Persuasive e-Marketing » 2007

Archive for January, 2007

January 30th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

It seems I hear this every week, unfortunately it also seems to always be true. Why should you care? Because the more spam there is, the harder it is to get your message into the inbox and embraced by your recipients.

Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop, posted a great recap of the most popular spamming techniques, as well as some additional resources, like this very indepth post about spam.

Unfortunately, spam will never go away. However, email marketers need to do their part to ensure they aren’t sending spam, and complying with all best practices/legislation. It’s really too bad when legitimate email marketers make spam oopsies and results in less time spent catching the real bad spammers.

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

Don’t care about Deliverability? Well now you should!

January 26th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

According to an article in ClickZ, ISPs are getting more aggressive about bounce rates. Spam is on the rise (again!!) and because of spammers constantly outsmarting filters, ISPs have decided to instead to focus less on email content, and more on sender reputation. This means if you aren’t consistently cleaning your bounces, you could see a spike in ISP blocks.

From the article:

In response, ISPs are doing what they’ve always done: tightening delivery requirements. The good news for e-mail marketers is the use of image spam and extreme variations in content mean that content filtering is less of a focus. The bad news is list hygiene and other chores related to best practices are becoming much more onerous. In particular, ISPs are increasingly aggressive about bounce rates. There’s a clear correlation between high bounce rates and spam, so it’s understandable ISPs utilize this as part of their defense.

Continue reading at ClickZ

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

Spammers hijack the e-newsletter

January 19th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

So spammers have finally decided to try to mimic e-newsletters to fool spam filters. Unfortunately if they choose to hijack your brand… you’re in trouble. I haven’t seen any examples yet, but this is definitely a story to watch..

Posted in Email marketing | 1 Comment »

A great idea that got lost along the way

January 18th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

Ok, don’t get me wrong, I love MediaPost - I subscribe to a bunch of its publications and regularly read & love them. However, today, I got a new one called “Performance Insider”, so out of curiosity I open it up and pleasantly to my surprise, it has this note attached introducing me, explaining what the new newsletter is about and why they think I might be interested (because I already subscribe to other similar MediaPost newsletters)

So anyway, I find the note compelling enough and decide I want to subscribe, so I click the link… but it brings me to a registration page (strange, since the note sounds like the email was only sent to those who are already registered) but no worries, I easily find a link for existing users. Then it prompts me to login.. I try once - invalid login, I try again - Invalid login, one more time - same thing.

Now I registered eons ago, and I’m sure I checked the “save my login info” because I ALWAYS do… but it’s not there now, and now after so many steps I’ve lost interest and won’t be subscribing to this new newsletter…

This is why it’s always important to make things quick and easy for subscribers, why couldn’t I just click a link and it automatically subscribes me to this email. I mean I’m already subscribed to their other publications, so it’s not like they need any additional info from me.

Posted in Email marketing | 1 Comment »

The importance of the ‘from name’

January 18th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

Do you ever get email from people who haven’t emailed you before, see the name and at first glance think it’s spam?

It seems every time this happens I sort of think in the back of my head “geez that person’s name looks spammy”, but the real issue here is the importance of the relationship between the sender and the recipient. With the high amount of spam these days, any unrecognizable name looks spammy.

For example, if your company name is really familiar to your audience, but specific people in your organization are not, then you should consider using the company name in the from line.

However, if the list is business contacts of one of your sales people, then perhaps his/her name in the from line is most appropriate.

I think people often feel having a person’s name in the from line makes the email more personalized, but if recipients don’t know the name, you’ll quickly be excused as spam.

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

Outlook 2007: bad news for email marketers

January 15th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

If you haven’t heard yet, Microsoft is in the midst of releasing Outlook 2007. However, it looks like Microsoft is shocking email marketers everywhere with decreased HTML & CSS support.

The good news is, Microsoft has already posted a list of what will and will not work as well as a validator to check your HTML.

Also, the Campaign Monitor blog has posted a good write up about it (including screenshots of what works/doesn’t work)

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

Thinking of changing your email template?

January 14th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

(found this over at the ClickZ blog)

Not the first time I’ve heard about this, but it’s relatively new; the beta versions of the new Yahoo and MSN email clients include a preview pane. But unlike your typical Outlook preview pane, the width in these beta versions are more narrow. Many people (including me) read most of their emails in the preview pane, and horizontal scrolling is a major pain. You may want to consider slimming down your template to accomodate this new design.

Does anyone else get the feeling soon our emails will start to look pretty silly?

Check out the ClickZ article about it - even has a little screenshot.

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

MarketingSherpa’s Marketing Wisdom for 2007

January 10th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should check out MarketingSherpa’s Marketing Wisdom for 2007, because it has so much great advice, you’ll definitely be setting yourself up for a good year.

As you can probably guess, I perused the “Email Marketing” section, and it’s fantastic. One reoccuring theme is to re-send your email campaigns a week or two later to all who did not open the original campaign. It’s very easy to do, and from the sounds in the report - leads to great ROI! Try it!

Posted in Email marketing | 1 Comment »

Calling all Canadian Corporate Bloggers

January 9th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

Try saying that five times fast!

Anyway, blogging has taken the internet world by storm, and Canadian businesses are catching up. Dave Forde over at Profectio is seeking Canadian Corporate bloggers to participate in a very short survey about how Canadian businesses are blogging.

I’m a big sucker for Canadian-based internet research, so please, check it out! Results will be published on the Profectio site in the next few weeks.

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

Why good writers (occasionally) produce bad writing.

January 5th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

The saddest part about being a writer, is EVERYONE thinks they can write. So especially if you are writing for a client, you rarely encounter someone who says
“Well you are the expert, so I’m sure whatever you write is best.”

So where I’m going with this, is I found this great article on the Bad Language blog. “Why good writers (occasionally) produce bad writing.” Sometimes it’s the writer’s fault: tight deadlines, bad working environment etc. and other times it’s dealing with too many editors, corporate speak and so on.

If you’re thinking “What does this have to do with email?” then the answer is EVERYTHING! In email every word is precious and the writing needs to be concise and convincing in order to keep a captive audience. Keep your writing skills sharp!

Posted in Email marketing | No Comments »

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