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.

There is something in the realm of link building called “link baiting,” a process whereby links appear by themselves. You don’t ask anyone to link to your webpage, you don’t submit your site anywhere, but new inbound links appear every day.

How is that possible? Below are some ways to make this happen for your own site.

One of the best ideas for link baiting is to create an extensive resource list for something specific that your visitors will find most useful. Think about what that could be, do your research, and create that resource list.

Another similar idea is to create a “101” list for your particular topic. These kinds of lists are doing pretty well in social network marketing; they too generate linkbacks easily.

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