Author Archive

In direct mail marketing, a “Johnson Box” is commonly found at the top of the letter. Its purpose is to draw the reader’s attention to the key message first, and then hopefully engage the reader for the rest of the letter. This view is also sometimes referred to as “above the fold,” in reference to printed material such as a newspaper or other folded item.

The Johnson Box/above the fold scenarios have also been adapted for email. Most email clients today offer a “preview pane” in which readers can see the first 20 words, more or less, of the message. These are the first words a reader will see, and will most likely be the words a reader will use to determine whether or not to read the rest of the message. To that end, it is critical that whatever content is used in that portion of an email contains the crux of the message.

Additionally, from an email delivery standpoint, another common practice for email senders is to include in the top portion:

• A message to recipients to add the sender’s address to their address books.
• A link to a web page version of the email.

In one test, response rate was increased by 220% when a sender modified the top of the content as directed above. As responsible senders, it is essential that you use this preview section of your message to your advantage. Doing so it will help to generate more response to your campaigns, as well as subscriber engagement.

Until next time,

Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm
Eat Responsibly, Drink Responsibly, Email Responsibly

Recently the folks at Gmail announced via their blog that they have been working closely with PayPal and eBay in an attempt to reduce the number of phishing attacks and the associated collateral damage. By using industry email authentication technologies such as DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Email (DKIM), they now authenticate every message sent PayPal and eBay. The end result is that if a message from either paypal.com or ebay.com arrives at Gmail, if it does not pass Gmail’s authentication verification, Gmail will reject that message completely and not deliver it.

The significance of this is that Gmail has now set a precedent within the realm of email deliverability. In short, the search giant has made the executive decision not to deliver messages from two particular companies unless those companies take steps to authenticate their email. What if Gmail were to decide to use the same policy for all inbound email? At this point, I think that is very unlikely, considering that email authentication unfortunately has not been embraced yet by the majority of email senders. In fact, it was also recently reported that less than half of Fortune 500 companies are using any sort of email authentication. A mere 202 companies—40 percent—are using some sort of authentication, and only 72 of those are using DomainKeys/DKIM. That to me is a little scary.

Folks, the time will come when spam and email abuse is bad enough that Internet and email service providers will make the decision to only deliver email that has been authenticated. Once that happens, any email senders who have not authenticated their email will be rejected. Do you want to be in that predicament? Will you be ready when that time comes? At mobileStorm, we use all authentication methods in our email. We are prepared.

Now is the time to start authenticating your email. There are numerous resources to help you understand these technologies and how to implement them. Authenticate today!

Until next time,
Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm
Drink Responsibly, Drive Responsibly, Email Responsibly

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of email in which the sender uses lots of text and pictures to communicate the message. And when I say lots, I mean LOTS. I sometimes find myself having to scroll two and three pages to get to the end of the message. Nightclub and event promoter emails are especially notorious for this type of content.

Case in point: A nightclub owner wants to promote a particular event. His email creative ends up full of photos of DJs and scantily clad women. What is not in the email is a good text-to-image ratio, or an easy-to-understand call to action.

To use the old adage, “less is more” seems more than appropriate to email marketing. Here are a few things to consider:

• Most email clients block images by default. If the message is 90% images, the user is left with 10% of the message.
• Sending unstructured content can have the potential to confuse to the reader.
• Using poor design and little or no navigation can result in a poor or incorrect customer perception of what is being communicated.

The bottom line is that you want to want your readers to be able to grasp the essence of what you are sending to them quickly and effectively. What you don’t want is for your readers lose interest because it takes them too long to get the point of your message. Here are some simple steps that can be followed to create great content.

1. Use a good mix of HTML text and graphics. Don’t just fill up your email with cool photos or images that have the words on them.

2. If using plain text, get to the point or call to action quickly. Don’t write a book and expect the subscriber to read the entire thing.

3. Validate your email content for errors. Use an HTML validator such as http://validator.w3.org/.

4. Check to see who is actually opening and reading/clicking your emails. Remove those who don’t.

Until next time,
Jaren Angerbauer, Director of Deliverability, mobileStorm

Drink Responsibly, Drive Responsibly, Email Responsibly.

I’m writing this from the sky as I fly over the Atlantic Ocean, on my way back from Heidelberg, Germany where I attended a MAAWG conference. I always enjoy going to MAAWG, not only because of the vast amount of socializing and networking that goes on, but also because of the high level of knowledge and expertise there. For example, I attended a panel discussion that included the managers of the postmaster teams for both AOL and Hotmail. These people are the ones who make the decisions on how email is delivered, and whether it is bulked or blocked. From my standpoint as the one in charge of ensuring good delivery for mobileStorm, the value for attending these conferences is clear.

Overall, from the panel discussions to the hallway discussions, some fundamental truths were again reconfirmed to me. These aren’t new concepts, and have been discussed at length in the past, but I will reiterate as they are becoming increasingly important.

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Recently, the email sending industry saw some fairly significant issues with delivering email to Yahoo. Senders trying to deliver bulk emails to their Yahoo subscribers found these to be continually “deferred”, or temporarily bounced back. It was later discovered that Yahoo had upgraded their filtering systems, which caused this continuous deferring. Since then, they have fine-tuned their systems, and are reporting that the issue has been resolved. Yahoo also noted that any sender still experiencing their mail being deferred is an issue that the sender will need to resolve. I would like to discuss both the mechanics of mailing systems, with respect to deferring, as well as why some ISPs (like Yahoo) choose to defer messages.

MTAs Explained

To the average individual, sending email is all about composing a message and clicking the “send” button. The message then is somehow delivered to the recipient. However, there is a whole lot of technology that happens in those few seconds when the message is transmitted. Here’s a simplified process flow:

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In the world of email deliverability, technologies and methodologies are in a constant state of flux. ISPs have to be on the alert for new spam and virus attacks, and as a result are constantly changing their blocking and filtering technologies to combat these problems and to protect their customers. When it comes to delivering email to the Inbox, ISPs also have to be careful about what email they accept, especially regarding senders from which they have never seen email traffic.

A classic example of this is where a company may start with or switch to a different Email Service Provider, and as a result will be sending their email from a brand new IP address. From an ISP’s perspective, this is like “the new kid on the block” – they’ve never seen email traffic coming from this new IP address. They don’t know if these messages are legitimate or simply a spammer that has decided to switch IP addresses. Thus, they are going to be very cautious about the email coming from that new IP address, and will scrutinize it with the full extent of their spam filters until they can ascertain what kind of email is being sent and its impact on their network. If the messages sent generate complaints or high amounts of hard bounces, the ISP will most likely not remove these filters and may opt to bulk and/or block those messages altogether. However, if the messages don’t generate complaints, and are sent to valid email accounts, the ISP will most likely turn down their filters and let email pass through more easily. By the very nature of sending from a new IP address, the sender is building either a good or bad reputation with that ISP.

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Short blog this time — it’s been a crazy week. The majority of my time has been spent primarily on two areas:

1. Helping to set up our clients on our system – meaning setting up their email, DNS, and authentication settings.

2. Working with potential and current customers on delivery best practices – maintaining clean lists and using a confirmed email opt-in method.

Folks, I can’t stress enough the importance of these two items. If you send email, and want to have good deliverability, you have to follow some simple rules:

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During my career in email, I have worked for a number of companies – one in particular that made use of the practice of sending pre-scheduled or “triggered” marketing emails to their recipients. At the time, I didn’t understand the logic or the impact this would have on the people receiving these messages. Many years later, I now have a better knowledge of what is acceptable and what is not when using triggered emails.

What is a triggered email?

A triggered email sent to a recipient relative to an event, or some kind of activity on with that recipient’s relationship to the sender. For example, I’m a member of LinkedIn, a social networking website. Whenever somebody views my profile or wants to add me to their network, I receive a triggered email, notifying me that I need to take some sort of action. However, not all triggered emails require action. An email send can also be triggered by a time-based event such as an upcoming birthday or anniversary. While almost always automated, triggered emails are usually very personalized, which set them apart from traditional autoresponders

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Recently I had a client come to me that wanted assistance with their deliverability. They are in the business of sending online greeting cards, and wanted to be able to “spoof” or change the “from” line in their emails to be the actual email address of the person sending the card. So, for example, if a person who uses the email address user@example.com, that email address would actually show as the “sender” – rather than the sending address of the greeting card company.

While there are plenty of companies out there that either do this currently or would like to do so with their mailing, what they don’t realize is using this technique could potentially break any authentication methods they have implemented.

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For my blog today, I thought I would share with you some of the tools that I use almost on a daily basis to help clients with their deliverability and reputation issues. While these tools can sometimes provide copious amounts of data, sometimes it takes a combination of them to truly understand the reputation of a sender.

Senderbase:
Senderbase is the world’s largest email and web traffic monitoring network. It aggregates data from over 100,000 organizations receiving email and tracks approximately 5 billion messages per day, equivalent to over 25% of the world’s email traffic. Data aggregated through this service that helps to determine reputation includes:

• Blacklist data
• User complaints
• Spamtrap hits
• Message volume and changes to volume
• Sender industry
• URL frequency

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