But after a few late nights and endless cursing at my computer, I stumbled across the Email Standards Project, an organization geared towards advancing, well, web standards in email.

In addition to their email standards advocacy, the Email Standards Project has a ton of great resources and documentation for the current standards that each of the major email clients and webmail provers support.

Whether you’re an old pro or new to the email marketing space, I urge you to get involved with this worthy cause. With our help, the Email Standards Project can hopefully make progress in their quest for email standards.

A zombie is an email subscriber on your list who has a valid email address but who has not opened any of your emails for an extended period time, often because the subscriber has changed their email address and abandoned their old email account.

It’s essential that you purge your list of zombies as often as possible. Since many email platforms (ESPs) charge per email, sending to a zombie is like sending money into a black hole. You’re wasting your time and financial resources marketing to someone who isn’t there. If you’re lucky, the customer re-engaged with your brand from their new email address, but either way, if a subscriber hasn’t opened any of your messages in more than a few months, it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

Checkout the full article on the Grow Blog and learn more about Grow Communications, a super-creative advertising and communications agency in Vancouver, BC.

Aside feedback loops, domain keys, sender authentication, reverse DNS, etc., which all generally take a bit of effort to implement, there are some simple things you do right now to help ensure that you’re achieveing maximum deliverability on all the messages you send.

• Don’t use buzz words in your copy or your subject line.
  Today’s spam filters look for more than just words like VIAGRA and CIALIS to determine if a message is spam. Spam filters are looking for buzz words and phrases that look spammy, like having the word FREE in all capital letters, going crazy with exclamation points!!!!, or using phrase like “click here” or “BUY NOW”. Additionally, it’s generally a good idea to avoid the use of symbols in the subject line, like dollar signs ($) and hash marks (#).
• Remember that links matter.
  As spam filters have become more sophisticated, many have begun checking to ensure that your links are live and working, and that they don’t look suspicious. While it seems pretty logical that marketers wouldn’t include broken links in their messages, spam filters are also looking to ensure that the links are not pointing to sites that have been blacklisted. So, if your message includes links to third-party sites, the reputation of those sites will directly impact the deliverability of your messages.
• Leave HTML to the experts.
  There are big differences between the HTML of the web, the HTML of MIcrosoft Word, and the HTML of email. Many of the HTML standards that are widely used and accepted on the web are totally unacceptable in email. Not only will your emails look different or broken in myriad email clients, if your emails are designed like a website, the risk to your deliverability is real. Having emails with inline commenting, calls to external style sheets, or unsupported formatting elements will often get your messages flagged as spam.
  Worse than emails designed like websites are email messages created in and copied from Microsoft Word. Since Microsoft Word doesn’t even support normal web HTML standards, the problems created by developing your messages in Word are even more profound. And because of these challenges, it’s often best to let the pros design your email messages.
• Text is still king.
  In email marketing, text is still king. If your messages have a high proportion of images to text, expect to get spam blocked. To ensure that your messages make it past the spam filters, messages should contain more text than images.

Inbox penetration is important because, in addition to the wasted emails, when you don’t get your messages into a subscriber’s inbox, you risk disengaging with the subscriber. And, if after months of spam blocking, your messages do make it back into an inbox, you may find that many of your subscriber forgot that they once opted-in to your messages and will unsubscribe or, worse yet, report you as a spammer, further damaging your reputation and you ability to deliver your messages across the ISP.

I’m compiling a list and want to know: What tools do you to ensure that your message doesn’t get flagged as SPAM? Sound off in the comments and I’ll add suggestions to the Spam Check/Spam Filter Testing resource page.

Check it out:

Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

Help me understand something. What good does it do your company if you have a statement like this in your email:

“Please DO NOT CLICK REPLY, as the email will not be read.”

Scott raises a great point. Companies spend a great deal of effort and money on their outbound messaging, but somehow have come to believe that email marketing is a one-way thing. But as digital marketers, we’re not programming television commercials or writing newspaper copy; we’re engaging in two-way communication with our users. No reasonable brand would start Tweeting or setup a Facebook page and then ignore people who try to interact them; email should be no different.

For companies that see it as an issue of resource allocation, it’s important to step back and ask yourself if the value that your business loses by ignoring your customers is worth what you’ll save in labor costs by doing so. My money is on the side of the argument that says providing your users — no matter the channel — with the best possible customer service is what will pay off in the long run.

There’s an old saying that says, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face”. In this case, though, I think it’s more appropriate to say that if you ignored people’s email replies the way advertisers so often do, they’d probably start ignoring you too. An no one — marketer or subscriber — wants to be ignored. So if you expect you users to read your emails, you should at least expect to return the favor.

How does your organization manage inbound replies? Do you ignore them, respond to them, have an auto-responder, or something else? Why?

Check out the full article Email Marketing: The Reply Problem on Scott Writes Everything.

But what I like most about their emails, is that they have the opt-out mechanism prominently displayed at the very top of each message.

This simple design element really lets me, as a consumer, feel like I’m in control of the relationship. I know that if I ever want to opt-out, I don’t have to go digging for a link in the footer or wonder if they’re truly interested in honoring my preferences. They set the expectation right up front, operating in a way that honors the spirit of permission-based email marketing.

Over the past month or so, I’ve noticed a considerable number of emails coming from CompUSA. After quickly searching, I noticed that I’ve received 12 emails from them in past 10 days, and a full 36 emails since I signed up for their mailing list on February 6, 2011 (32 days ago).  Honestly, I don’t even have time to read through one message before the next one arrives, which is just annoying because I generally do enjoy reading through technology deals emails.

So, as a result of the frustration and lack of available time to read through their messages, I decided to unsubscribe from their mailings. And while I’m in no way condoning their overmailing as a legitimate email marketing technique , they were able to retain me as a subscriber by giving me the option to reduce my frequency down to “1-2 emails per week”.

Now, let’s hope they keep their word! If they don’t, I’m not afraid to click that unsubscribe link. Lucky for them, though, as their next victim might just get frustrated and click that dreaded SPAM button.

How do you find a balance between too few and too many messages?

The article provides some very insightful advice for marketers coping with an an ever-changing digital marketing landscape.

Email use will evolve as people move through different stages in their lives and as more emerging communication channels move into the mainstream.

It’s up to marketers to ensure that email remains a vital and valuable communication resource in anticipation of the day today’s text-reliant teens join the full-time-work, mortgage-holding world, where a baby-sitter is someone you hire, not what you do to earn spending money.

Check out the full article Teens: OMG. Email Is For Old People at MediaPost

(photo by Hryck)

When I graduated from high school and moved out of my parents house years ago, I left behind something that I hadn’t thought much about since: my Comcast email address. Since then, I haven’t so much as logged into it expect for maybe once or twice during my first year of college. But as time went on and I moved from email account to email account, eventually ending up with the Gmail account I use today, I never thought much about that old Comcast account. Until a few days ago.

After months of prodding, I finally convinced my parents to give up their Comcast service and get AT&T’s U-verse service.  And with their installation date just around the corner, it occurred to me that my Comcast account from all those years ago was probably still around and would likely get shutdown when my parents finally cancelled their Comcast service.

So, for my own curiosity’s sake, I attempted to log into the account. I was half expecting that the address would have been revoked and reissued by Comcast, and half excepting to find that it had become a wasteland for spammers. But what I learned was that I, in fact, had become a zombie for a few of the old email lists I was a part of at the beginning of the decade.

I was shocked to find that American Airlines, FedEx, Classmates.com, and a few regional non-profit groups were STILL sending me messages. After more than 7 years over having never opened their messages, you’d think that they would’ve taken the hint and dropped me from their lists.

Why Does This Matter?

Periodically purging your lists of zombies is important for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, if your list is full of zombies, ISPs will begin to take notice and it will eventually have a negative impact on your reputation and your ability to deliver messages into subscriber inboxes. Period. At the end of the day, if you can’t get into your subscribers’ inboxes, than you can drive sales, revenue, page views, or whatever your conversion metric is and your campaign’s performance will suffer.

But if you send your messages on a CPM basis (that is, you pay X dollars for every 1000 emails that you send) you should also consider the financial cost of sending emails to zombie. If you pay $2.50 for every 1000 messages you send, you estimate that 5% of your list of 100,000 subscriber are zombies, and you send out messages once a week, you’d be wasting $650 a year sending to these ‘subscribers’. The bigger the list the more you have to lose by throwing away your money. I threw together a quick Zombie Cost calculator so you can see the numbers for yourself and see just how much money you stand to lose. Check it out.

So don’t just assume that if an email address doesn’t bounce, that it’s worth the effort to send to. These days, some people change email addresses with the same frequency that they update their Facebook status, so it’s worth developing and investing in a good zombie purging strategy.

Aside from the usual newsletter sign-up form that you no doubt have integrated into your website, there are a never-ending array of creative ways to drive list growth and organically increase your list size with qualified leads and engaged consumers.

• Integrate Social Sharing. Social sharing features, such Facebook Share and Tweet This buttons integrated into your email can be effective in getting your messages in front of a new audience. The average Facebook user–of which there are over 500,000–has 130 friends. If only 100 of your subscribers shared your messaging on Facebook, you’d have the potential to reach 13,000 additional potential customers. And thanks to the viral nature of social media, it’s likely that some of your messages will be picked up and re-shared/re-tweeted throughout the social sphere.
• Facebook Connect. Instead of asking users to complete a 101 questions your newsletter sign-up form, allow them to sign-up using Facebook Connect. Not only are you more likely to see conversions increase by removing the burden of completing a sign-up form, but you’ll also be able to get better access to up-to-date information about your consumers, as they’re much more likely to keep their likes and interestes up-to-date in Facebook than they are in your preference center.
• Enable Forward to a Friend. As with social sharing, forward to a friend functionality, which allows a subscriber to forward a customized copy of your message, is a simple and virtually free way to grow your lists. Setting up forward to a friend campaigns is easy with even the most basic ESP, and it can reap a ton of benefits. Think about it: if your list is comprised of women interested in fashion, it stands to reason that your subscribers probably have friends and family who are also have similar likes and interests.
• Direct Mail and Traditional Advertising. If your company sends direct mail or does television, outdoor, or newspaper advertising, including your email programs in that advertising can be another effective way to acquire subscribers. Including a simple one or two line call to action on your print campaigns or at the bottom of the television spot doesn’t take up much space, but is guaranteed to drive results.
• Text Messaging. Text messaging is probably the easiest way for a consumer to sign-up for your lists. Simply setting up a text messaging campaign that instructs consumers to send in their email addresses for deals, newsletters, product announcements, etc., is a surefire list acquisition method because it’s so simple for consumers. The best part is that your messaging can be something as simple as “Text your email address to 55555 for special offers and coupons”. No need for fancy copy or sophisticated graphics. And you can include the messaging into your existing campaigns, point of purchase promotional materials, and white papers.

Remember, too, that it’s essential that you know your audience. If your core demographic is adults aged 55-70, then text messaging may not be right for you. Or, if you’re going after business customers (B2B), then Facebook Connect integration may not be right.

What other methods have you used to drive successful, organic list growth?

(SPAM by barmala, on Flickr)

Aside from reputation, content is king. That is, the content in your message has a profund impact on whether or not your message makes it past the ISP spam filter.

To ensure that your message makes it past the spam guards, avoid using the following phrases and common practices in your messages:

1. Using spammy phrases like “Click here”, “Act now!” or anything that involves discount drugs or mortgages

2. Having too many images in the message body

3. TYPING IN ALL CAPS

4. Using too many font colors in your messages

5. Including the word TEST or too many symbols in the subject line (like ! or $ or *)

6. Not putting a subject line in your message

Although it all seems like common sense, the things listed above are just a few of the hundreds of different things that can make ISPs think you’re a spammer — and the list is always changing.

Proactive Prevention

Prevention is key, but it’s also important that you have a pulse on exactly what is happening with your messages once they’ve been sent. The best solution is to sign-up for a few different email addresses (Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, a few local ISPs, etc.), add the new addresses to your mailing lists, and validate that your messages are making it to the inboxes of each of these accounts.

Also, check with your ESP. Many of today’s email service providers offer integrated spam scoring that will evaluate your messages and provide you with suggested revisions to to ensure to you don’t get trapped in ISP spam hell before you send.

More Than Testing

Periodically reviewing your bounce messages is also an important part of ensuring that you’re not getting flagged as a spammer. While not every ISP sends bounces messages for spam complaints, some do, and it’s important you don’t ignore it. Additionally, more and more ISPs are beginning to offer feedback loop programs, which are definitely worth the time investment required to set up.

(photo by Global X)

The web has been abuzz this week over the prospect that Facebook will be launching their own email service on Monday. The new service, dubbed Project Titan, is reportedly being positioned by Facebook to be the Gmail killer, in the latest round of the Google versus Facebook battle. (If you need to catch up on the squabble, checkout this great recap, courtesy of TechCrunch.)

It’s true that there’s been chatter about the possibilities of a Facebook email platform for the better part of the year. And by most accounts, many are simply suggesting that this will be another email choice available for consumers, featuring a webmail interface and the standard POP/IMAP and SMTP access, with the benefit of a trendy @facebook.com email address. Others, however, are suggesting that it could be the end of email marketing as we know it.

Blue Sky Factory is suggesting that Project Titan will “devastate” the email marketing industry and your company’s email marketing efforts:

[I]f Project Titan is adopted by [Facebook]‘s userbase, it’s going to absolutely devastate your current email marketing efforts. Deliverability will go out the window. Open rates will drop to near zero. Your email won’t even get to users, much less get read.

The premise behind the doomsday scenario is that, unlike email as we know it today, Facebook would implement a whitelisting system, whereby marketers would have to have a Facebook relationship with a consumer before being able to message them. All in all, it’s an interesting article and is definitely worth the read.

Whether Blue Sky Factory’s predictions come true remains to be seen, but I’m not putting my money on it. It seems to me that if Facebook implements a closed system, we’d basically end up with the same Facebook mail system that we have today, where Facebook users can only send messages to the people in their social network. If Project Titan really intends to be a Gmail killer, I don’t think a 100% closed system is the way to do it. But then again, Facebook is pretty innovative, and simply creating a new email platform seems like an unlikely way to kill Gmail.

Until Monday, I’ll be anxiously awaiting Facebook’s announcement. And, if Facebook is listening, the one thing I’d really like to see (as a marketer) is a published set of guidelines for sending to their new email platform that include things like which HTML/CSS elements are OK, to rules about deliverability, to the ability as a marketer to have my questions answered. Nothing is more troublesome than crafting a message, only to find out that it’s not rendering properly because Outlook 2007 doesn’t support normal CSS styles or Yahoo! is spam blocking my message but not being able to figure out why.

And, as a consumer, the last thing I need is another email address, though the temptation of a cool @facebook.com address will probably change my mind. And I’m sure I’m not alone on that one.

To aid in the process, Litmus offers a free tool for previewing what a subject line looks like in a variety of different email clients, both desktop and web-based. The tools is very usefully in getting an idea of how much space you have to work with in the subject line field. Despite the field length in some email platforms, in practice, most email clients only display between 30-40 characters effectively. In some clients, you have even less space to work with, so it’s important to take this into consideration so that you can craft a subject line that delivers the most bang for your buck.

Once you’ve crafted a few perfect subject lines, it’s smart to perform an A/B test to determine which of the subjects had the best impact on your campaign’s performance. A/B testing is pretty standard in all of the common email marketing platforms, and is generally very simple to implement.