VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Deliverability and Your Email Campaigns - What You Need to Know

As legitimate email marketing senders, we all get frustrated when we get unsolicited email clogging up our inboxes. It's not only infuriating it's time consuming as well.

On top of this, phishing and spoofing are even more infuriating to us since that's just plain illegal. Phishers are those people that act as a legitimate company you may or may not do business with and "spoof" the from address to make it look like that legitimate business. How many of us have clicked on a link from our bank, eBay, or another legitimate company asking us to "update our information" which may include our credit cards?

How Does an ISP Authenticate a Legitimate Email Sender?

As a way to fight this bad behavior many ISPs (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!) are adopting authentication protocols for how they screen incoming email to their users. There are four recommended protocols that are available to email senders right now SPF, SenderID, Domain Keys, DKIM.

SPF and Sender ID are very similar and use the some of the same data points to verify if a sender is authorized to send from the sender’s domain.  Because of this similarity they are often referred to at the same time, SPF/SenderID.  SPF was the first widely adopted protocol used for email authentication and is still most broadly used.  SenderID was developed by Hotmail to also help verify the origin of the email.  The limitations with SPF/SenderID, which include the protocols no longer working when a message is forwarded, is why SPF/SenderID are most effective when used in tandem with other protocols.

Domain Keys (DK) and DKIM are also very similar; DKIM is technically the next generation of DK and has improved upon that earlier technology.  

A New Measure to Weed Out Unscrupulous Email Senders - DKIM

DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is the newest protocol to be introduced and it is being quickly adopted by ISPs such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo!, Bell South, Cox, and Earthlink and you can bet these make up a bunch of consumer email inboxes. 

On a very basic level, DKIM is technology that looks at the sender's domain (after the @  sign) and verifies to see if the email did, in fact, come from that domain. If it doesn't match then there is a possibility that the email won't go through or get flagged as potential spam.

On a deeper level, a digital signature is attached to each email. When it reaches the receiving party they check the signature by looking at two things in the email header (which normally most recipients don't see): a private key, which is the signature of the sender and a public key, which verifies the hidden private key.

What You Should Know

So if you are using an email service provider that uses DKIM, you're ahead of the game in getting your emails delivered more effectively. Why? Because as DKIM gets increasingly adopted by ISPs or the receiving party, chances are your recipients are either in a company that uses DKIM to verify incoming email or they use an email provider like Gmail to do the same.

One more thing: It's a good idea to ask your email service provider how and if they deal with DKIM and other protocols that are being used.

GOOD NEWS: VerticalResponse is ahead of the curve! Since we know how important it is for our customers' emails to be delivered at the highest rate possible, we've adopted all protocols including SPF, SenderID, Domain Keys and DKIM.  

GoDaddy is Charging for Spam Complaints - Ouch!

Seems like the folks over at GoDaddy are charging their email marketing customers if they get spam complaints. Deliverability.com broke the news when they got an email with this information sent to them from a GoDaddy customer. GoDaddy will now charge customers $200 to "manage" their complaints. Even worse is that if the customer wants to then leave them and transfer their domains to another registrar they can't do it until they pay GoDaddy $75!

To cover all of their bases, it appears that if one of their customers uses an Email Service Provider outside of GoDaddy to advertise their GoDaddy-hosted site and they get complaints from one of their customer's recipients, they could be hit with a fine or other action.

Wow. Serious Email Service Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse usually do this as a service to customers and won't allow spammers to use their services. But let's face it, everyone gets a complaint now and then, even customers with best intentions. The difference is that serious ESPs want to help their customers learn best practices about email marketing and not turn complaints into a new revenue stream.

If you use GoDaddy to host your website be careful. And any time you're looking for a serious ESP, make sure you ask if they have a deliverability and abuse department - most serious ESPs do, looks like GoDaddy might not.

IMO, GoDaddy should stick to what they're good at, being a registrar. Leave the email marketing heavy-lifting to those who "want" to do it and help businesses grow.

Subject Line Copy - This is Not Spam!

One of our Marketing Programs Managers Jess came into my office to ask if I'd received an email from one of our Partner companies. She was waiting for the email so that I could transfer "ownership" of the program over to her. I'd have to log-in from an email I got and do it myself.

"I don't recall getting an email in my inbox, let me check," I told her. I looked and didn't find it. "Wait, let me check my Junk Folder," I said. I looked for about 1 minute and there it was. Pretty important email for my junk folder I thought. Why did it go there?

 

Names have been removed to protect the innocent.

Were their hearts in the right place? You bet. But probably NOT a good idea to include the word "SPAM" in the subject line.

Just a friendly recommendation to all.

An Explanation of VR's "Reply-To" email address ... What is vresp.com?

We get this question all the time, why does my email marketing campaign have a reply-to with a vresp.com domain?

Well that’s a question with a few levels of answering so let me start.

1. Reputation - First of all VR has been around 7 years. Why is that important?  ISPs that we send your email to recognize our domain as a trusted sender and they let your email through their "pearly gates". You get the benefit of our good sender reputation using this domain.

2. Authentication - VR authenticates all client mail using SPF, Sender-ID and DomainKeys, and has been doing so for years.  If we simply allowed users to "spoof" their own domain, we wouldn't be able to send fully authenticated emails for those users.  Authenticating mail is a best practice and helps with email delivery.

3. vresp.com – We chose this domain because it doesn’t include any branding and it’s not our long domain. In short, it’s not anything people will recognize.

4. Replies - VR uses Variable Envelope Return Paths for all mail sent through our system.  This enables us to make sure that the proper recipient address is unsubscribed or bounced when the situation warrants it, plus the use of V.E.R.P is also considered a best practice.

Note that if a recipient replies to your email for any reason other than to unsubscribe, we route them to the "reply-to" email address you indicate on your launch page.  We always want to ensure you receive the legitimate email.

Can you use your own branded domain with VerticalResponse?  Yes, there is a set-up fee for it.  It also requires a little work on both your end and on our end to make sure we have full permission to authenticate your mail.  Email domainbranding@verticalresponse.com for more information on this. Our recommendation? We think you should take advantage of our domain and reputation since we’ve been working really hard at it!

See our Deliverability section on our website. Comment with any questions!

Your Company Name Has Changed - Treat Your From Label Carefully!

We spend a bunch of time talking about the art of the Subject Line here at VR. Why? It’s critical to get it right so you maximize your response from your email marketing campaigns. But what about the From Label? How important is it?

We think it’s arguably the 1st or 2nd most important part of your email campaign. Why?
It’s whom you originally made your relationship with when your recipient signed up for your email. They’ll recognize whom the email is coming from and a good percentage of them will hopefully open your email and click on your links.

Changing your From Label could increase your unsubscribe rates if your recipient does not recognize the From, not to mention your recipients could feel “tricked” into opening your email, then complain to you or your ISP for potential spamming. No one wants that.

So What Happens When You Change Your Company Name??

This happens all the time with mergers, acquisitions and general company name changes. How do you treat this? One word: Carefully!

Here’s an approach we took at a previous company for and it worked well.

Send a first email campaign with the old company name announcing the new company name in the subject line.

Send your next month or two of email campaigns “From Old Company Name/New Company Name”.

The next month or two send your email campaigns “From New Company Name/Old Company Name”.

Finally switch over to “From New Company Name”

This way it’s a gradual change and you’re getting your recipients over time to recognize the company they initially had the relationship with as the new company. This is especially true because your recipients probably don’t always open your email every time you send one (kudos to you if they do!)

If anyone has any other ideas for this situation please chime in.

Deliverability Update - Rate Limits & Phishing

Since we all take a lot of time preparing and sending our email marketing campaigns, lI've asked our Email Delivery team to update us on what's going on in the world of deliverability. Here's the lowdown...

Rate Limiting with Most Major ISPs

Just about every Internet Service Provider (AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) is now rate limiting the amount of email that can come into their system from a given IP address.  This started with Yahoo! and Bell South, and has now many ISPS are doing it.  Established IP addresses with good reputations (this describes our IPs we send email from) naturally have the highest limits of email that can go through in a given time and IPs with no reputations (or bad reputations) have the lowest limits.

Even though our reputation is great, our  email may still be rate limited from time to time.  This means that, sometimes, your email to a certain domain may arrive an hour or so later than you send it out.  This shouldn't be too common, but it is an industry wide issue.  So if you see a problem with your email being delayed to Yahoo or somewhere else, then it could be just a rate limiting issue.

Call with Microsoft - Phishing Schemes are Plentiful

Our Email Delivery King George was on a call with Microsoft and the word of the day was "phishing". What is phishing? It is when someone tries to get sensitive and confidential information by posing as a legitimate business. Banks are often the target of a phishing scheme were the phisher would pretend to be a popular bank, using email or IM link you to a page that looks like the bank's site where they ask you to input your user information.

Three things came out of the call:

• Phishing has had a "6 fold" increase in just the last 2 years. Yahoo.com & bankofamerica.com are the number 1 spoofed domains used by Phishers.

• Phishers are very smarter marketers. They know their targets extremely well and their emails are usually sent out at just the right time to be the most effective.

• All major browsers will be putting into place a phishing filter for web pages that have been confirmed as phishing sites, and will warn the user of this.

Microsoft also mentioned that they have a new optional add-on for Internet Explorer users that warns them of potential phishing sites. When an IE user clicks on a link and is taken to a site that has been confirmed by Microsoft's security staff as a phishing site, the actual address bar of the browser will display red, the site will be blocked from the user and a warning from Microsoft will be displayed.

If an IE user goes to a site that is suspicious, their address bar will be yellow and they will be warned that this is a suspicious website by Microsoft.

With this new phishing filter, users can report a site they believe to be a phishing site. Once they do this, Microsoft's security team will then investigate the report.

That's all for now. Questions? Send us a comment.

Take a Stroll Through My Junk Folder

I thought it might be fun to peruse my junk folder and point out why some of the emails wind up there...ready? Let's begin!

From: Neiman Marcus
Subject: FREE SHIPPING + What's the hottest CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN style for fall?

Problems: I know I always bust on Neiman, but it's pretty easy.
FREE SHIPPING - Avoid this and please not in all caps, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN is all in caps too. They use a + and a ? which by themselves might not be bad but coupled with everything else wrong...why not add in a few !!!! while you're at it? The content was made up of only images without names.

From: Brookstone
Subject: Stop Snoring! Clinically Tested Sona Anti-Snore Pillow!

Problems: Did they learn nothing when they used to be a VR Customer;-)
They use two exclamation points and their email is only images.

From: eMarketer
Subject: eMarketer Daily - Prescribing Online Pharma Marketing

Problems: I usually get this amazing email in my inbox but this one went directly into Junk, why? My guess is that the subject has "Prescribing Online Pharma", it's too much like selling drugs online like many spammers do.
One more thing - We don't recommend repeating your "from" in the subject line, it cuts off what you really want your readers to see.

From: Monsoon Email
Subject: Re: Mortgage Brokers - #1 mortgage broker marketing tool end of summer promotion

Problems: My guess as to why it landing in my junk folder is that a) I never signed up for this b) never but a Re: when it's really not a reply, c) stay away from using Mortgage, let alone twice in the subject line. Also an image heavy email. And I'm not just picking on the competition who spammed me ;-)

From: The Westin Copely Place, Boston
Subject: Limited Time Offer: Summer Sale

Problems: Seems simple but "offer" and "sale" are probably not great to have in the subject line together. The good thing they do? They mix up their creative with some text so I do get an idea about the content of the email. The bad thing? I can't "click to view in a browser".

I will end this post by saying that just because you use an Email Service Provider, even VerticalResponse, there is no guarantee you'll get into the inbox without a bit of work on your part creatively. We can get you through the gates of the ISP but we need a bit of help from you when you create your email to get that into the inbox, and the retail season is upon us and it's more important than ever for many of you to increase your sales.

Here are a few posts that might help.

Email Deliverability and You - A Handy Guide
Stop Looking to the Big Boys for Creative Ideas
A List of Subject Lines and Offers for the Holidays
5 Quick Ways to Improve Delivery Rates

Hope this helps!

VerticalResponse Caught!

I recently blogged about creating your emails for images turned off. One of the things I talked about was the importance of naming your images so that if images were turned off, it would at least display what the image name was. Last week, VerticalResponse sent out a newsletter where I thought that simply naming your image in the VerticalResponse Media Library was good enough to show up. My bad, it wasn't.

Good news? Thanks to the competitor who pointed this out (IMO someone might have too much time on their hands, but good news for us!) and one crafty engineer (Thanks James) we fixed that and now your image name will show up .

Cheers!

Updated Info on Deliverability - a White Paper

Wikipedia's definition of a white paper: A white paper is an authoritative report. White papers are used to educate customers, collect leads for a company or help people make decisions.

In this case it's not really to get leads, it's to give you info. Richard, our deliverability expert, wrote a white paper on Email Delivery: VerticalResponse, Email Delivery and You - A Handy Guide

What's in it you ask?

• Info our email gets to the inbox in plain English, no techy-speak.
• What VR does to ensure delivery
• What you can do to help

It's free, check it out. Send it to your friends. Post any questions about it here, Richard will be happy to jump in and answer.

Vonage Has Bad Email Practices...

Andy Sernovitz, the guru on word of mouth marketing, has a serious issue with Vonage. And I can see why. Turns out so do tons of other people. What happened? Andy referred friends to Vonage years ago, and now Vonage is using Andy's name to endorse their service to his friends in multiple emails. Yikes.

If you're using Forward to a Friend on your site or in your emails, make sure that you don't do anything with those addresses until the forwarded recipients opt-in to your list. 

Perfect example? VerticalResponse offers Forward to a Friend links you can include in your email. BUT unless someone who receives a forwarded email from one of your recipients fills out an opt-in form to opt in to your list, we don't allow you to get that email address. This is good practice and you avoid getting into trouble like Vonage is in.

Did this happen to you? Let's hear your story!