I Got Your Spam Blockers …
Right Heeeere …
Hello and welcome back to another installment of Working IT Out! Today I’d like to take some time and discuss one of the most important issues you’ll come across during your e-mail marketing.
Now, we’ve all been there before … I just finished writing a killer sales letter.
The copy is sparkling with tasty quips and glorious phrases that outline and emphasize the unbelievable deal that I’m orchestrating. You would be a fool not to buy after perusing my persuading work of art.
But alas, many will never see my masterpiece because the powers that be have declared that my magnum opus of sales letters is flagged as spam.
AAARGH!
So what we need to do as copywriters, marketers, and business owners is ensure that our message actually gets to the potential customers just chomping at the bit to receive our message.
In this issue we’ll talk about:
- The difference between opt-in e-mail, double opt-in e-mail and opt-out e-mail.
- What whitelisting is and how to use it.
- What some of the experts are saying about e-mail deliverability.
- Several different resources to test your e-mails through, to give you the best chance at eluding spam blockers.
- And much, much more!
The difference between opt-in e-mail,
double opt-in e-mail and opt-out e-mail.
I’d like start by talking about a few different ways that e-mails are collected. Now if you’re worried about e-mail deliverability, then it stands to reason that you collect e-mails in some fashion.
The way in which you collect e-mails has a direct effect on the deliverability of your e-mails to the collected list.
Let’s start by discussing 3 common forms of collecting e-mails:
- Opt-In E-mail Form: This is a very standard and common way to collect e-mail addresses. It basically asks the potential lead to put their e-mail address and other information into a form and then click submit.
- Double Opt-In E-mail: A double opt-in approach, takes the standard opt-in one step further by first asking them to submit their email address but then requiring them to confirm their subscription. A common double opt-in is where the company sends a follow up email after registration by the subscriber asking them to click a link to make the subscription active.
- Opt-Out E-mail: This form of e-mail collection was very common a few years ago and still rears its ugly head today. A common place to find opt-out e-mail forms is during co-registration forms on popular sites.
The main difference between opt-in and opt-out e-mails is that for opt-out e-mails you’re in unless you specify that you don’t want to be in, usually by the use of a check box saying, "uncheck this box if you don’t want to receive our newsletter."
For example, let’s say you buy a subscription to a popular online newspaper, and while you are filling out the form to purchase, you see an already checked box that says “Would you like to receive e-mails from our friends?”
This is an example of opt-out e-mail because it requires the client to uncheck the box, or opt out. If they do nothing then, they will be opted-in to whatever the online newspaper has you checked to receive.
Now, this could be a problem because many people may not want the subscription, but overlooked the check box and just completed their order.
So all of the sudden they start getting your sales messages, but they don’t remember ever signing up, so they mark your e-mails as spam.
Multiply this scenario by a large percentage of the new names you got from this co-registration, and you’re well on your way to getting blacklisted as a spammer.
Now, many of you have heard the term blacklisting before, but in case you weren’t quite sure what it meant, it simply means that you have been blacklisted by a website that collects lists of known and suspected spammers.
This information is then used by popular e-mail spam blocking programs to help filter out the e-mails sent by known spammers.
This leads to a question, “If there is a list of known spammers … Is there also a list of known non-spammers?”
In steps the concept of whitelisting …
What Whitelisting is and How to Use It
Simply put, a whitelist is a list of e-mail addresses or more importantly domain names of e-mail senders, which an e-mail spam blocking program will allow messages to go through and not end up in the person’s junk mail.
Spam blockers are intended to prevent unsolicited e-mail messages or spam from showing up in your inbox.
But like most technology, it ain’t perfect …
Creative spammers spend many hours toiling away at breaking the spam blockers, thus spam gets through.
This of course creates a huge obstacle for honest marketers who are e-mailing legitimate sales letters to clients that desire the information.
Whitelisting is usually as easy as letting the spam filter know that you want e-mails from this address to come through and not be blocked.
This is done by adding the e-mail address to your trusted senders list, contact list, address book or whatever your e-mail program has named the list of people you trust.
Checkout this page we created to help guide people when attempting to whitelist our e-mail address.
So how important is it to ensure that your e-mail goes?
Well, the truth is you probably can’t ensure that it all will go through, but you can give your e-mail the best possible chance for success.
It ain’t rocket surgery. If the client never sees the e-mail, then they have a zero percent chance of following the sales letter and making a purchase.
What some of the experts are saying
about e-mail deliverability
As I was researching solutions to deliverability issues, I ran across a great site that published a very interesting PDF about e-mail deliverability, E-mail Deliverability: How We Got Here and What Marketer’s Should do About It, published by the Deliverability Hub of the E-mail Marketing Council of the Direct Marketing Association (UK) June 2007.
Well, when I ran across this PDF published by the DMA, I was thrilled to find such a respected organization providing a free comprehensive publication on the subject of deliverability.
They went into an in-depth cost analysis on just how much it hurts when you can’t get your e-mails through to your potential clients. It’s pretty analytical so I’m going to paraphrase it a bit here, but you can always peruse the article in its entirety.
How much it costs you if your e-mail is blocked …
So how does it affect us as marketers and business owners? Well, it affects us directly in the pocketbook.
One simple way to calculate exactly how much blocked e-mails cost you is first figuring out exactly how much you make on average off of each e-mail and then multiply that by the number of e-mails that were blocked.
|
Number of Emails
Blocked |
X
|
Average Earnings
per E-mail Sent |
=
|
Total Amount of
money lost due to spam blockers |
So let’s say you send out 10,000 e-mails and you make $2000 in sales off the e-mails. That means that on average each e-mail is making you 20 cents. Your average earnings per e-mail sent is $0.20.
We know if all 10,000 go through we will make our $2000, but if 20% of our e-mails are blocked due to spam, that is 2000 blocked e-mails that never make it to our potential clients.
Multiply those 2000 blocked e-mails by your 20 cents earned per e-mail sent and you can figure out a ball park figure for just how much you are losing due to blocked e-mails.
2000 x $0.20 = $400
Instead of $2000, I now only make $1600. This means that if you can increase your deliverability rate you stand to gain as much as 20% more to your gross sales every time you blast an e-mail campaign.
I’ll admit this is an over-simplification of the impact spam blockers have on us, but at the very least it shows why one shouldn’t ignore the implications entirely.
Of course, it boils down to testing once again and making sure that the strategies you implement make sense for your market.
For example, we have found that long copy, graphic HTML e-mails perform better than text only e-mails in certain scenarios. The problem is that long HTML e-mails almost always go straight to junk mail for almost all subscribers that haven’t whitelisted us.
Now the dilemma is do we blast the e-mail knowing full well that our deliverability will be lower?
In this case, the answer is yes.
Sure you will lose a higher than normal amount of opens due to the poor delivery rate, but you gain a much better response from those who do get the e-mails.
It really becomes a simple question once you do the math, but it is important to keep testing your market.
Six months ago, HTML e-mails might have outperformed text-only e-mails or vice versa, but that can change. Only with constant testing can you ensure that you’re maximizing your results.
Several different resources to test
your e-mails through, to give you
the best chance at eluding spam blockers.
Assuming that I have convinced you that it is important to get your messages through … here is a list of resources I have found that have helped us get our messages through spam blockers.
Now remember, the point of these resources is to help businesses and marketers get their sales messages to potential clients that want the sales letter.
These resources are not intended to help you find a way around the spam blockers just to spam people. This is intended to help deliver your message to people who have opted-in to receive what you’re sending.
If you are hazy about spam laws, here is a nice site that explains them in detail.
Spam Resources:
http://www.emailcenteruk.com/spam_submit.php
http://www.deliverability.com/
http://www.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/
Remember to take adavantage of free webmail acounts for testing also. There is no reason why you can’t sign up for another e-mail address such as tester_companyname@gmail or yahoo or msn. That way when you set up your test lists you can see how the e-mail will actually look in the different browsers.
I hope this helps get you message across the ether. If you find other resources, be sure to let us know about them in the comments below.
Until next time!
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Editor, Working IT Out
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
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