Yesterday we talked about why you should give each of your customers their own IP address. But for various reasons, not everybody can do that - at least not right away - and so, as promised, today we are going to talk about segregating your outbound mail across different IP addresses based on opt-in quality.
Over at our email accreditation service, SuretyMail, we strongly urge our senders who provision or otherwise host their customers' outgoing email to give each customer their own outbound IP address.
Email cadence and how you schedule email to be sent is of crucial importance to both your email ROI and your email deliverability! Yet in all of the focus that email marketers, newsletter publishers, and other volume email senders put on tweaking their content, format, and other aspects of their email to help maximize deliverability and ROI, they often overlook the scheduling of their mailings, by which we mean when they send their mailings, and how often they send them. Yet this can have a seriously negative impact on your deliverability! Here then, are the top 5 mistakes that email senders make in their email cadence.
The quick and dirty: The main immediate and relevant difference between the Canada Anti Spam Law (CASL) and the United States' CAN-SPAM, is that the CASL requires true opt-in, and it requires that the contact information within the email remain a viable way to contact the sender for at least 60 days.
One of the most important things that you can do to ensure good email deliverability is to add email deliverability test accounts to your mailing list. Fortunately, adding deliverability test accounts is also one of the easiest things that you can do! You should do this by creating one or more test accounts with each of the major free webmail hosts, such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. You can do this by using your "company name" as your standard email deliverability test account name.
"Never use a 'do not reply' email address" is something that we seem to have been saying for years (because we have). Today we are repeating it, hot on the heels of a real-life example, a retail mini-saga that unfolded for us with a large, well-known online retailer. The saga could have been easily downgraded to a minor glitch, had it not been for the fact that we kept receiving what seemed to be quite urgent, even strident, emails, all from a "do not reply" email address, and with no other way to respond to the email (no alternate email address, no phone number, zip, zero, zilch). It serves as a good reminder that not only can "do not reply" email addresses be incredibly frustrating (especially if some sort of alternate communication option is not provided), but they can also affect your email deliverability, especially when "no reply" email addresses are in fact non-existent email addresses.
We were stunned when we came across an article by Internet Evolution, suggesting email marketers use Paypal's batch payment function to send mass emails to non-opted-in recipients, with a payment incentive to open the email. The article even states directly, "The sender can simply upload a list of targeted but unknown email addresses and give each a 1 cent payment."
Well, the run for President is continuing to heat up and, like any good campaign strategy, the candidates are integrating email marketing into their overall plan. But did you know that political email has an exemption where politicians can grab email addresses from voter registrations and spam them all they want with immunity? What does this mean for you?
We've heard a lot about whitelisting and blacklisting, but many are unfamiliar with the term "greylisting" and, to a lesser extent, "rate limiting." Greylisting and rate limiting are two additional but lesser used methods which some ISPs may employ to attempt to deal with spam and/or a sudden influx of bulk email.
We are often asked "Why are my emails going to spam?" And while we know, and you may know, that there are obvious missteps to avoid when ensuring that your email is not marked as spam, there are some commonly overlooked practices, or lack thereof, that can still cause a legitimate email to be marked as spam.
Listen to Our Blogcast
- Iowa, Montana, Indiana, and Tennessee Join the Ranks of States with Email Opt-in Requirement in New Data Privacy Laws (Season 3 Episode 8)
- New Texas Data Privacy Law is Strict on Email Collection and Email Marketing (Season 3 Episode 7)
- The Value of a Political Email List: Ready for Ron (RFR) versus the FEC (Season 3 Episode 6)
- Who is Behind the Domain Kmail-lists? Here's Who (Season 3, Episode 5)
- Get a Great Return on SMS Marketing While Following SMS Marketing Laws and Best Practices (Season 3 Episode 6)