I hypothesize one cause of the problem is due to email marketing software is too easy. Convenience can be dangeous when anyone and their boss can send a mass email to all past, present and potential customers. Trust me when I say a lot of the email marketing services out there are very powerful and able to send hundreds of emails per second.

Don’t get me wrong – email marketing software isn’t “easy” when it comes to segmentation or launching a highly targeted email marketing and campaign. For that, it’s complex and can be mind-boggling to even the most savviest email marketer. Instead, many email marketing apps make it easy to cause big mistakes. Those mistakes can result in undesirable unsubscribes, treacherous spam complaints or even being dropped entirely by your email marketing provider. Nobody wants that, but it’s remarkably easy to do it.

So, what’s the solution? Learn and push your email marketing software to its limits. Understand how it offers segmentation, automation and know what will entice your subscribers to act. In a majority of instances, what sounds good in the morning to send might be better to send later that week  – or not even at all. Thinking like your subscriber is huge for understanding what will provide them value. In fact, eMarketer recently published a report that concludes that list fatigue (age + lack of relevance) is why most people lose interest in emails sent by businesses.

(On that note, Infusionsoft provides a ton of features within the software and plenty of excellent documentation so you can build a highly-targeted campaign for your business.)

Effective email marketers practice discipline. It takes patience to analyze the metrics and activity with their email marketing software. It takes a thoughtful leader to make decisions that support the interests of the subscriber over the business.

Like sending email at 1:30 AM to your co-workers, it’s probably a good idea to draft it up and revisit it after several hours. Your email marketing shouldn’t differ. (And yes, I have been guilty of this and my co-workers probably are nodding in agreement.)

As marketers, in our next email marketing campaign, can we commit to segment and fine-tune our list before we hit send?

How are you “aiming” before sending? Share your insight in the comments below!

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I’ll save you time and pain and break down exactly what deliverability is, how it is measured, and what you can do today to improve your email deliverability.

Deliverability, in general, refers to getting email messages to the inbox of the recipient. It’s often used interchangeably with the term “Delivery Rate” which is a calculation of deliverability.

Good Deliverability
Good deliverability is simply when messages arrive to the inbox. This is the goal of any email sender – especially email marketers. If an email never makes it in front of the recipient, it is as though it was never sent.

Poor Deliverability
Poor deliverability refers to any message that fails to reach a recipient’s inbox. A number of reasons including bad email addresses, aged lists, poor reputation, or spammy content can cause email delivery failures.

Determining Delivery Rate
The most accurate method for calculating delivery rates and the one used by ESPs such as Infusionsoft is Seed List Testing through an independent email reputation service. We use ReturnPath’s Mailbox Monitor to monitor the reputation of our email servers. This is used to test our email infrastructure; we take out all the variables we can’t control. This means we send to a seed list of working email addresses using content that has proven not to trigger spam filters. Mailbox Monitor automatically goes and checks all the email accounts and tells us what was delivered to the inbox, what never showed up and what landed in the spam filter. If we see things going into the spam filter, or not showing up, when using our known good content, we investigate to fix the problem.

How Infusionsoft Helps You

Infusionsoft does several key activities to ensure that our infrastructure gives your email the best chance at delivery.

Advanced Mail Servers – We use the Message Systems Momentum the same advanced mail platform used by the email heavyweight Facebook to server over 400 million people. If your message cannot get through a certain route our mail servers will intelligently try other routes until it is successful. There’s a reason why Facebook uses these types of mail servers. We agree.

Strict No-Spam Policy – Users reporting spam is one of the most damaging factors in email deliverability. Since we have and enforce our spam policies, we are able to carry on great relationships with ISPs.

Authentication – We use DKIM/Domain Keys signing and Sender-ID/SPF on all outbound email messages. These are the two industry standard methods ISPs use to ensure emails are coming from trusted sources. This makes it easy so you don’t have to worry about configuring SPF or Domain Key records on your own server.

Automated Monitoring – We have developed a system for identifying potentially risky campaigns and automatically monitor them to ensure they are not problematic. If a campaign appears to be problematic it gets paused for human review.

People Monitor Systems 24/7 – We actively test and monitor our infrastructure, systems and security. Our team of dedicated individuals monitors the Infusionsoft sending infrastructure ensuring emails are flowing. We also leverage blacklist detection and deliverability alerts using ReturnPath services.

As you can see, we have taken care of all the geeky technical stuff. However, the responsibility doesn’t rest on our shoulders alone.

Here are basic steps you can take today to maintain or improve your email deliverability:

Use Permission Marketing – As I mentioned ISP spam complaints really hurt deliverability. By ensuring everyone you send email to has requested it directly from you and are expecting the it,  you are going to send you reduce complaints and improve your reputation.

Keep a Clean List – Remove inactive contacts (older than six months) from your list. Some major ISPs turn old email addresses into spam traps that damage your reputation. We have also found that the risk for spam complaints doubles at approximately six months.

Use a Spam Checker – Getting blocked by a content spam filter will either land you in the spam folder or worse cause your email to never show up. You can use tools like Litmus to check your email for spam characteristics. There is a small fee, but it is well worth it. Alternatively, you can also use a Windows program, MailingCheck, that will provide you the SpamAssassin score for a specific email.

Ask to be Whitelisted – Ask users to add you to their “Safe Sender” list. When a user adds you to their whitelist, they are essentially turning the content filtering off for email coming from you. This increases your chances of constantly reaching your recipients. This activity is considered by some ISPs as “engagement,” so it never hurts to ask.

Email deliverability is a big deal to us. It’s no question that it should be — we help our users send over 30 million email messages a week and they expect their messages to reach customers and prospects in their businesses. By utilizing the Infusionsoft mail systems and following the steps outlined above you will achieve excellent delivery rates, reach more people, and ultimately be a more successful marketer.

After reading this, you should have a solid understanding of exactly what is email deliverability, how Infusionsoft protects it for its users and how email senders can improve their email deliverability. If you have questions about email deliverability, reputation or best practices, let us know by leaving a comment below.

[Image credit: Horia Vorlan]

Soon, Microsoft will make an important upgrade to their email services (Hotmail/MSN/Live) which changes the email marketing game quite a bit. As we Tweeted previously, we wanted to give you the scoop about this so you’re ahead of the curve.

Microsoft reports that approximately 50% of email sent to their Hotmail/Live/MSN users can be classified as junk mail, not to be confused with Spam. Meaning, spam is email that would be unsolicited, suspicious, phishing or simply something people never wanted. With that said, Hotmail cites 80% of their spam reports are not actually spam messages. Hotmail differentiates the two because they are two very distinct problems. Hotmail, for example, views junk mail as being a newsletter you may have signed up years ago that, “continues to haunt your inbox, or the promotional email that you forgot to unsubscribe from, or the real estate listing alert you never canceled.”  They classify this as inbox “Clutter.”

What does this mean to you as an email marketer?  This means “the times they are a changin’,” and now it is more important than ever to be sure your email marketing tactics evolve along with the rest of the industry. You need to ask yourself as a marketer, several self-analysis questions.  How targeted are your emails to each individual on your list?  … Are you sending truly relevant information?  … Do your emails contain value to individuals?  As objectively as possible, ask yourself if you would perceive your own email as junk mail or ‘clutter’?

Hotmail is one of the first major email services to provide these tools to their users. Others will follow their lead. Now is the time to clean up the clutter before your emails become swept aside with all major email service providers.

Below are a few highlights of new the new Hotmail features:

• Efficient inbox management tools;
• Filtered inbox views;
  
• Improved user-filtering tools …  intelligent email filtering technology to help reduce “clutter” for their users;
• Send up to 10gb of photos through email.

Recommendations on How to Handle the New Hotmail Changes:

1. Take a moment to thoroughly understand the new Hotmail features.
2. Engage your recipients in your emails, always.
3. Segment (narrow) your list as much as possible in order to cater to individual’s expectations and needs — this is the raw power of Infusionsoft and Email Marketing 2.0.
4. Send out occasional emails asking recipients what they want. Polling them helps you gauge their interest. Are your emails too frequent, not frequent enough, irrelevant, too sales-driven, etc.?
5. Provide different types of email campaigns for your recipients.  For example, do they just want a monthly newsletter, promotions and offers, product updates or all of the above? (Tip: Use Automation Links to make this super easy for recipients.)

In the end, make your emails standout from the rest of the clutter in your recipient’s inbox. Consider mailing less and providing more. But whatever you do, don’t follow this advice.

According to the Windows Live Blog, you have about three weeks to get your stuff together and stop sending Clutter.

Why bother connecting social media to email marketing?
Simple, people are naturally curious and will click around what interests them. Specifically, you want to keep your email subscribers engaged, interested and happy to receive your content. You also want your social media content to spread like wildfire so people share content with online friends. Either way, it’s a win-win-win for you, your subscribers and their friends.

Why would you bother using lead-generation in social media — it’s not authentic or genuine? Bull. Social media is a great method to provide and share information if you got the chops with a worthy piece of content. There’s nothing wrong with allowing people to exchange their info for your killer content. Many social media purists may disagree and all I have to say is it’s a lost opportunity if you’re not capturing leads from content that you invest time (and likely, money) into creating.

With that said, I’ve listed 19 suggestions on how you can connect social media with your email marketing campaigns. It’s not terribly difficult, but not a breeze, either. Social media takes effort to pull off well and email marketing takes discipline.

I don’t recommend everyone heeds all these suggestions. In fact, I recommend you cherry-pick a few ideas and execute on them very well. You’ll be surprised and intrigued by the response. Pay close attention to the response, feedback and analytics of your marketing campaign to determine whether or not people like what you’re doing.

You must have at least a couple other ideas that I didn’t think of. Share your ideas and feedback in the comments below.

[Image credit: webtreats]

The goal of email marketing 2.0 is tailored in such a way to not worry about spam filters. We know that; however, it’s important to consider the levels of filters their recipients have so you see what you’re up against to get the message in the inbox.

We’re not alone. Every Email Service Provider (ESP) provider including Constant Contact, iContact and AWeber all face the challenge of getting their users’ messages to the inbox. While the ESP maintains the bulk of the responsibility in getting messages there, content of the emails are crucial to consistently have the message hit the inbox, not the spam folder.

Illustrated below, I explain the levels of spam filtering that take place with each message.

The ISP filter checks for the major sources of Spam and reject offending messages. These often handle the 75% of work for anti-spam operations. This includes checking for Email Relays, IP Reputation, Authentication (Phishing), botnets and simply accepts or denies a senders from proceeding to send their email.  When mail is rejected here, a bounce is sent to the sender for later handling. (Infusionsoft automatically handles these for you.)

The Content Filter rests between the email recipient and their ISP. These handle about 20% of anti-spam operations. This will often check the email for content that doesn’t meet their standards, such as malicious attachments, spammy words and even the overall “fingerprint” of the email itself. When mail is rejected here, it’s silent and often the user doesn’t know. Some ISPs may bounce the message back with details, but not always.

Finally, the Personal Filter is the filter that happens when the recipient’s email software filters the messages on its criteria. These handle about 5% of anti-spam operations. Depending on the email service, the ISP may offer this through a web-based interface or in the case of Outlook, it’s running with the email client. These filters honor any request by the recipient. When mail is rejected here, it’s silent and often the user doesn’t know until they specifically look for the message. (Don’t believe me? Try syncing your Gmail account in Outlook and watch what lands in the “Junk Email” sub-folder. It’s a pretty liberal spam filter.)

What do you do with this information? That, I can’t tell you. It’s up to you.

Infusionsoft (along with any reputable ESP) has a good IP reputation and a Feedback Loop (FBL) established with ISPs so they can handle any complaints that come through. Infusionsoft also makes it easy to build standards-compliant emails, so that’s covered. We recommend users adhere to industry-leading best practices so you don’t get flagged as a spammer. Lastly, we drop spammers when we encounter them, preserving good deliverability for all the rest of our users.

If there’s one nugget of advice to takeaway from all this, it’s this:

Encourage recipients to add your email address to their address book. This is known as Whitelisting and often Whitelists supersede Content Filters to your recipients email inboxes. With Infusionsoft, you can ask people to add your email address to their address book, and many people will if they want to continue receiving your messages.

Now for a little disclosure. I used to work within the AOL Postmaster team. During my tenure there, I learned a lot about how they (specifically AOL/AIM/Netscape/CompuServe) filter their inbound email. No information from this article is proprietary or confidential — at least I hope not. AOL sets the standard when it comes to aggressive spam filtering, so I can only assume other top-tier ISPs follow suit.

[Image credit: TheTruthAbout]