August Cooler Tips & Cooler Cartoon!

December 17, 2007

Table of Contents

More on the "From" Line

One of our ongoing themes is to emphasize things that will help you get your emails read.

Some of these things can't be said too many times.

This week there was a very good article on this theme concerning the best way to handle your ï¿½Fromï¿½ address on ClickZ.com by Jeanne Jennings. We heartily recommend that you read her article!

THE JEANNE JENNINGS ARTICLE

Updated Definitions

Note sure what a word or phrase used for describing email functions means.

Now you can find the latest definitions and be sure that you are using the same vocabulary as the vast majority of the industry. The Internet Advertising Bureau has just updated its list of definitions used in the industry.

UPDATED LIST OF DEFINITIONS

"Pass This On to All of Your Friends"...NOT

When you receive an email with some dire warning from a good friend with the request to forward it on to everyone you know for their benefit, what should you do with it?

99% of the time you should delete it as quickly as possible and go on to some work that is actually productive.

One of the more significant sources of spam today are those messages sent by your friends to make sure that you are aware that: "dihydrogen oxide is hazardous to your health" (water, aka H2O), "microwaving with Saran Wrap will put dioxins in your food" (untrue, there are no dioxins in Saran Wrap at all), or that some file currently on your hard drive will delete everything there (even though the file is a Microsoft published system file). These are all examples of emails I have actually received from friends. Why do you as a broadcast emailer care about these superfluous emails? Because each email someone receives increases their sensitivity to "spam". They start considering more and more types of emails to be spam. Pretty soon they are hitting that button indicating a specific email is spam with real abandon. And before you know it, your great emails, that people have received for years and loved, gets tagged as spam.

As a broadcast emailer everything that makes email more critical to a person's life is a plus and everything that trivializes spam is a negative. If people are sending direct messages from their friends straight to the "junk" folder because the message is less than pertinent, they could be easily doing the same thing to you.

Use Subscribing as another Sales Opportunity

When a person subscribes to one of your lists, you have a chance to really hammer your message home to them.

When a person subscribes to one of your lists, you have a chance to really hammer your message home to them. After all, they are going to see a "thank you" page and a confirming email from you before they are completely signed up. Why not use those as sales opportunities?

CoolerEmail gives you the ability to change the default email message the new subscriber gets to confirm his sign-up. You still want the new subscriber to confirm that they want to receive your emails, but you can use that email as another sales opportunity!

Tell them how important they are to you and your business. Tell them about sales, special promotions, improved products, your local offices, whatever. Since you can personalize this message, use a decision data point and ask for their zip code then them the location closest to them!

Since most people will be looking for that confirming email, your open rates for these emails are going to be especially high. This is definitely the time to take advantage of these expectations and get your message across that this additional opportunity.

Cooler by Design

Send comments, or suggestions, to Bill Mitchell

It's Not About You

Next time you are composing an edition, step back a few paces and look at it.

Now forget that you are the one writing it. Think about you as the intended recipient...and that you are busy with other tasks and may barely have time to read the email. Is the email compelling enough for you to invest the time to read it?

Emails are read not because you want them to be read but because the recipient wants to read them...or doesn't. Everything you do with your entire email program affects whether your email gets read….or doesn't.

Below is a link to a good article on the importance of the Sender line you use. It tells your recipients who you are and is the single greatest factor in whether your email is read or not. Why? Because it is your reputation that you are trading on. If you are well known to your recipient and they want to hear what you have to say, they will open and read your email. One of the important things in the previous sentence is "they want to hear what you have to say".

However, unless you are diligent about what you say to them in every email, they may no longer want to hear what you have to say. If your emails are repetitive or trivial or constantly trying to sell them something they couldn't possibly want, you'll be establishing a different kind of reputation…one that screams to them, "Don't bother reading this email."

If you are doing a newsletter that promotes your own company, that is fine. In fact, it can be great. Just make sure that you concentrate on things the recipients want to know. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't inform them about things you want them to know and are important to you. Just make sure that they will find them important to them also. You have a new whizbang that decreases your manufacturing cost by 50%. Except for your stockholders, no one will care. However, if your new manufacturing process allows you to decrease your customers' costs by 10% plus increases the usable life of the product by 25%, that's big news…and important to your client. Both of these things will affect his operations and costs directly and positively.

Now you may think that this content will only affect the one edition. That's dead wrong. Actually, what you put into any one edition doesn't affect the readership of that edition at all. After all, the recipient needs to open the email to even see the content. However, if the content doesn't relate to her, this may be the last time she ever opens one of your emails. The two main reactions that the recipient could have after deciding your email is something she no longer needs to read are:

1) Unsubscribe - They just tell you they no longer want to hear what you have to say. The only plus to this is that this is at least feedback telling you that you have done something wrong, either in content or in targeting.

2) Indicate you as "junk" - Most email client programs now have the ability to indicate which senders are sending emails the recipients no longer wish to read. And because of the plethora of actual spammers out there, the recipients don't always unsubscribe because they know that even unsubscribing can generate more spam by letting the spammer know that the recipient is a real person and someone to whom they can email. Consequently, they just have all of your future emails sent to a junk folder that they empty every few days without reading. This is worse because you don't even get any feedback. You just watch your open rate decrease with each broadcast.

The overall term to describe this is relevancy. So, be relevant to your readers and write from the recipient's concerns and point of view. You'll find that your readership will be much better.

Reputation Filtering vs. Content Filtering

If in issue after issue of CoolerEmail Tips we seem to be harping about maintaining a good online reputation, there is a solid reason for this.

The companies who develop anti-spam software have found that no matter how they improve the filtering programs that look at the content of emails, the spammers are always analyzing what they are doing and finding ways to overcome the content filters.

Consequently, the anti-spam developers added a new tool to their arsenal. They keep track of all the emails that everyone sends. They look to see who is getting lots of spam complaints versus whose emails are being opened and read on a regular basis. Who is sending out lots of emails with LOTS of bad, bouncing email addresses versus who uses lists where everything gets delivered. Who is sending out emails with no content but only graphic attachments versus who is sending out emails that appear to contain real content. Who is sending out emails with strings of unassociated words versus those with real complete and meaningful sentences. Who includes links to known spammers or uses links that are only re-directors or dead links versus those whose links always go to an actual, reputable URL. And then they correlate all of this. As best they can, they are analyzing your REPUTATION.

Consequently, today the weight of your reputation is about four times more important than the content of any one email when it comes to what gets through to your recipients versus what gets filtered out.

As with any reputation, your email reputation can be easy to blacken and difficult and timely to restore. You'll want to make sure that you do some of the following to keep your email reputation pristine:

1) Only send to recipients who request and want your emails. Using ï¿½confirmed opt-inï¿½ sign-ups works best.
2) Keep your bounces to a minimum. If an email address keeps coming back as undeliverable, either correct it or change the ï¿½Mail Formatï¿½ to ï¿½Bouncedï¿½ so that you cut down on these bounces.
3) Ask your recipients to put the email addresses that you send your emails from in their address book. Most email client programs will accept emails from address that are already in the address book and will cut down on bounces.
4) Make sure all of the URL links you use in your emails are good, functioning addresses. Avoid using re-directing URLs.
5) Although some anti-spam programs mark against you if you use HTML in your emails, this trend has greatly decreased. HTML is fine these days, EXCEPT: Do not include any scripts in your emails. JavaScript, ActionScript, ActiveX, etc. all have the possibility of effecting less than desirable actions on a computer. Consequently, most email client programs filter them out and most anti-spam programs consider them risks.
6) Keep attached files as small as possible. Few email programs will accept an email with an attachment larger than 5 MB. Also, some companies place even smaller maximums on what they are willing to let through their servers, sometimes filtering out attachments as small as anything over 49KB. Make sure you know your recipients and what size attachments are acceptable.
7) Eliminate prurient words. Even though content filtering is of far less importance than it once was, most corporations and many ISPs still have little tolerance for ï¿½dirty wordsï¿½.

This edition of CoolerTips was written by Stephen Shore, founder of STADIS.net - A Permission-Based Email Marketing Service.

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