email marketing

Tag: email marketing

Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill

Here’s what you need to know about Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill that was recently introduced. Three are some significant differences between this and the US CAN-SPAM legislation that businesses will want to keep in mind as they pursue their marketing plans involving email communications with customers and potential customers alike.

Canada’s Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) is expected to have rules regarding opt-in and opt-out procedures, consumer privacy and sender identification. Of course will all legislation, there is some ambiguity in the wording so you should use the links at bottom to make your own interpretation or contact counsel.

Permission is Required
The primary difference between ECPA and CAN-SPAM is inherit in the acronyms. The US version does not require advance permission to send the emails. Basically, you CAN SPAM provided you follow the rules that allow for opt-out mechanisms as well as real-world contact information. ECPA on the other hand prohibits the sending of commercial email without prior permission from the recipient. There are provisions however for implied consent so long as a relationship (business or non-business) can be established between the sender and the recipient.

SMS Messages Require Advance Permission
The ECPA lumps text and SMS messages into the same category so keep the elements of this law in mind for this type of communication as well.

Unsubscribes Must Stay Active for 60 days
You will be required to maintain active unsubscribe links in your outbound emails that are active for a minimum of 60 days. This is not a problem with EMM since the unsubscribe links are persistant.

Unsubscribes Must be Honored in Timely Manner
More importantly, they’ve set a deadline of 10 days in order to act on any unsubscribe requests. Note that CAN-SPAM allows for 10 business days while ECPA does not so you have less time under this proposed Candadian legislation. EMM will assist you in this manner in that the unsubscribe links embedded in the emails will automatically unsubscribe users when they click on it. This should be strong encouragement to also manage your bouncebacks to ensure that your customers don’t try and unsubscribe by replying to your mailing.

Individuals Can Sue Violators
ECPA contains provisions that allow for a “private right of action” that allows individuals to sue spammers up to $200 per item. This could have huge effects for businesses in violation as individuals could join together for class-action suits to create a substantial settlement. Of course, the government can also sue; in this case for up to $10 million!

How Do I Identify A Canadian Address?
Easiest way is to identify the addresses that end in .ca which is the Canadian Top Level Domain. You can easily target or exclude these addresses using our custom query feature if you wish to engage in a permission campaign on the external customer list. If you are collecting geographic information in your external mailing list, you can use Zip/Postal codes or state/province information to identify these addresses. Lastly, you can do IP address lookups on the site visitor’s IP address using a tool like ip2Location.com but again, if you are sending to your customers in ASPDNSF you should be fine as they have explicitly opted in.

Bottom Line
If you are working with our EMM product and working in your ASPDNSF customer base, you are covered. If you are using the external user base, you need to tread more carefully if the names were not collected on an opt-in basis. Between now and when the bill passes, you might wish to engage in a permission campaign to convert these addresses to a opt-in addresses.

Next Version of Enhanced Mail Manager for ASPDNSF

Here are some of the ideas on the roadmap for the next version of EMM:

  • Attachments ? Originally we didn?t include this due to our previous experience as a mail service provider for thousands of clients, serving millions of emails a day. By not sending attachments, the likelihood of acceptance by a wider range of mail servers is higher and the risk of spreading viruses is eliminated. However, these concerns may not be shared by all and there are certain situations where this feature might be useful. My initial thoughts are that it would require a Super Admin account to turn this feature on and it will be off by default.
  • Scheduled Jobs ? I?m not sure if I?ll be able to squeeze this into this version. This might be a feature that requires the ability to run a service on the server that is hosting the machine; limiting its usefulness to those who have dedicated or virtual servers. I?m investigating a way to simulate a service using ONLY what is available to ASP.NET.
  • Daily limits ? The AppConfig variable has existed for this since the first release but we haven?t been utilizing it. This feature hasn?t made much sense to include until the scheduled jobs feature is enabled.
  • Archive of emails/newsletters for presentation online
    • Allow viewing/listing on a per-campaign basis
    • Define if it shows inside or outside the site framework (lytebox?)
    • Set expiration date for campaign to be listed/viewed
  • Fix a bug in the editor (long story)
  • Support locking down the Track.Click action files to prevent their sue by spammers by limiting them to internal links. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-redirect-urls-is-your-site-being.html

Do you have any other features you?d like to have us consider for inclusion in the next release of EMM? If so, please use the comments section below to speak up. Or if you have any questions or thoughts about the features mentioned above, please do use the comment section to continue this discussion.

EMM And Email Deliverability

I received an email from an EMM customer today asking about how best to advise HIS client when it came time to talk about the value of Enhanced Mail Manager for ASPDotNetStorefront versus hosted services like Constant Contact. Aside from the obvious cost discussion (a HUGE factor for many small businesses) here is the rest of what we discussed via email:

Thanks Jonathan for your continued support of EMM.

Has your client done side by side testing of open counts with their mailing list in Constant Contact and in EMM? Seems to me this would be the best possible comparison. It would give them a solid foundation for a discussion about where they are getting the most bang for the buck.

I’ve done everything in software that I can to minimize the likelihood of filtering based on common information (ie : it is better to NOT encode graphics as attachments, always have a text and HTML version done as multi-part, include proper CAN-SPAM support, etc).

However, there is much about filtration that cannot be addressed in software and must be addressed by either a service bureau (like CC) or by the organization doing the mailing. The following items will all contribute to mail getting through:

  • Ensuring that the IP address of the sending mail server is not on any real-time blacklists or shared by any spammers if in a shared hosting environment. IF your website is hosted in an environment that has strikes against it for clients who spam, you would want to use the mail settings in ASPDNSF to ensure that your mail is going out through that mail server rather than through the web server’s SMTP server.  This is one of the services I?ve used in the past to check up on this: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
  • Ensure that your mail server can be matched forwards and reverse DNS to eliminate "No Reverse DNS Pointers Found" type of bounces.
  • Setting up proper SPF and SenderID DNS records for the sending email domain. SenderID and SPF are becoming more and more critical for acceptance of email at ISPs and corporate email hosts. You can learn more about it here: http://www.openspf.org/SPF_vs_Sender_ID
  • Keep your mailing list clean. This means immediately remove not only manual unsubscribe requests, but probably more important is to process bounce backs immediately.
    • While EMM will accept one-click unsubscribe requests (as required by CAN-SPAM requirements) it doesn’t automate processing of bounce backs or manual unsubscribes. We do, however make it easy by accepting a list of email addresses to unsubscribe as well as attributing the type of unsubscribe to a specific mailing for reporting purposes.
    • By running a "dirty" list, you will find that your emails are much more likely to get bounced since ISPs have been known to "shut the door" temporarily or permanently to mail servers who consistently attempt mail delivery to large numbers of old or invalid mailboxes. This helps protect not only against dictionary spam attacks but also against old data lists.
  • Consider subscribing to reputation system/service. While I’m not certain if these actually work or not, there are a number of people who swear by their effectiveness. An example of this is GoodMail: http://www.goodmailsystems.com/. Nothing against the quality of their service, I?d have to have a pretty darn good reason to subscribe to a service like this as I feel that just contributing to a system that could tier email deliverability based on how much money you want to spend is just plain wrong.

Some of these items are set once and forget it kind of things while others will require a little bit of work on the part of merchant to keep their reputation clean. That is why it is always good to immediately monitor the results of each mailing (true for in-house or outsourced). You can spot trends in your bounce backs as well as in your open rates using EMM’s reporting features.

I hope you find this information helpful. If I can help in any other way, please feel free to shout!

MJG

Email Marketers Meet and Share Ideas

Those who’ve known me for some time know that I kind of have a love/hate relationship with MarketingSherpa and the information they provide. At times they provide great support and numbers from the industry to use when crafting your own campaigns. At other times, they frustrate me no end when I find that I disagree with their conclusions…

All that being said, they recently released a short summary on the Email Marketing Summit 2008. Below are some of the top dozen takeaways:

  1. Don’t get caught up in only being a marketer – Put on the hats of those in your organization that you are trying to co-opt to your way of thinking. How can what YOU do assist those above and beside you in the organization.
  2. Landing pages are becoming de riguer – Most marketers wouldn’t think these days about testing a marketing campaign without having strong landing pages associated with them. Suggestions include building the landing page as soon as the offer and message are defined to ensure that the work gets done before the emails go out.
  3. It is message, stupid – stick to your message at every step of the campaign. This includes the subject line, the text and images of the message and the landing page itself. Tips: Landing pages shouldn’t carry all the site navigation elements to prevent distracting from the message in the offer.
  4. Don’t waste too much energy worrying about deliverability – while important, this is becoming less and less of a concern as opposed to ensuring that your message comes across to those who do get it.
  5. Segment your audience – One size doesn’t fit all and you’ll find that many small, targettable lists will out perform a massive but unspecific list any day.
  6. The rumor of the death of email is just that, a rumor – don’t give in to talk that email marketing is dead as email loses it’s day in – day out value to Internet customers and users. A resurgence of email availability is seen with the large swings of consumer to connected devices like Blackberries, iPhones and Windows Mobile devices.
  7. Be Interesting – Give your targets a reason to open your emails. You can do this by trying different subject lines across your segmented list (you are segmenting your list, aren’t you? If not, see #5 above). Be irreverent, be obtuse, just please be something other than predictable or boring.
  8. Close the door on Open Rates – While there is some value to open rates, this is being too short-sighted. You need to keep your aim a little higher. You should be concerned more with conversion rates or click-through rates; depending upon your goals.
  9. B2B, or not 2B – The answer to this question is that B-to-B email marketing is on the upswing but keep it targeted, interesting and directly personalized to get recipients engaged in the message of the campaign.
  10. Ask and ye shall receive – Use the communication opportunity to your customers to ask questions about anything you can think of. These provided great opportunities to learn more about your customers and targets alike.
  11. Get Mobile – Reaching out to mobile users with your message will become a key target in the coming years as the penetration of email capable devices continues to grow over the next few years.
  12. And lastly… TEST, TEST, TEST

Interested in how EMM can help with these? Here’s the high points:

  • Need to segment lists? Use Custom Queries to create repeatable groups of campaign recipients. You can slice and dice your users by network, by zip codes or just about any data point available in ASPDNSF customer records. With some SQL creativity, you could even target your lists at customers who haven’t bought recently (or ever) or even ones who bought a specific product.
  • Accountability? Track not only opens, but more importantly, use the click tracking to monitor the success of actually driving your customers to your landing pages, site or other location
  • Mobile ready? Taking full advantage of multi-part messaging available in EMM to reach mobile devices of varying email capabilities by letting the device sort out which of version of your campaign to display.

If you have any thoughts on this, or any topic, please DO use the comments feature below start a dialog with MJG or any other readers of this blog!

When To Send… Does It Matter?

MarketingSherpa.com regularly posts articles of interest to e-tailers and marketeers. Here is one that I thought EMM customers might find of particular interest.

The question revolves around whether or not time of day makes a difference in the click-through rates for e-mail campaigns. Not surprisingly, they came to the conclusion that time of day does indeed matter!

The first step is to use analytics to narrow down the choice of times to test. You are using analytics, right? No? Then shame on you! In this day of Google Analytics (which is free BTW) there is no reason to not use Analytics to analyze the performance of your site. Most tools will show you the busiest hours on your site. The example used showed that 9 am & noon were the busiest hours with Tuesday being the busiest day of the week. With this info in hand they moved onto the next step.

Next you have to determine how to best segment your audience. Since this is a time based test, they chose to segment by time zone. You could just as easily have done it by state or network or anything else. EMM allows you a great flexibility in doing this via the Custom Query feature in each campaign. In this case they chose the two busiest hours and an off-peak hour to test against.

The next step would be to actually send the A/B/C tests. Because the only variable they wanted in this test was the time, the subject line and body of the message remained the same. EMM is perfect for this since the administrative interface refers to messages by a unique title you can name that makes sense rather than referring to the subject line alone. After the emails were sent they went back and evaluated the results by the click-through rates; another area where EMM shines. No need to go to a paid service to track click-through rates when this is built into the product. Conversion was less important since the content of the message and the landing pages were the same.

What were the results you ask? Does it really matter? I would argue that is doesn’t matter much as their customers are different than yours and mine. The only way that we can make assumptions about GENERAL buying trends is to compare the data across multiple customer bases.

It is more important that you take the time to run a test like this yourself and report your results here in a comment so we can all benefit from the shared knowledge.

Source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30305