Email marketing firm Silverpop, released study results about the efficacy of email campaigns. Silverpop took a look at emails that were sent during 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. The email messages analyzed were sent by Silverpop's clients, by over 1,100 different brands. They looked at several different types of email messages, including transactional messages, promotional emails, content-based newsletters, and notifications. The data that they found pertaining to click-through rates, open rates and unsusubscribe rates were very informative.
We wanted to do a mid-year check-in to remind you to make sure that your emailing practices are staying in tip-top shape, and that your email marketing campaigns were minding their p's and q's to ensure maximum deliverability.
Relying on images in email marketing can hurt you for a few reasons: 1) It can increase the likelihood that your email will be marked as spam, and, 2) because so many services such as Gmail, and email programs such as Outlook, automatically block images, it can be detrimental to the effectiveness of your email if much of the impact of it was visual. Even when email applications don’t block images by default, many users are being advised to disallow images in incoming emails.
There are certain buzzwords that could be a ding against your email when it comes to […]
For those of you who have read the intro of our Email Deliverability Handbook, you know […]
SMTP codes can be so confusing, especially those SMTP response codes and SMTP error codes like the dreaded SMTP error 550. These are often returned in bounced email, such as "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable" or "550 5 2 1 mail from refused spam site." They are in response to SMTP commands that have 'gone wrong' between your email server that sent the email, and the receiving email server that is unable to deliver it (or refuses to deliver it) for some reason. But what exactly do they mean? Why should you care and what should you do? And why do we say that SMTP error 550 is dreaded?
We are often asked by volume email senders just why we urge people to use confirmed opt-in (or "double opt-in") whenever possible. After all, they know that they are being ethical and only adding to their mailing lists people whom they believe really want their mailings. Why should they have to go through the added "hassle" of using confirmed opt-in? Here's why.
It's always nice when an independent third-party study substantiates what we've been saying all along. In this case, a study by Harris Interactive on behalf of Merkle (the database marketing people) has found that between 73 to 75% of people hit "unsubscribe" because either they feel that they are getting email from you too often, or that it is not relevant, or both.
I recently had the pleasure of working with journalist Karen Bannen, on an article that she was doing for BtoB Online. Karen interviewed both myself and R. Dave Lewis for the piece, in which she distilled down to their essence 5 ways to improve your email deliverability.
It's important not to confuse email marketing best practices, and email best practices in general, with email "common practices".
In fact, this can be a very dangerous, slippery slope on which to pin your email deliverability and indeed your email reputation. In fact at one point in time there was a meme going around suggesting exactly that, that it's "important to follow email marketing common practices." No, no, NO! To suggest that best practices aren't really best practices, but only 'common practices', reduces them to "not necessarily required" practices.
