October 15, 2007

Table of Contents   

Defending Your Reputation
Now your email reputation has become as important as your branding reputation.

As Matt Blumbert, CEO of Return Path, discussed at the DM Days Conference in New York City on June 20th, your email reputation has become key to Internet service providers when they decide whether to let your email through to their users' mailboxes. Today 77 percent of filtering is driven by the sender reputation while, only 6 percent is by domain reputation and 17 percent by content.

And remember: CoolerEmail has the highest deliverability rates in the industry and maintains a sterling reputation with all of the major ISPs.

What determines your email reputation? It is a combination of what you send out and the reaction to those emails by your recipients. Many of the email clients now have a "Spam" or "Junk" button next to the "Forward" and "Delete" buttons. If enough of the recipients of the email you send consider your email to be spam, they will click on the "Spam" button to notify their vendor. It doesn't take many clicks for the ISP to decide you are sending out junk emails and block emails coming from your email address by either bouncing them or just sending them straight to Spam folders.
READ MORE
Keeping a Good Reputation
How do you keep a good reputation? It is actually pretty easy:

1. Send only to people who have given you specific permission to mail to the and want your emails.
2. Eliminate addresses from your list that either bounce regularly or are never opened
3. Make sure your recipients know who you are and use your known name and email address as the send addresses.
4. Make sure the message you are sending is one that is of interest to the recipients.
5. Think about what you see spammers do and don't do any of those things.

Remember, one email out that looks to the recipients like spam can negatively impact everything sent after it.
Coming Next Month!
Personalized Web Pages

Are there times you might want to send people from your list to a web page that is personalized for them and is different from the look and content of the email you are sending them? This is actually fairly easy to do. Also, you would have the added advantage of being able to put scripts in that web page that would never work in an email.

How do you do this? Just create two editions instead of only one. The first edition will be your email while the second will be displayed only as a web page.
This edition of CoolerTips was written by Stephen Shore, founder of STADIS.net - A Permission-Based Email Marketing Service.

Cooler by Design

Send comments, or suggestions, to Bill Mitchell
Creating Invitations With RSVPs
For those times when you send out an invitation and need to hear back from your list members about whether they will be attending your event or not, CoolerEmail provides a number of ways to collect that response.

They range for the simple, "Yes, I'm coming" variety to the far more complex where you may need to know a number of details about their attendance. We'll break these explanations down so that you can use the tools that best and most easily satisfy your needs.
RSVPs Lesson 1: The "Yep, I'll Be There" Method
If all that you need is a list of people who will be attending your event, let's do this the easy way.

Build your edition as an invitation. Then near the end of the invitation place either a text link or a graphic button that basically says, "RSVP - Yes, I'll Be There". Then use a simple link on this text or image to a web page that you will also build that thanks them for responding and tells them how much you look forward to seeing them at the event...and make sure to repeat the details of the where and when. The HTML code for this link is can be very simple and looks basically like this:

‹a href="xxxx://zzz.yoursite.xxx/yourRSVPpage.html"›
RSVP - Yes, I'll be There.
‹/a›

(In the example above, make sure to replace the "xxxx://zzz.yoursite.xxx/yourRSVPpage.html" with the correct link to your webpage.)
The "Yep, I'll Be There" Method Continued...
RSVPs Lesson 2: The "Meat, Fish, or Vegetarian" Method
Sometimes just knowing that someone is attending is not enough information.

There are times you might have several sessions available from which to choose or, at a dinner, you might really have meat, fish, and vegetarian options. Or you might even want the person to be able to change their mind and respond with a different answer at a later date and for you to have all of the current information automatically tabulated for you.

This is where the CoolerEmail Survey feature comes in. It is found by clicking on the Libraries tab in the top row of the menu bar at the top of the web page and then the "Survey Library" in the second row of buttons. This allows you to put together survey questions that can use Radio Buttons, Check Boxes, or free form Text entry fields. For the purposes of people RSVPing to an invitation, the Radio Button question will be the one most often used. It allows the recipient to choose one option from among the ones offered and allows you to give them up to 10 different options.

Just go to the Survey library, create a new survey, name it, choose the type of survey question, and fill in the blanks. After you save the survey question, it will generate the HTML code that you will drop into your edition. All that you have to do is copy the code and paste it into the edition where you want it to go.
The "Meat, Fish, or Vegetarian" Method Continued...
RSVPs Lesson 3: The "I need more information" Method
Sometimes you need LOTS of information back from the people attending your event in order to properly serve them.

You may have to break it down by age, gender, educational level, orchestra vs. balcony seating, time of day, location, and several other things. Plus, you may need information like their phone number or street address whech may not currently be in your database. Here is a place that CoolerEmail can really shine in obtaining and recording this information for you. In fact, when you collect the information this way, you can have several functions happen as soon as the recipient clicks on the "submit" button:

• The person will be added to a specific attendee list with all of the information entered.

• A web page will be opened thanking them for responding.

• You can send them a thank you email reiterating all the details of the event or giving them details that were not in the original email.

• A notice can be sent to you as each person signs up. (For a small mailing this may be desirable but for a large mailing you probably will want to forgo this.)
The "I need more information" Method Continued...

CoolerEmail
  •   ,
866.4COOLER   •   Fax:   •   editor@cooleremail.com   •   http://cooleremail.com