Along with all other items that might get you to the Spam box of your hosted profiles, the content very important.
Most Spam filters around the planet (built in on the ISP server or client software) are evolutive. They "learn" according to the users' attitude concerning received mail.
This impacts mainly english words unfortunately for our English speaking friends. You want to avoid the use of words such as Viagra (of course), Special offer, online pharmacy,...
In the same way, you should avoid using money related words or sign in the subject line (it's apparently less impacting in the creative itself).
Still concerning the subject line, you should avoid special characteres such as #, %, £, $, €,...
Finaly you are more likely to go through if your creative includes some text, Spam filters are very harsh on emails coming in with mainly images.
Aug 17, 2007
Aug 16, 2007
IP management
Well let's start with the beggining.
When you send out an email the main ISPs will react first (but not exclusively) according to your IP reputation.
A good IP reputaiton is very important. This reputation is calculated according to several items:
1 - The volume of sent emails.
The number of sent email on a daily, weekly, monthly basis must be sufficient. An IP sending a to low amount of email is more likely to be Blocked or Spam filtered.
2 - The number of Spam traps triggered.
Most of the freemail/webmail providers (hotmail, gmail,...) use closed addresses as spam traps. Once a user stops using his email address, it is first inactivated (the ISP then sends back an error to the email sender). After a while, it is transformed into a spam trap. Email senders that haven't updated their database according to the error messages (by deactivating the profile) will then be considered as spammers.
3 - The number of Unknown users.
A high number of unknown users in your database highly increases the risks of being blocked by the ISP and will highly impact your IP reputation. You must make sure your database is clean before shooting it and ALLWAYS unsubscribe hardbounced emails.
4 - The number of spam complaints.
The number of complaints is of course important for your IP reputation (it does impact your sender ID as well). Complaints can be made through the 'this is a spam' button on the webmail interface, to abuse@domain.com email addresses or SPAM software such as Spam cop.
With hotmail, you can negociate a loop that will blacklist users in your database when they click on 'this is a spam' instead of triggering a Spam alert.
To see your IP reputation, you can type it in on the following website:
https://www.senderscore.org/
If you administrate directly your sendouts (without using a send out tool) you can create an account on the hotmail SNDS
https://postmaster.live.com/snds/
If you use a sendout tool such as cheetahmail (US) or cabestan (EU), they should already be registered and can give you the relevant information you might need.
When you send out an email the main ISPs will react first (but not exclusively) according to your IP reputation.
A good IP reputaiton is very important. This reputation is calculated according to several items:
1 - The volume of sent emails.
The number of sent email on a daily, weekly, monthly basis must be sufficient. An IP sending a to low amount of email is more likely to be Blocked or Spam filtered.
2 - The number of Spam traps triggered.
Most of the freemail/webmail providers (hotmail, gmail,...) use closed addresses as spam traps. Once a user stops using his email address, it is first inactivated (the ISP then sends back an error to the email sender). After a while, it is transformed into a spam trap. Email senders that haven't updated their database according to the error messages (by deactivating the profile) will then be considered as spammers.
3 - The number of Unknown users.
A high number of unknown users in your database highly increases the risks of being blocked by the ISP and will highly impact your IP reputation. You must make sure your database is clean before shooting it and ALLWAYS unsubscribe hardbounced emails.
4 - The number of spam complaints.
The number of complaints is of course important for your IP reputation (it does impact your sender ID as well). Complaints can be made through the 'this is a spam' button on the webmail interface, to abuse@domain.com email addresses or SPAM software such as Spam cop.
With hotmail, you can negociate a loop that will blacklist users in your database when they click on 'this is a spam' instead of triggering a Spam alert.
To see your IP reputation, you can type it in on the following website:
https://www.senderscore.org/
If you administrate directly your sendouts (without using a send out tool) you can create an account on the hotmail SNDS
https://postmaster.live.com/snds/
If you use a sendout tool such as cheetahmail (US) or cabestan (EU), they should already be registered and can give you the relevant information you might need.
Jun 2, 2007
Words
I think some of you might need definitions of words I used in the posts I made and the ones that are coming so here you go:
Database:
Profile : A profile is one user with all the available data related to him.
Profile fields : The database fields in which you will insert the relevant data (First name, Last name, date of birth, last order date,....)
Optin : the acceptation by the user to receive offers and communication from your organization.
Optout (Unsubscribe) : the action of unsubscribing from your diffusion list.
Lead : An optin profile
Data mining : the study in deep of your database to analyze it and to optimize it.
Online marketing:
Media campaigns : campaign on a website with creatives and a link redirecting to your website (most frequent banners are the following size : 468x60, 728x90, 120x600, 300x250, 250x250), this kind of campaign is usually sold on a CPM or CPC basis (see here after)
Lead campaigns : campaigns which aim at registering users to your website or your newsletter.
Direct marketing campaigns : renting a database to send out an html or text message through email or SMS.
Sales words:
CPM : Cost for one thousand (can be one thousand impressions for media campaigns, one thousand emails rented for a broadcast,...)
CPC : Cost per click
CPL : Cost per lead
eCPM : Effective CPM, to compare the efficiency of different campaigns sold on a different basis (CPC, CPL, CPM), you need to calculate your income on a eCPM basis.
If "A" is the global revenue generated on the campaign, "B" the number of sent emails or impressions, your eCPM can be calculated as follows:
eCPM = (A/B) x 1.000
Don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a message on the message board if something's missing :)
Jun 1, 2007
Knowing your users
One of the most important issues of a successful direct marketing program is knowing who's in the database.
Some information can be gathered on a behavioural basis, some information needs to be given by the user/client himself.
Some examples of declarative only information are :
- First name
- Last name
- Birth date
- Address
- Marital status
The rest of the information can be gathered without the user's having to fill in incredible forms.
This kind of information will be incremented over time according to the user behaviour.
Some examples of behavioural tracking can be te list of items bought for a given client account, links clicked on a received email (if you link each link of your newsletters to relevant profile fields in your database).
The analysis of behavioural information is one of the most usefull tool of direct marketing, online marketing in a whole and database management.
After some while, that will allow you to send relevant information and offers to your user, to enter a one2one relationship with him.
Today's challenge in direct marketing has changed, users are receiving more and more emails each day, if one receives irrelevant information in his inbox, he will unsubscribe or even on some webmails report spam.
To create a profitable relationship with your users, you need to target as well and as precisely as possible.
May 25, 2007
Why create an email optin database?
Today, email direct marketing is one of the best ways of communicating to clients or prospects.
International law authorizes to mail clients with corporative information but you need to allow clients to unsubscribe from your diffusion list.
Concerning prospecting emailing, you need to create an optin database.
You "simply" collect emails with an "optin" field (Yes, I want to receive promotional information from....)
- Level 0 of database creation is registering only the email.
This can be done through co registration (a simple check box to subscribe to a newsletter, where only the email is passed through to the database). One of the most well known example of co registration is the second page of hotmail free accounts creation.
It's the less expensive, but also the less efficient way to create a DB, you will have to few information to optimize your direct marketing communication afterwards.
- I personally do advise to buy more information, according to your needs.
Usually you will need:
Gender, Firstname, Lastname, Email (of course).
You can add relevant information that you might need to target your offers:
Postcode, year of birth, wedding status, Nb of children at home,....
Mind that the more numerous fields you buy, the more expensive the database will be.
A successfull campaign will be a campaign dragging a lot of potentially new clients to your database.
To do this you need to chose an incentive related to your activity.
For example:
Coupons for online shopping websites, hotel nights for hotel companies....
(Giving out plane tickets for a pet food merchant would not be relevant)
My company (ad pepper) works in every country with major companies to collect optin emails for them. If you are interested, please contact your local office, the contacts can be found at the following url:
http://www.adpepper.com/en/Desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-103/
International law authorizes to mail clients with corporative information but you need to allow clients to unsubscribe from your diffusion list.
Concerning prospecting emailing, you need to create an optin database.
You "simply" collect emails with an "optin" field (Yes, I want to receive promotional information from....)
- Level 0 of database creation is registering only the email.
This can be done through co registration (a simple check box to subscribe to a newsletter, where only the email is passed through to the database). One of the most well known example of co registration is the second page of hotmail free accounts creation.
It's the less expensive, but also the less efficient way to create a DB, you will have to few information to optimize your direct marketing communication afterwards.
- I personally do advise to buy more information, according to your needs.
Usually you will need:
Gender, Firstname, Lastname, Email (of course).
You can add relevant information that you might need to target your offers:
Postcode, year of birth, wedding status, Nb of children at home,....
Mind that the more numerous fields you buy, the more expensive the database will be.
A successfull campaign will be a campaign dragging a lot of potentially new clients to your database.
To do this you need to chose an incentive related to your activity.
For example:
Coupons for online shopping websites, hotel nights for hotel companies....
(Giving out plane tickets for a pet food merchant would not be relevant)
My company (ad pepper) works in every country with major companies to collect optin emails for them. If you are interested, please contact your local office, the contacts can be found at the following url:
http://www.adpepper.com/en/Desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-103/
May 20, 2007
My resume
Hi,
For those who want to know a little more about me, here is my resume :
Cabestan (Since April 2008)
ESP
International Project Manager
Ad pepper Media (From Feb. 2005 to April 2008)
International media and direct marketing solutions
International Direct Marketing Tech Support Direct Marketing Manager
BestOfMicro - Buycentral (From Sep. 2002 to Feb. 2005)
Online Shopping guide
Account Manager Direct Marketing Manager Traffic Manager
Search Engine Manager / Search Engine Optimizer
My work at ad pepper today is to setup direct marketing french campaigns, to do the technical support/trainings for all our local offices and to analyze our technical needs, to negotiate new developments with our email sender (cabestan) and to monitor those developments.
For those who want to know a little more about me, here is my resume :
Cabestan (Since April 2008)
ESP
Ad pepper Media (From Feb. 2005 to April 2008)
International media and direct marketing solutions
BestOfMicro - Buycentral (From Sep. 2002 to Feb. 2005)
Online Shopping guide
My work at ad pepper today is to setup direct marketing french campaigns, to do the technical support/trainings for all our local offices and to analyze our technical needs, to negotiate new developments with our email sender (cabestan) and to monitor those developments.
Hello World !
Hello,
First, let me introduce myself:
My name is Anton Panaitesco, I work for ad pepper INT as a Direct Marketing International Tech support.
I am 28 yo (almost 29 though).
I'm married and have a little girl (she's 8 months old).
I will talk on this blog about Direct Marketing issues.
First, let me introduce myself:
My name is Anton Panaitesco, I work for ad pepper INT as a Direct Marketing International Tech support.
I am 28 yo (almost 29 though).
I'm married and have a little girl (she's 8 months old).
I will talk on this blog about Direct Marketing issues.
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