Mobilize Mail Opinion

It seems that ISP’s in the continuing war against SPAM are now using excessive bounce rates to identify spammers which has a negative impact on ethical email marketers.

Excessive bounce rates are normally a sign of spammers with their unlimited capacity to generate email addresses which most are invalid thus generating large bounce rates.

Because spammers are getting more and more creative and dare I say in more and more successful in fooling the current spam filters ISP’s are now adopting a zero tolerance policy with mail servers that generate reasonable amounts of bounces.

Now you can argue that the ethical email marketers with their confirmed opt-in mailing lists would not generate too many bounces but wait what about mailing lists that are contacted infrequently or only once every quarter or even once a year?

Because of the length between email communications and the fact that up to 30% of email addresses within a mailing list become invalid after 1 year you are sure to get a large amount of bounces.

There seems to be no way around this change in ISP policy where in some cases you only need to generate a reasonable bounce rate after one email campaign to be banned indefinitely.

The only way I can see currently is to increase your email campaign rate to reduce the bounce rate if you have long periods between email campaigns (who knows what some ISP’s would measure as long but I am guessing anymore than a month between email campaigns and you are asking for trouble) but then you start upsetting the subscribers as increased frequency of commercial based emails is normally not a good thing.

I would keep you posted on developments.

I have decided to create a series of articles on email marketing for small business after helping numerous of our small business clients with their email marketing strategies.  The one common element I have found is that they are all scared to venture into this space for fear of being marked as spammer and losing customers.

That’s a valid and realistic concern and if you don’t know the basics of ethical email marketing you will more than likely end up doing exactly that.

Now before I get into writing up the articles I need to add a huge disclaimer for all you people out there that consider any business sending email to be a spammer.

Email marketing is not spamming IF the subscribers who received the email have asked for it and you as the email marketer stick to the frequency of mail outs you stated to the subscriber when they subscribed and lastly you honor their unsubscribe requests.

For example we have one client who every day sends an email to their subscribers containing property news. How can they be a spammer when:

1. The subscribers have to go through a confirmed opt-in process before they are even added to the mailing lists,
2. The client sends the emails at the frequency that is stated on the subscription web page.
3. The client does not add any email addresses to the list,
4. Our system automatically processes all bounces and unsubscribe requests,
5. The client immediately removes any requests for unsubscribes if the subscriber does not use the links provided within their emails,
6. They use a professional email service provider to delivery and managed their email campaigns (that’s us by the way) and keep them honest.

So with the disclaimer out of the way I would like to present my ideas for the articles. Please contact me if you would like other topics or to provide suggestions with my current ideas. Topics I will cover are:

1. Why should small business use email marketing?
2. Common concepts and terminology used within email marketing
3. How much should I spend on email marketing and how do I calculate ROI?
4. Why use an email service provider (ESP) to managed email marketing
5. What content should I offer my subscribers?
6. Understanding the subscriber and their dangerous habits
7. How to attract and keep subscribers
8. Mailing lists and mail list hygiene
9. How to correctly format emails
10. How to understand and utilise email campaign statistics
11. More complex email marketing strategies such as segmentation, Autoresponders

Whew! So that’s the topic list so far. I am keeping the topics high level enough not to be boring for business people but detailed enough that you don’t need to hire an email marketing expert.

Well well. many times we at Mobilize Mail have yelled at the top of our voices that the KISS principle should be applied to email templates. How many times do we need to say “Inline CSS and tables” is what provides the most consistency for email templates.

Here is a link to an article on a web designers/developers web site where the techies are complaining about the new Microsoft Outlook version – 2007 and how the support for CSS has gone back 5 years in history in regards to CSS support. A lot of the fancy “gee whiz” CSS is not supported in the new Outlook application which currently commands a 75-85% market share of the email application market for business.

Some within the Sitepoint forums are stating that we should just tell our subscribers to swap email applications!! I am not sure of the experience and age of some of these people but with my 10 years experience in IT I can almost be certain that the subscribers will not appreciate that comment.