If you have more than one subscription form on your website you can track which form was used and by whom with a simple addition to your subscription form.

Follow the steps below:

1) Create a new field in the attributes section of your account and name it something like “source� or whatever is meaningful to you. Make sure the type is “hidden�. Note the special tag name for the new field which will start with “attribute�.

2) Now open the internal subscription form you would like the new tracking field to be added to and select the new tracking field within the subscription form record. Save your changes.

3) Next access the associated external subscription form and click the “Regenerate HTML Code� button. Copy the new HTML subscription code.

4) Place this code on each of the pages on your site, and give the hidden field a value. For example, the front page could use value=”frontpage” and the contact page could be value=”contactpage”. Locate the “source” field by its name which you recorded the name in step 1. For example input type="hidden" size="40" name="attribute10" value="front page"

5) Every time someone completes the subscribe forms, they’ll be added to your list and the hidden form value will passed into the “source” field.

If you want to analyze what subscription forms were used export the subscribers and include the source field. You can now add the data to a spreadsheet application and sort by the source column.

Mobilize Mail supports two types of subscription forms:

1) Internal, the subscription form is housed on Mobilize Mail and is a great idea for customers who do not have their own website but want a subscription form to send people to.

2) External, the subscription form can be housed on any website. External styles are normally used when customers wish to have a subscription located on their website.

With both subscription form styles we allow full customization of the form including styling, images and additional HTML.  For some strange reason most other email service providers (ESP’s) only allow you to change basic colours and upload a logo – boring!!

Take a look below at two customer’s subscription form styles both of which are internal (housed on Mobilize Mail). The first thing you will notice is that they are completely different which is great news as no one wants to be trapped by the boring and oppressive templates that other ESP’s force you into.

 

Yesh! Another news item on the increasing influx of spam in mail boxes. 

This is of course a huge concern to email marketers trying to do good by following every email standard and protocol on the planet. The cost of safelist accreditation services and other third party reputation services for email marketers is massive to say the least.  I personally believe the only ones making any real money are the companies who charge outrageous sums of money to vouch for your credibility as an email marketer.

News below…

EVERY day, 1.5 million e-mails are sent to staff and students at Edinburgh University from the outside world - but only 125,000 of those prove to be genuine.

Read more…

Gmail empowers its users to download email from other accounts into their gmail account which means more and more emails are ending up viewed in gmail.

Which means you need to give more attention to Gmail’s display eccentricities when it comes to email. More information on these developments here.

Apple’s new version of their webmail service looks great but unfortunately it seems to kill your CSS! Have a read of this review and also read the comments as a possible solution is provided.

Click here

At this time of year a lot of businesses send eCards (email versions of Christmas cards) to their clients and prospects. eCards sometimes have the Christmas wishes accompanied with an image of Christmas usually embedded within the email for maximum effect.

One of the reasons businesses use email service providers such as Mobilize Mail is too increase the deliverability rate of their emails. As part of the task of continually monitoring the email marketing space for any changes to spam filters and ISP polices around email we conducted a test to see how the current ISP mail systems deal with embedded images.

The results were not promising. It seems that due to the influx of image embedded spam the major ISP’s in New Zealand and Australia have increased the bounce back of any email containing embedded images. Our tests showed a 30% bounce back of the test eCard we sent to the major ISP’s in New Zealand and Australia. There were some exceptions to the rule however (Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail) who warmly received our test email.

We therefore recommend that our clients who are sending eCards this year to their subscribers use external images. For clients who are engaging Mobilize Mail to create and send their Christmas eCard we are providing two options:

1) Use external images or,

2) Provide in the email message a link to the completed eCard which will be housed within your landing page area of your Mobilize Mail account. The benefit to this approach is that there are more options as to the makeup of the eCard. For example the use of sounds and animation could be used.

Please contact us if you have further questions.

Have you noticed an increase in the amount of image based spam you receiving? I bet you have run up your ISP and demanded that they fix the problem pronto.

Well it really is not that simple anymore. You see spammers are getting real smart these days and buying very advanced software from underground software manufacturers (yes they have their own software vendors!). The software creates the spam image containing the spam message and then for every email sent (we are talking possibly millions a day) each embedded image is slightly altered at the pixel level so the current spam filters cannot identify the spam. That’s smart!

This is of course not good for the ethical email marketers as the ISP’s have now beefed up their spam filters to a level that our technicians describe as “block any email containing an embedded image.�. I can see why they have taken this approach as its far cheaper to block every embedded image than to spend time and money trying to filter content.

The thing that always bugs me is that the spammers are earning money from their ventures so logically they will keep on doing it until no one clicks on their links. So what are we all doing about understanding why some people click on links within the spammers emails? Who are they? Why do they do it?

Fighting email spam is a continuous war and New Zealand Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) are stepping up the fight with new spam-fighting systems. TelstraClear recently announced it had spent $3.5 million on spam filtering technology.
Earlier in the month (November) ihug customers were demanding to know why they were having problems with their email service. One customer reported receiving over 6000 spam emails overnight and concluded that ihug’s anti- spam filter was not working. An apparent junk mail attack was to blame for ihug’s customers experiencing intermittent service according to an article on www.nzherald.co.nz.

Today “The Dominion Postâ€� reports ‘Spam still affecting Xtra’ in an article articulating a similar problem to that experienced by ihug’s customers earlier last month. With no announcement made by Xtra, their customers were unaware that the problem may be affecting the delivery of email to their Inbox.Â
The good news is the unsolicited electronic messages bill is soon to become law in New Zealand and that should deter individuals and businesses from sending unsolicited bulk email. Australian company Clarity1 was recently fined A$5.5 million ($6.5 million) for sending millions of unsolicited emails over a two year period and this successful result is due to the introduction of the Australian anti-spam laws.

The possible impact of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Bill on your business can be viewed in this article

There maybe some relief on the horizon for the poor battered email marketer who spends half their life rigorously following opt-in best practices.

We also know about the menace of the “this is spam” button provided by many large ISPs including AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.  We have also seen the studies and gasped at the amount of subscribers who use the button to “unsubscribe” from a list.

There is a new Internet standard in town that helps good marketers avoid this pitfall.

The “list-Unsubscribe” header can be embedded into the email message and facilitates the automated or semi-automated unsubscribe processes.  What will happen is when a subscriber clicks on the “list is spam” button with an email that contains the new header the ISP will send an unsubscribe request to the sender on behalf of the recipient.

MSN/Hotmail has announced their intention to support the new header and I hope more ISPs follow. One thing that bugs me and I need to read the RFC is how it deals with spammers who would love to have more unsubscribe requests sent their way to confirm an email address is valid.

Click here to read the technical spec…