daily WTF:

Am I right when I say that you must be careful even with banners? ;-)

Segmenting your database is always important to achieve better results in your campaigns. But sometimes it's even more important due to technology issues.

Maybe you already know it, but recently GMail - the webmail from Google and the one a good share of your subscribers is probably using- has incorporated a new feature to automatically translate emails on the fly. You must add it explicitly to your GMail account through the "Labs" tab in "Settings":

Once this useful feature is finally incorporated to the product by default you'll need to be very careful with the layout issues that will arise.

Expressions/sentences in different languages are normally very different in length, so if your design or layout depends heavily on text you must be careful. If your recipients are translating your mail automatically your design could be easily scrambled.

Take for example this simple e-mail in English:

Click on image to zoom

It contains a headline and some text. The headline uses a quite big text that obviously is intended to fit in a single line.

Let's see what happens when I press the translate link and got my email translated to Spanish:

Click on image to zoom

The headline now uses two lines, and the email is not so beautiful.

This could get much worse on longer phrases and on emails that rely excessively on the size of text fit between images. So take it into account.

If you segment your database well and send contents in the right language to the right people, then -apart from probably getting a much successfully campaign in any conditions- this effect will be minimized.

By the way, the GMail translation plug-in doesn't translate links at this moment. I've reported it through the feedback option and hope that it gets fixed soon :-)