Recently I have picked up some interest in email marketing and also did a few blog posts on content strategies for email marketing and email marketing services . This is kind of a sequel to those two, trying to talk about another eternal problem in email marketing : avoiding the spam filter.

Avoiding the spam filter has always been a challenge for email marketers and while there has been certain known triggers that gets the spam filters on a overdrive, there’s a lot more to avoiding email spam.

One of the most well defined guidelines on this is the US CAN SPAM law. You can find the details here. While this is legally binding upon email marketers operating for a US company, there are some general email marketing best practices to avoid the spam filter that everyone can follow :

1. Don’t use false / misleading email headers
2. Identify the message as an advertisement, if it is so. You can simply use [ADV] on the subject line
3. Include a valid postal address for the sender
4. Make sure your Unsubscribe option is included in the mailer and is working perfectly.

While these are some basic principles that are easy to maintain, there is every chance that your emailer content can put you into the spam box. Most ISPs use a point based system that identifies trigger phrases commonly used by spammers. If an email goes over the points it is filtered out. Now the question is how do you know  if your email is about to trigger off the spam filters ?

A Tool to Avoid Spam Filters for Email Marketing

While knowing these terms helps to avoid spam, there might be some tools for the same. I love the one that StreamSend provides. I have been a big fan of StreamSend as an email marketing tool and the Analysis tool they offer has just increased my love for them. While the tool offers four very useful features, the two I love most are :

1. It runs your email through 9 spam filters  for any sign of spam triggering content, helping you avoid the spam box and increase your inbox rate.
2. It also allows your to preview your email in 30 different email clients in various modes ( images on/off, preview pane etc), ensuring your email looks exactly the way you want them to be.

I feel these two features address two of the most dreaded challenges in email marketing and to have these tools integrated right into the email marketing solution you are using makes it a lot more easier. I would strongly recommend trying out Stream Send to anyone into email marketing not just for the awesome interface and analytics they provide but more so for these two amazing features that can go a long way in ensuring a higher ROI for your email marketing campaign.

If  you don’t have a tool like this and are depending on your manual judgement to avoid the spam filters for your email, here are few more common points to avoid :

1. A low ratio of text to image in your HTML
2. HTML and Text parts are different
3. Subject line in all caps
4. Use of “Dear” in address – “Dear ” – No he isn’t so dear to you !
5. “You registered with a partner” – having this in your text tells the spam filters your list is most likely not permission based

Words triggering spam are too numerous to put in this post, instead I have included this PDF with a list of those email marketing spam triggers that you should avoid like Plague if you want your email to hit the inbox.

The post Email Marketing : How to Avoid the Spam Filters appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Selection of content type as a part of your email marketing strategy is highly dependent on various factors including the type of industry you are in, your campaign objective, the list to whom you are sending the content ( or vice versa, depending on the content you want to send, you create a targeted list) and more. While there is no limitations to it, here in this article, I am trying to lay down a few different types of content that can be used for an email campaign and how they set in with different types of email marketing strategies.

1. The “Our Products” Emails : These are most common with e-commerce websites and honestly I don’t see this as any long term strategy. Here each mailer is like a campaign by itself, where you send a list of products that are in your store, at times some discounts, coupons etc and expect people to click through to the site and make a purchase.
2. The “Promotion” Emails : These are also offered by e-commerce websites as well as almost any and every company that offers some product/services for sales. This would typically be a short piece of content explaining the product/service, and feature a discount code / promotion code etc. You expect people to click through and make purchase on your website. This could be very effective, when you have a relatively large inventory for certain items or want to give your sales a shot in the arm. The main difference between the earlier one and this one is that, the earlier email was more about featuring a wide range of products, whereas in these emails, the Promotion/Discount is the hero of the content.
3. The “Short Course” Emails : When a person subscribes to your list, it is your responsibility to deliver some value and these short courses are an wonderful way to do it. Develop a short course that is broken down into smaller modules of 4,5,7 or 10 days. Send one module in one emailer and pace it our evenly – not everyday, not once in two months but may be once every week ( depending on the depth and seriousness of the content).What do you achieve with it ? A well designed course would actually deliver value for users, regular short paced emails would really help in establishing your brand and will have a good recall. Also, if you are in any knowledge business, this short courses could be a great precursor to promoting your paid courses.
4. The “Content Hero” Emails : Yeah, I loved this name, because indeed content is the real Hero in these emails. When you produce a great piece of content, like a White Paper, an Infographic, some big shot Interview etc, you love people to know about it and these emails are meant for that. These emails would be extremely short, with small description about the content and prominent placement of call to action that would take the visitor to your website, where they can savor the content. While you could have served the content right inside the email, it is always better to have the user over to your website to view the content – you wont serve champagne in a water tumbler, would you ? It gives you more page views, chances are your users would also visit a few more content pieces that you have created and engage further with your brand.
5. The “Monthly Newsletter” Emails : These could be very interesting and probably one of the most easier ones to create. If your content generation capabilities are limited, this is the best approach for you. These newsletters typically use a magazine format, where you serve a mix of industry news, update, events and similar information along with some updates about your company and what you are doing. While there is a drawback in this type of mailers because you might be promoting news and articles published by other websites – you can always make it more interesting by adding your perspective to those news. From a receivers perspective, they would most likely read this email because this keeps him updated about all the industry happening. At the same time it helps you to push in your company updates to the readers. These emails are typically sent monthly or once in two weeks and are great for regularly connecting with your prospects and customers and creating a strong brand recall.

The post Email Marketing Strategy : Planning Your Content appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The need and importance of email marketing has been proved beyond any doubt and it is still one of the very effective ways for lead generation and brand building till date in certain industries. For an email marketing campaign to work well though, it is critical that you have a proper software to run the campaign. The days of desktop software are however gone and it is easier and much cheaper to use any of the online email marketing services that are way cheaper yet offers pretty robust solution.

So, why do you need an email marketing service? You can always send emails from Outlook or any other email client There are a lot of email marketing services available online like StreamSend, Constant Contact etc and it is often a challenge to select the right one. Here are few points that you must be looking for while selecting an email marketing services :

Creation of Emails / Template : Most of these email marketing services offers a template library, but you should be looking at what are the options beyond using those templates. While in most cases the templates are customizable, full customization is often not possible which could be critical for proper branding. Ideally an email marketing service should give you the option to use your own HTML mailers, use any of their templates as well as have provision for sending a version for non-HTML supported mail clients.

List Management : Again a common feature in most email marketing services however, the ease of operating the same is critical. The system should allow you to not just do bulk uploads of email address but also group/ classify them into separate lists, offer download options, manage unsubscribes etc. managing unsubscribes is one of the most critical features, the system should be able to automatically able to take out all the unsubscribed emails from the lists and make sure that future emails are not delivered to those addresses.

Delivery : Delivering emails to inbox has always been a challenge for email marketers. A good email marketing service takes different steps to ensure maximum deliverability. Some of them includes setting up SPF records for the senders email address, throttling the email blast over a reasonable period of time, analysis of email content etc. Before you select an email marketing service try to check these options, they are critical to ensure the visibility of your emails.

Analytics : One of the key advantages of digital marketing channels over all others is the availability of precise analytics data. Email marketing is no different, almost all email marketing services provide analytics to some extent but I would strongly recommend that you go with one that gives you a really detailed level of analytics. I have been personally using StreamSend for last 3-4 years and they have been extremely satisfactory in this count. You should be able to track not just the inbox delivery and open rates but also click throughs, which are the links clicked, unique viewers, unique clickers, forwards, social shares, bounce rate and numbers along with the category( reason why it the mail bounced), domain level breakdown of delivery, bounce, delivery rate per time increment and tons of similar intricate details that can help fine tune your campaign. Also, as most of us use Google Analytics, what I love in StreamSend is its extremely easy integration with GA, so I can get all the data in my analytics dashboard.

While these are the primary features and functionalities that you should be looking for while selecting an email marketing service the fact is most of them does offer these features to some extent but what makes the difference is the robustness of the solution provided, the ease of use for the interface and any additional tools that they might offer. For example, in StreamSend they do offer an Analyses tool which I really love. It allows you to preview your email in different mail clients, runs it through 9 spam filters to check whether its triggering any signs of spam content also do some spot checking using thumbnails of your mail content. A tool like this could be highly effective in saving your emails from landing in junk and can increase your visibility substantially.

 Having said all these, one crucial factor remains to be discussed. Pricing. Well most email marketing services offers various packages based on your needs and even have some free trial package with limited features/capacity. I started with the free trial that StreamSend offers but then eventually upgraded to higher packages as my requirement increased . I think that is a better model as it helps you to understand and get comfortable with the system before you start paying but with packages starting as low as $19.90, its definitely affordable if you are serious about email marketing.

The post Email Marketing Services – What Should You Look For ? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.