Category: Email Deliverability

The couple that spams together gets successfully sued together.

This week a federal court ordered spam marketing husband-and-wife team Henry Perez and Suzanne Bartok to pay a small Internet service provider (ISP) more than $236 million for sending out some 23 million emails advertising loan refinancing services. The messages were sent to the servers at CIS Internet Services in 2003–using the ironically-titled program called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies.

Happily, this is just the latest news about spammers getting theirs. What I like about this story is that the little guy (CIS is a tiny ISP based in Clinton, Iowa) is fighting spammers one at a time–and winning. CIS’ triumph in the U.S. District Court in Davenport marks the tenth lawsuit in which it has prevailed, company owner Robert Kramer III said. Mr. Kramer has been at it for years: Wins include a $11.2 billion judgement against a Miami spammer in 2006, and a combined judgement of $1 billion after winning lawsuits against three spammers in 2005.

Mr. Kramer said during the most recent trial that the spam messages cut into his company’s bandwidth, making it harder for his customers to go on the Internet and costing CIS a lot of business. The number of CIS clients dropped from 5,000 in 2001 to 1,200 by late 2004.

For CIS, the drop was significant enough to prompt Mr. Kramer to go after those who messed with his bread and butter. Nevertheless, his successful lawsuits should prompt larger ISPs to follow through in their own anti-spammer actions. Even if it’s unlikely Mr. Kramer will collect the cash judgements owed him, he’s won on another front: CIS now gets only 10 to 15 million spam messages daily, down significantly from the 500 million it did in 2003.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager

“I’d rather you text me”

Email marketers big and small all face similar struggles when it comes to email delivery. Spam has meant ISPs are increasing their tightening of requirements and filtering of perceived unwanted messages. On the other hand, it’s common knowledge that email is one of the most effective mediums to get out marketing messages to your audience.

Not to mention unparalleled returns on investment. The Direct Marketing Association forecasts email ROI to be $45.65 for every $1 spent. In addition, a Datran Media survey showed that marketers found ROI to be 55.3 percent higher than other channels.

The email space may seem nebulous to many marketers, but the truth is that it can be simplified. The rules for successful electronic mailing are just one click away, thanks to mobileStorm’s series of digital marketing white papers. Whether you are currently using email or not, getting educated about responsible mailing will open doors and break down the barriers to entry for you and your brand.

To find out the ten most important must-knows regarding successful email delivery, download mobileStorm’s newest whitepaper: “The 10 Commandments of Email Delivery: Make It Into The Inbox.” For other white papers, go to this page.

Shaneli Ramratan, Director Of Marketing, mobileStorm

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.

Furniture shoppers are responding brilliantly to messaging campaigns from the retail chain Broad River Furniture of Charlotte, N.C. and upstate South Carolina. And mobileStorm 4.0 gets part of the credit.

Hey, we can’t help but brag when ROI includes a whopping $20,000 in one day’s revenue (!) generated when the chain announced a 12-hour sale by subscription message, sent out only the evening before the sale began.

It’s an inspiring case of a seasoned marketer unfamiliar with digital messaging who quickly—thanks to an easy, all-encompassing platform and the wise use of best practices—executes successful campaign after successful campaign.

The Charlotte-based Broad River Furniture regional chain came to SMS marketing a bit reluctantly. Admits co-owner and COO Charlie Malouf, “We were initially against the concept, because we thought that text message marketing was just annoying spam. Then we found out that it’s not spam; instead, it’s based on highly regulated permission marketing principles where you only send text messages to people who have opted in to subscribe and receive special offers.”

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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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It’s only been three months since mobileStorm started offering digital video distribution—and using our own service to disseminate mobileStorm’s marketing news/comedy show. Already our product release and own leap into online video marketing have proved astute, at least according to a new survey.

Ipsos MediaCT—which researches the media, content, telecoms and tech industries—says that early this year, online video viewership rose while viewership of other types of media fell. Among those surveyed:

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I took a little break from blogging, and am now back in the saddle again. However, rather than getting to hear me preach about deliverability every week, I am going to share my slot with my esteemed colleagues Jared Reitzin and Shaneli Ramratan. So enjoy the new schedule!

The FTC recently approved some slight modifications to the CAN-SPAM act. While these changes will not dramatically impact the way we send email, they are worth noting, as they do affect the way some mailers manage their unsubscribe process, among other things.

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As you may have noticed in the past couple of years, open rates have declined, making it harder and harder to reach the inbox. This is due to the large anti-spam systems that ISPs have had to put in place to thwart spammers. Unfortunately, permission-based mail also gets treated as spam. So how do you improve your open rates?

Well first, let’s talk about what an open rate is. An open rate is the percentage of mail you have sent, divided by the number of unique people that have opened your message. So if you successfully sent an email to 100 people, and 50 of those people open your email, then you would receive a 50% open rate (that would be a nice figure huh?).

A lot of marketers feel the larger the list they have the better things will be, but this is simply not true. It’s all about the quality of a list, not quantity. Why would you want to continue to send emails to people who don’t care? People who don’t open your email (and we aren’t talking about plain text emails here), don’t care about your content. You need to get real with yourself and face the facts. The first thing you should do is go back over the last 10 campaigns you sent, and remove all of the people who have not opened your email.

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