Weekend challenge: answer these questions

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 30, 2007

an empty padI keep a permanent list of questions about email marketing for which I have no easy answers.

I thought it might be fun to publish the list and see if you can come up with anything.

So here you go...

  • If your "from" or "sender" line is a brand, business or name that recipients will easily recognize, do you need to mention your brand/business/name again in the subject line?

  • If you embed images directly in your email, are they blocked the same way as hosted images or are they more likely to display? And are there any other issues here (such as reduced deliverability?)

  • (Non-statisticians look away!) Hotmail and other services block your email when you exceed a certain percentage of spam complaints. Given that statistical anomalies are more likely with smaller lists, is that percentage number the same regardless of how many emails you send? Or is there also a minimum absolute number of spam reports required as well?

  • Which is more important (now and in the future): your IP sender reputation or your domain sender reputation?

  • Say you send a series of emails that form a whole (like a one-email-a-week teaser campaign building to a big special offer.) What do you do when one week you have a delivery problem at certain address domains, but not the next week? In other words, how do you cope with the scenario where some people missed one of the series?

  • It is claimed that just a handful of US-based spammers are responsible for most of the spam we get. Why don't Microsoft, Yahoo and Google throw $100 million into an anti-spam pot and do all the groundwork needed for the US authorities to close down these spam operations?

  • How will email habits and attitudes change over the next 12 months?

Use the comments, contact me directly or put a post up on your blog if you have one or more answers! Enlighten me!

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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8 Comments:

Hi Im Neil Hale and I am head of marketing at a company called BuyBrandTools.com.

We have been running e-mail marketing campaigns for a while and I thought I would answer a few of the questions from my perspective.

1. Not all the time no, I find that we get just as high a response rate with a question in the subject line.

5. If you are sending a series of emails, then it is important that these emails are archived online, with links back to previous emails in each further email.

6. They should but spammers will always find a new way to carry out their "work".

7. Hard to say - "the futures not ours to see"

Great blog by the way
By Blogger stato77, on 30 November, 2007  
 

Excellent. Thanks Neil. An elegant solution to the "email series" issue, too.

Keep 'em coming folks.
By Blogger Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 30 November, 2007  
 

Re: #4 - I would argue that your domain reputation is more important than your IP. After all, which one do your subscribers see and respond to? I can't imagine anyone ever saying "what a great/awful email I got last week from 123.45.6.789"

Subscribers whitelist domains, not IPs. They complain about emails from companies/domains that aren't sending them relevant, valuable content, not the IPs those messages happen to come from.

After all, who cares how great your IPs' reputation is with ISPs, if your domain's/company's reputation with subscribers is awful? At best you'll be getting your emails delivered to a non-responsive audience, and at worst, they'll lodge a slew of complaints that will eventually drag down your IPs' reputation, too.

I know that's a different angle than you were probably looking for, but it's what jumps to mind first.
By Anonymous Justin Premick, on 30 November, 2007  
 

You're right, Justin, I wasn't thinking of it like that BUT your angle is equally valid - thanks for throwing a bit of a different light on things!

It's definitely important to see reputation both in terms of your formal deliverability status with ISPs and your reputation with the individuals who actually get the emails. After all, like you said, it doesn't help to get an email through if nobody is going to respond anyway...
By Blogger Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 30 November, 2007  
 

Regarding #4 as well:

We recently had a delivery issue on one IP and it spread across our other IP addresses, which are sent from the same MAIL-FROM (return-path) in our system. The delivery issue started from one IP, but it seemed that the ISP's tracked the Rep of our sending domain.

I am not sure about the FROM email though.

To me, tracking based on the MAIL-FROM is the smartest way for ISP's to track reputation. That way spammers can't grab a new IP every time they want to send. This also keeps ESP's in check when setting up dedicated IP addresses for certain clients.
By Anonymous Chris, on 03 December, 2007  
 

1. I found that adding the brand or company name again in the subject line did not improve the open rate. If it is in the "from" line, that it sufficient for the recipient of the email to know sent the email

2. I prefer to link to images on my server. This allows me to control the message even more by A) removing the image when the product is no longer available (my products are only available for about four months and can never be ordered again B) change the image (due to error or availability

3. not sure on this one

4. it should be domain based for the IP of the domain can and do change

5. you always provide a link back to your Web site to get the other parts in a series

6. I would throw in $100 to help!

7. E-mail will become more mobile and new templates will need to be designed to reach the on-the-go e-mail reader
By Anonymous aBarn, on 03 December, 2007  
 

aBarn,

Very interesting point on using remote images - I haven't to date seen anyone doing that.

It'd be interesting to see if combining that with a redirect could be used to "take lemons & make lemonade"

Example: once a product sells out you put together an image that explains what happened and offers a waiting list, or a related product, and then redirect whatever URL the image was linked to, to a landing page for that waiting list or related product.

aBarn, Mark, anyone: ever done or seen anything like that?
By Anonymous Justin Premick, on 03 December, 2007  
 

Chris, aBarn, Justin, thanks for the comments.

The updating images is an excellent idea. TO answer Justin, I vaguely recall reading about someone who used images to display coupon codes or discounts. They would update the images so anybody browsing through old emails would see, for example, the latest coupon code.

One problem is likely to be "designing for image blocking." If there's a strong text offer and call to action next to the image, then an updated image likely has less impact...

Interesting, interesting.
By Blogger Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 03 December, 2007  
 

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