Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

  1. Send technically correct email. That means finding a developer who understands the various email related RFCs including 5321 and 5322 as well as the MIME standard, HTML standards and encoding standards. Don’t rely solely on your vendor to create a correct email for you.
  2. Stop sending mail to non-existent or abandoned email addresses. This means correctly handling addresses that bounce and implementing some sort of data hygiene that’s appropriate for your lists and market segments.
  3. Use VERP in your mail strings. VERP means each email is tagged with the subscriber, list, and even mailing. Having that data encoded in the headers allows troubleshooting, bounce processing and FBL processing much, much easier.
  4. Send only opt-in mail. I know a lot of people argue permission is passé but I don’t believe that is true. ISPs, receivers and filtering companies don’t like it when you send mail without permission.
  5. Be up front with recipients how you’re going to use their email address. Don’t hide the opt-in language in your privacy policy.
  6. Send a welcome message. Introduce yourself, introduce your program, get your message in front of your new subscriber as soon as possible after they subscribed. They’re interested in what you have to offer, get into their inbox ASAP to engage them before they move on.

How you implement these practices depends on your particular infrastructure, goals and recipient base. Mailers should, though, have appropriate implementations of practices.

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This morning I received notification that the IETF had approved RFC5321 and RFC5322. These two RFCs are standards track and are updating the current email standards RFC821/822 and RFC2821/2822.
MailChannels has a description of the changes between 2821/2822 and 5321/5322. While the new RFCs obsolete the old ones, they are more a clarification than actual changes to the protocols. Dave Crocker had this to say about the new documents.

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End of quarter spam

There has been a plethora of big brand companies doing stupid stuff with marketing recently. I can only figure it’s end of quarter and everyone is looking to pump up their numbers as fast as possible.
I talked about Millenium hotels sending me with an utterly irrelevant ad earlier this week.
@Yahoomail direct message spammed all their twitter followers with an ad for something related to the new Yahoo mail product.
Anyone watching my twitter feed yesterday probably noticed me complaining about spam from Dell.
All of these things are just examples of sloppy marketing. In Dell’s case it’s even worse because they sent me multiple copies of the spam to different addresses. Two copies of the same “SHOP NOW!” email to different addresses, one of which has never been given to Dell.
Mail to the first address is unquestionably spam and I did send in a complaint to Dell’s ESP. That address is never used to sign up for anything. I did try clicking on the “update your subscription” link in the footer and Dell’s website helpfully told me that address was not on their mailing lists. Looks like Dell bought a list.
The second address is one that was involved with the purchase of software from Dell last July. This is the first non-transactional mail sent to that address. I can’t necessarily call the email spam as I did give it to Dell during the course of a transaction. However, Dell could have done a lot better in managing our “relationship” than they did.
Dell collected my email address as part of a transaction in July 2010. They did not start sending marketing mail to this address until May 2011. While Dell is a major brand and most people would recognize the name and may be a little less inclined to hit “this is spam” waiting 10 months between a purchase and regular mailings is a bad idea.  People who don’t use tagged addresses may forget they gave the sender an email address and automatically send in a spam complaint.
Sitting on an address for 10 months means Dell really should have done a welcome series, or even just a single welcome email, to ease the transition from no mail to regular mail. But, no, they just send me an email advertising their sales.
We’ve been Dell customers for quite a while, and all of our purchases have been enterprise grade hardware or software to run on those servers. We’ve never purchased anything remotely like office computers. But the sales flyer was for desktops, printers and monitors. Dell knows what I purchased from there, so why are they sending me ads for things I’ve never bought?
We have our own Dell sales rep, and my only involvement in the transaction is source of payment. Adding me to a product list really feels like spam.
Then there was the email itself.  The “update your subscription” link was broken and told me I wasn’t subscribed to their list. I mentioned it to Steve and he pointed out that particular link had been broken “forever.” How long has it been since anyone inside of Dell has checked that their footer links work?
What is Dell up to? Who knows. But they unarguably are sending mail to addresses that never opted in. And even if you consider an email giving during a purchase process their handling of that particular address was appalling and in violation of almost every good practice out there.
 

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