MailChimp Blog

Gmail Breaking Cellpadding

Looks like Gmail recently made some changes to their interface, and it's stripping out table cellpadding and cellspacing in HTML emails. Ouch.

There's a teeny-tiny link at the top of gmail that lets users switch between "old version" and "new version". In the "old version" things work and look fine:

It appears as though using inline-css to define your cellpadding helps. Note that some people in the intertubes are complaining that some inline-css is breaking in gmail too (like line-height).

Since Google is technically a "beta" product, and since it's free, and since they only just recently made these changes, we can't complain too much or react too soon.

I have faith in almighty Google. They will fix this. If they don't do it soon, I have even more faith in "The Chad" (our new programmer). He will modify our templates if we have to. But give it a little time. This kinda stuff happens all the time. Even Lotus Notes fixed most of their HTML email issues (eventually).

Before You Hit Send, Consult Your Email Checklist

Karen Gedney's got some good advice here about using an email checklist before you hit the "send" button. You know, to prevent those embarrassing mistakes (like sending 5,000 "Happy Thanksgiving" emails on Christmas---not that I've ever done that before).

Some things Karen recommends for your checklist:

• Test your subject line for readability in multiple email programs
• Do the first 15 characters contain the main hook?
• Did you remember a call-to-action in the content?
• Does the link point to the correct landing page?
• Check how your email appears in different email programs (ahem, very easy to do with MailChimp's Inbox Inspector)

And many more really good points. Be sure to check out the full article here:

http://www.clickz.com/3627581

MailChimp's Pre-Delivery Checklist

If you're like me, you probably get a little nervous when it's time to click that send button. It's kinda scary sending something to thousands of people.

That's why in MailChimp, we've got the Pre-Delivery Checklist. It's a screen where we stop the flow, and give you a chance to review what you've done before hitting that send button:

Here are some of the things I've screwed up with my campaigns I recommend you check before you send:

• Are you sending it to the correct list? Particularly important if you're an agency sending on behalf of multiple clients. Or, if you just want to send to your test list, make sure that it's selected here (and not your "real" list).
• Is tracking on? By default, MailChimp has it on, but for some reason, people like to turn it off while they're sending themselves tests (I have no idea why). Make sure you turn tracking back on if you want it.
• Are you using the correct email template for the campaign?
• Did you remember a plain-text version of the email?

If we had our way, the little chimp's arm would poke out the Pre-delivery Checklist screen and give you a gentle slap on the face. Just to get your attention.

One last tip (from our customer service guru, Dan): Don't click the "Send Now" button. If you're a nervous nellie like me, always use the "Schedule for later" button. Even if you're ready to send the campaign now, schedule it for 30 minutes in the future. That's because as soon as you hit "Send" you WILL suddenly remember all those things you forgot to do (on Karen's checklist). Now you've got 30 minutes to "go back in time" and fix things.

Equifax Opt-out

Maybe it's too early in the morning, but I had a really hard time understanding Equifax's opt-out checkbox:

Look at all the double negatives. And am I opting out of their privacy policy too?

Why not just say, "Opt-out of email marketing from Equifax"?

I'm still not sure whether I opted-in or out when I checked the box.

Simple Tweak To Avoid Apple Mail Junk Filter

Do you collect first and last name data on your signup forms? If not, you should. Merging that data into your email campaigns (the To: field) could help you avoid some spam filters, because it shows you have a relationship with that recipient...

Read more in our Resource Center...

and check out some of our other spam filter and deliverability articles.

Send Automatic Birthday Emails

Some of our customers (especially restaurants) have asked us to build some kind of "automatic birthday campaign" tool in MailChimp.

The idea is to automatically send a "Happy Birthday" email campaign to everyone with a birthday this month. The email campaign would have some kind of e-coupon, or special offer of some sort.

Hmm, we probably will add this to our list of features soon.

But for now, you can actually use our new list segmentation functionality to do this. We've posted a how-to article over at MailChimp.

If you're one of our web design customers managing the email marketing for a local restaurant or hotel or nightclub client, you might propose this as a new project for them.

Read the how-to article...

HTML Email on Apple's iPhone

On Friday, our main engineer (and self-proclaimed Mac freak) Mark Armstrong went and got himself an iPhone. Forget that our whole company has a T-Mobile corporate account. The rogue has gone off and joined AT&T.

Anyways, we've been testing how HTML emails render on the iPhone, and so far it's been great. Follow the link to see the video, and some notes for email marketers...

http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/iphone_html_email.phtml

Related: Mark Brownlow's scoured YouTube and found lots of other cell phone videos here.

HTML Email Mistake: Image-based unsubscribe link

We've already talked about some of the dangers of image-based HTML email (See: Common HTML email design mistakes).

I'll say it again, though. All-image HTML emails look like spam, so they trigger spam filters. Even worse, most of them display with the images turned off by default, so your recipients don't always see your message (which is why you should always test your campaigns before you send them).

All this time, I've neglected to mention that it's a bad idea to make your unsubscribe link an image. Kinda thought that was common sense.

Well here's an article from Ken Magill at DIRECT magazine about a woman who reported a marketer to the New York attorney general’s office, because her email program never displayed the unsubscribe image:

http://directmag.com/magilla/image-based_email/

It even suggests that you might be breaking CAN-SPAM law if you send email marketing with an image as your unsub link.

One tip the provide is to also include the full URL of your unsubscribe link, just in case your clickable hyperlink doesn't work.

MailChimp users: the built-in templates we provide for your campaigns already have a text-based, one-click unsubscribe link embedded. If you want to display the full path for the unsubscribe URL, insert it with this tag: *|UNSUB|*

Weeding Out Your Email List

Getting started with permission email marketing? Helping a client prepare their first campaign?  You don't want to hit "send" then get flooded with spam complaints, or even worse---get blacklisted by a major ISP. Here are some things you can do to make your first campaign go smoothly...

1. If your list is very large, remove any email address that you haven't contacted in a long time. People cancel email accounts as soon as 6 months nowadays. Sending too many emails to bad/cancelled/expired email addresses makes you look like a spammer who purchased an old email list somewhere. Too many "undeliverable address" bounces, and ISPs will start blocking emails from your company. Some large ISPs take old/expired email addresses (that haven't been used in ages) and turn them into "spam traps." They figure any email sent to such an old address is obviously spam.
2. Are you exporting from Outlook Address Book? Weed out any email addresses from tech-support@my-isp, or sales@amazon, etc. Many email programs automatically add email addresses to your address book simply because you replied to an email from that person in the past. If you send an email newsletter to everyone in your address book, you're bound to accidentally send to someone that you never even knew was in there (here's a real life example).
3. Are you assembling a list from some kind of CRM? Make sure you're not grabbing lists of "Prospects" or "Maybes" from your sales team. Your sales team gathers contact information for every single person they meet at trade shows, conferences, whatever. Anything that moves is a "prospect" to the sales team. That's the way it should be. But those prospects did not opt-in for email newsletters from your company. Those prospects probably wouldn't mind a one-to-one email from that sales guy she met at the tradeshow 3 years ago. "Oh yeah, I remember that guy" is how she might respond. But if you suddenly send an email newsletter from your company, she'll react by clicking the "This is spam" button in her email program, which sends a report to her ISP. The ISP will then scan the email, and potentially block all future emails from your company, no matter where you send it from.
4. Separate your lists. One campaign does not fit all. Do you have one big, ginormous list of email addresses? Break them into groups. Some of them might be "People who bought something from me." Some might be "People who signed up for my newsletter." Some might be "Members of the press/media who follow my company." Some might be, "People who entered a prize drawing, and didn't opt-out from future emails from my company". Don't send one blanket campaign to all of those people at once. ISPs have a "threshold" for spam complaints. Too many at one time, and you're blocked. Break them into separate lists, and put together relevant content for each list.
5. Take a glance through your list and look for catch-all type email addresses, like "sales@example.com" or "everybody@example.com" or "info@" and especially "webmaster@" (web masters are perhaps the grumpiest of all people, because they get so much spam). There are pranksters and jerks (your competition) who will sign up someone else's email address to your list without their permission. Just to get you in trouble. Also, very few people subscribe to lists with their "sales@" email address. So when we see something like that on a list, it's a good indicator that the list was "scraped" from a website somewhere. If you spot a lot of these on your list (or your client's list), you should ask if perhaps any employees in the company took it upon themselves to add "people who should want our campaign" as opposed to "people who actually do want our campaign." Unless you used double opt-in and confirmed every email address, it's a good idea to try to avoid these kinds of emails.

More specific to MailChimp, people often ask how they can remove dupes and typo'd emails from their lists before importing into MailChimp. There's really no need to do that. We clean duplicates and incorrectly formatted addresses from your list automatically during the import process.

Tiny Fonts Trigger Spam Filters

One of our users just designed a nice email campaign for his client, and tested it in our Inbox Inspector. Overall, he received a passing score, but we noticed something in the spam filter checker.

Spam Assassin and MessageLabs didn't like the fact that his email footer used "tiny fonts" in it:

As you can see, Spam Assassin gave it a full 2.6 points for that! They say the default threshold for Spam Assassin is "5" but we tell people to try to stay below "3" (because c'mon---who really keeps their threshold at 5 these days?). Better safe than sorry.

Our customer really had a nice looking template, and wasn't trying to hide anything. But spam filters think that tiny fonts are a sign that some spammer is trying to embed a whole bunch of confusing content into their message to throw off their scent.

Our customer's footer had text specified with: "font-size:9px." Interestingly, our own email templates specify our font size to be 10px, but we've never been flagged for that.

So if you have fonts in your footer that are really, really small (like we all tend to do), make sure they're no smaller than 10px in size.

Related:

See what else Spam Assassin scans for in your email.

Learn how you can use MailChimp's Inbox Inspector to test your email marketing campaigns and transactional emails

Lyris Deliverability Report

Lyris just published their latest Deliverability Report (PDF). It's got some great findings, like:

• They measured average inbox deliverability rate across top US Domains at around 74.57%. So about 25% of your emails are getting gobbled up by spam filters, email firewalls, and server gateways. 

At MailChimp, we'll occasionally get a call from a new customer who sends his very first campaign ever to his customer list, then calls us up, shocked, that "one of the customers on my list never got my email!" Our usual answer is, "Just one?" There are things you can do to minimize accidental spam filter blocks (See: How Spam Filters Think) but email marketers are unfortunately just going to have to get used to imperfect delivery. It's inevitable, like the airline losing your luggage. But ISPs handle billions of emails a day---emails are gonna get lost.

• One of the most common reasons emails were getting blocked in their study? Too many images, not enough text.

"Too many images" is a problem we've discussed (ad nauseam) here and here. You really need a healthy balance of images and text in your campaigns. You shouldn't just cram a bunch of heavy graphics into an email and "blast it out" to your list.

Email Marketing Ideas for Travel Industry

Ken Magill has some creative ways a luxury ski resort operator uses email marketing.

http://chiefmarketer.com/Channels/online/email_ski_resort/

Pathetic, Clingy Unsubscribe Pages

Our friend Paul was recently taken to this unsubscribe landing page:

Adds Paul:

"I landed on this page after clicking on an unsubscribe button in their email. Also the 'check here to unsubscribe' box was unchecked when I got there."

Siiiiiiiiiiigh. Why would you want to make unsubscribing so complicated?

If you send an email to a subscriber, and they want to unsubscribe, they obviously don't want to hear from you. Maybe they're swamped with too many emails. Maybe they don't find you relevant anymore.

Whatever the case, you shouldn't want to send email to them anymore. It's wasted bandwidth. Plus, you're just pissing off potential customers. When I get taken to unsubscribe pages with forms I have to fill out (especially the kind that require passwords) I abandon the form, and simply mark future emails from that sender as junk. In my mind, they deserve it (even if I opted-in at some point in the past).

Making unsubscribing a hassle is like calling someone over and over again, after they've just dumped you. You're not going to nag them into liking you again. You just look desperate and pathetic.

Let them go. Make unsubscribing easy.

In MailChimp, when a subscriber to your list clicks "unsubscribe" he is instantly removed from your list (not only is that a nice thing to do, but it prevents lawsuits like this one ). They're taken to a landing page that says, "You have been removed." One not-so-annoying thing you can do at this point is edit that landing page to include a link to some quick online survey, asking for feedback (so you can improve your content).

If you love your subscribers, set them free. If they come back, they're yours forever. If they don't, then heck, it was a waste of bandwidth and money emailing them anyways, so it's all good.

Related: "What's a normal unsubscribe rate?"

Don't Assume We Know You

A bunch of marketers (who are also bloggers) got the same piece of spam yesterday. I got it too. It was about how not to spam bloggers.

It started out with:

Countless accounts of “PR Flaks” who have spammed bloggers, mis-targeted pitches or just plain gotten blogger relations wrong fill the Internet. Don’t risk finding your next pitch blasted on your favorite blog!

Their offer:

Download the FREE Vocus white paper Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations to get insights on how today’s PR professionals can successfully incorporate blogger relations into their PR strategy and build effective relationships straight from four of the top blogging experts in the industry!

Who the heck is Vocus, and how'd they get my email address?!?!?

Then I found another blogger complaining about this spam. He posted the spam to his blog (which is exactly what Vocus wants to teach us how to avoid) and when people started investigating, we discovered that the one thing we all had in common was that we've all used a service called PRWeb to distribute a press release at some time in the past.

Then we learned that Vocus had recently acquired PRWeb.

Ooooooh, so they were sending out an email to their customers. Okay, I guess that's not spam. Problem is, most of us had no idea we were Vocus customers.

It really would have helped if they used PRWeb somewhere (like in the From: or Subject: fields) so we could trust it. Maybe even a permission reminder, telling us that "You are receiving this email because you are a PRWeb Customer, and PRWeb is a service of Vocus..."

We see this countless times at MailChimp. Companies are in a rush to "blast their customers" with some offer, or some exciting (to whom?) company news, and they don't consider that the majority of their recipients will simply get the email and ask, "Who the @#$% Are You, And How'd You Get My Email?"

What happens next? They get too many spam complaints and they get their company domain name blacklisted. Even worse, they get their email posted on some blog for all the world to see.

Vocus looks like they mean well. They just made a simple mistake (that a lot of marketers make). And the whitepaper they're offering? It actually looks useful.

If you haven't contacted your list in a while, PLEASE send a re-introduction campaign. Don't just assume people remember who you are, and definitely don't assume they want to hear your news.

Here's an excellent example from ModernPostcard on how to re-introduce yourself to your customers.

Quick Tip: Always Schedule Campaigns for Later

Dan is our customer support guy. He's the one you talk to whenever you click the "Live Chat" button if you have a problem or question in MailChimp. Needless to say, Dan has seen a lot of "oopsies."

I overheard him giving one of our customers a nice tip:

Let's say you just finished building your email campaign, and you're ready to send it to your list. Even if you know it's ready to go, always schedule it for later. You can set it to 15 minutes from now, 30 minutes from now, whatever. Just don't send it NOW. Because after you click the submit button, you will inevitably think of something you forgot to add. Or some link you coded wrong. You always have last minute changes. Scheduling for later gives you some time to jump back in and edit.

And here's a related article over at AWeber

Welcome Email Ideas

Spotted this "welcome email" design from MailChimp user RealTruck.com

It's a nice idea that's not too hard to implement: when people subscribe to the RealTruck email newsletter, the welcome email contains a $10 off promo code:

How many of you actually took the time to customize your own welcome emails this way?

Do your welcome emails have nice gifts like this for your new subscribers, or do you just have the boilerplate, "welcome, this is the info we have on file, and click here to unsubscribe in the future, blah blah blah."

When I saw this welcome email, I got a little self-conscious of my own welcome emails for our MonkeyWrench newsletter. I went back to look at what I did, and boy was I embarrassed...

Here's what my own welcome email looked like:

Yaaaawn.

I guess I was more excited about customizing my beautiful HTML email templates and signup forms, so the poor little welcome email got no love.

I used the example from Realtrucks as my inspiration, plus these ideas from Mark Brownlow to totally redesign my welcome email (click for full screen):

The main thing I added (besides some color!) was a link to past issues of our newsletter. MailChimp makes that really easy (details here). 

Then I got to thinking - one reason I kept my welcome email so plain (besides laziness and stupidity) is I thought that cramming too many images and links into a "transactional" email would get it blocked by more spam filters.

So I ran my welcome email through our Inbox Inspector tool. It made it through every single spam filter, except---you guessed it---Postini. Postini said that it looked like "make money fast" spam. Here's my spam filter report:

Hmm, Postini thinks this is "make money fast spam"? I looked at my copy and noticed this line:

Maybe that is a little too spammy.

I removed that line, ran another Inbox Inspection, and it passed Postini!

I never would have known about Postini, let alone been able to get past it, without the Inbox Inspector. Unless, of course, I purchased my own Postini server for email testing. Big, big thank you to the geniuses at ReturnPath for coming up with this technology.

Do your welcome emails need some love? Are you missing out on the best opportunity to make a great first impression with your new subscribers? Do you know if your transactional emails make it past spam filters?

Event Marketing via Email

Interesting article from Karen Gedney on how she used email marketing to do some last-minute event promotion:

Recently, I was called to rescue an event that was only two months away -- with only a handful of registrants to date. Here's what I did.

Nice use of surveys in the article. Great tips for any event planners out there.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625860

Ruby on Rails integration with MailChimp

The folks at ProjectLocker.com have created a way to integrate MailChimp with Ruby on Rails applications. It's open source, and posted at:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-mailchimp/

They've even got it checking an inbox for MailChimp's automated "This user has just subscribed/unsubscribed" email alerts, so they can take appropriate actions on their own hosted database.

Thanks, ProjectLocker!

Getting Blocked By Postini?

Some of our customers who have been checking their email campaigns in our Inbox Inspector  are noticing that Postini is a very, very tough email firewall to get through. Just about everybody (including us!) is getting rejected by Postini.

Dozens of our customers have been testing their campaigns, but so far, we've only seen about 8 campaigns actually get through Postini. Ouch!

You may recall I spent hours dueling with Postini with this GourmetStation campaign. I changed keywords, altered the HTML, totally changed the subject line---all to no avail (at least I made a pretty fascinating image-to-text discovery).

Postini is very picky. Smart---but picky.

All I can say is that if you're having trouble getting through Postini's firewall, below are screenshots of some campaigns that actually passed. Maybe you'll see some kind of pattern here...

The only general similarity I can see with all these campaigns is their image-to-weight ratio.

If they have lots of images, they need a lot more text to balance things out. If a campaign has very little text, then it better not have a lot of images. Also, these people are experienced (maybe a little obsessed) with coding clean HTML (or they simply used our built-in HTML email templates).

Big thanks to all these MailChimp customers for letting us learn from their campaigns...

RealTruck.com Mother's Day Campaign
What's surprising to me about this one from RealTruck.com is it actually contains lots of those "spammy" keywords that we've all been trained to avoid. They used words like NEW, and You Save. They also use red text, and have dollar signs galore. But they got a 100% pass for their Spam Filter score. Goes to show the spam filters are a lot smarter than you think, and the old advice of "Avoid spammy words" just doesn't always work. So long as you're sending good, useful email that people actually requested, you don't have to stress over every little keyword in your campaign.

SoupStudios.com Mother's Day Campaign
Here's one from Aarron Walter, designed for Soup Studios. This is a campaign that doesn't have a lot of text in it, so you'd think the spam filters would give him some grief. Aarron's a web developer, and his code is spotless. That probably helped a lot (certainly didn't hurt him!). Also, the image is well optimized at 40k.  Aarron knows what he's doing, and somehow, I think Postini picked up on that.

Robb Report Home Entertainment eNews
This one from Robb Report has 4 big images in it, but it's also got a lot of text in it to balance them out. Plus, the text is quality content. Product reviews with no apparent "CLICK HERE NOW!" keywords. Note: I spoke with their designer, and she apparently spends a lot of time making sure their HTML code is immaculate before copy-pasting into MailChimp.

Caitlin Allen Acupuncture
I get a lot of "pharmaceutical" spam, so if you were to tell me an email campaign with, "Chinese medicine, Chinese herbs, hayfever, rhinitis, pilates, bloating, and probiotics" could ever pass through spam filters, I'd ask you what kind of crack you were smoking. But Caitlin Allen Acupuncture sent this nice, well-written newsletter to their customers, with ALL those pharmaceutical keywords (and more) and got a 100% passing score. The spam filters (including Postini) could tell that this was good, useful content, so they didn't block it.

LBC Wise Counsel
This one's from Oomph Design, on behalf of their client, LBC Wise Counsel. I like this one for several reasons. First, they passed Postini. Second, they used one of our built-in templates. Third, it starts with a good re-introduction paragraph at the top ("I'm sure you remember me from...").

King Innovation
This one has at least 7 images in it, but again, they're balanced with a lot of text. Also, their HTML code is rock solid (we know, because they used our built-in template to make this). Yet another example of how you can't just assume spammy keywords will get you blocked. This campaign has ALL CAPS, exclamation points, an iPod giveaway, and all kinds of stuff you'd normally think spam filters would hate. But somehow, the spam filters (including Postini) know it's legit.

So I have no idea what the deal is with Postini. It's very picky. The only common thread here is immaculate code, plus a good image-weight to text ratio.

Should You Care?
Is it worth spending a lot of your time trying to get through Postini? Depends on whether or not a significant portion of your recipients check their mail through a Postini server. One way you can tell is to open an old campaign's stats, and dig into your bounce records (how to do that in MailChimp). Just eyeball your SMTP headers for any signs that a Postini server rejected you. Here's an old article I found with an example Postini bounce. Or just CTRL+F and search the smtp headers for "postini."

According to Postini, they're used by over 35,000 businesses. They seem to be used by medium to large corporations, and ISPs can become Postini resellers (they use it to offer anti-spam services to their customers). Check out their "Clients" page to get an idea of who uses them, and whether or not your list might consist of similar clients.

Email Deliverability Tips from Microsoft

Microsoft has posted a handy guide for improving your deliverability to Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, and Outlook.

Download the 26-page PDF here.

Interesting stuff about their built-in SmartScreen technology (which just made the news here), used to detect spam and phishing scams. Also, how they use Brightmail (basically a spam filter for spam filters), and they recommend using ReturnPath's SenderScore service.

They even have some handy tips for designing HTML email for Outlook 2007, like:

• Keep your designs less than 600 pixels wide
• Only use inline CSS
• No background images
• No JavaScript

And other stuff we've always recommended. In fact, all their design suggestions are already included in MailChimp's built-in templates (just in case you haven't found a reason to give them a try yet).

Source: http://www.b2bemailmarketing.com 

How Authentication Helps Your Deliverability

If you send a lot of email marketing, you should start thinking about authentication.

Authenticating your email is basically like having a license plate on a car. If you do something wrong, or just act suspicious while driving, the police can look up the license plate number, and see if you're really the owner.

Some ISPs are already checking for these "license plates" on incoming email.

If you do something spammy (like suddenly send waaaaaay too many emails at one time from a fresh new IP address) they'll check for authentication to see if you're legit.

There are basically two major types of authentication. Microsoft has their SenderID framework, which is fairly easy to implement. This is very similar to the license plate analogy. Yahoo came up with DKIM authentication, which is kind of like checking a car's license plate, plus the driver's fingerprints. It's more thorough, but also a lot harder to implement for some people.

Mark Brownlow recently posted this article from  David Baker, which is a nice summary of how all the different ISPs are planning to check for authentication.

MailChimp users can contact us for information on how to get authenticated. If you're already sending from a dedicated IP address, setting up authentication is a snap.

Spam Filters Need Spam Filters Now

By now, most email marketers know you should avoid using "spammy" phrases like "FREE! CLICK NOW!" or the spam filters will trash your message.

But did you know that before your email even gets to a spam filter, it has to get through a gatekeeper? Yep, spam is so bad, that spam filters now need spam filters to help them.

These gatekeepers kinda look like this:

Looks vicious, doesn't it? They're all over the place. ISPs use them. Large corporations use them. Small businesses are starting to use them.

What's really scary is they all talk to each other. It's how they learn what "spam" is, and who should be blocked (Gulp - are they talking about you right now?).

That's a picture of IronPort's Email Security Appliance. If it thinks your email is spam, it'll gobble it up and fart its remains into cyberspace before your recipient's puny little spam filter even gets a chance to look for the word "V1AGRA". It won't even waste the energy to tell anybody about it (like in a bounce report).

Ever send to your email list and wonder where 5-10% of the emails seem to disappear off to? Ever wonder why the numbers don't seem to add up in your deliverability reports? It was probably one of these big, mean appliances (ReturnPath says its closer to 20% in this PDF Report).

If IronPort thinks your email is "not spam" then it lets your email through (but it'll still get analyzed by a content-based spam filter). And that's when your "avoid spammy content" tactics finally come into play.

To learn more about how IronPort works, they've got an eyebrow-raising demo you should watch. Click the tab at the bottom of the movie, to skip to the "anti-spam" section. Watch the demo

How the heck does this server know what spam is? Your own recipients teach it. When you send an email to your list, and someone on your list thinks it's spam, or doesn't remember opting-in to your list, or if you purchased a list from someone, that person can report you to SpamCop (which was purchased by IronPort in 2003, and is now called "SenderBase"). Get enough SpamCop complaints, and they'll propogate your data to all the IronPort servers around the world, letting everyone know you're a spammer:

Incidentally, your email service provider should be registered at SenderBase, so they can properly investigate every single complaint generated in response to their users' campaigns. At MailChimp, everyone on our staff personally receives copies of any complaints that come in, so we can go suspend the sender's account and investigate immediately.

IronPort is only one of many, many email firewalls, gateways, and security appliances you, as an email marketer, should learn about. Also see:

• Barracuda Networks
• Postini
• MessageLabs
• Brightmail ("9 of the top 12 U.S. ISPs use Brightmail")

All of those big, mean, ruthless "gatekeepers" rely on "reputation" scores to block emails before they even get to the content-based spam filters.

So you really want to make sure your reputation is good. How can you do this?

• Never send spam.
• Don't buy lists. Don't use lists that other people gave you.
• Only send to lists of people who know you, and requested emails from you. Otherwise, if you want to get the word out about your company, pick up the phone and call your prospects, or pick up a pen and write them. Or, email them one at a time (see "Definition of spam" and specifically the word "bulk"), from your own email program.
  

Assuming you're not sending spam, your email design is a huge factor in getting you blocked by one of these gatekeepers:

• When you send emails, always include a "How we got your email" reminder. MailChimp's built-in templates include that information for you, with our *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* tag. This tag is automatically replaced with the survey information that you provide each time you setup a list in MailChimp.
• Your email designs have to be reputable looking. Get sloppy, and people won't trust your opt-out link, and report you instead. See how one designer got blacklisted from his design.
• Always include a one-click unsubscribe link in every campaign you send (MailChimp adds this for you when you use our built-in templates. If you use your own designs, we'll give you a code snippet).
• Haven't contacted your list in a while? Or is this your first campaign? Send an introduction email. Remind them of who you are, or you'll get a big surge in complaints, and wind up on all those ugly blacklists out there.
• Sometimes, you're not the one who got you blacklisted. It was someone else on the server that you used. If you used a shared email marketing service like MailChimp, where thousands of people are sending emails from the same IP, you're at risk. That's why MailChimp has lots of IPs that we send from, but more importantly, we have a human staff of reviewers who pre-screen all new users before they're allowed to use our system. If a user still manages to generate spam complaints, our abuse desk can shut the user down immediately, and re-route email to our other IPs, while we deal with the blacklist service. This is how we manage to send millions of emails every day from our system. If that still sounds too risky, or if you hate sharing, get your own dedicated IP address from MailChimp.
• But if you think you can send junk, get reported, then switch to a new email server, you are sadly mistaken. Once you get reported, your company's name and domain name are on the lists. They'll know to block ALL emails with your name in it from now on, no matter who sends it, or where it came from. This is why affiliate marketing programs can be so risky. Imagine thousands of sloppy email senders (your affiliates) buying lists and sending emails with your company's domain name in them.
  
• Still want to make absolutely sure your campaigns won't get blocked? Consider our new Inbox Inspector feature. It checks the most common spam filters, plus MessageLabs, Postini, and IronPort.
• Want to continually monitor your reputation? There are services for that (ReturnPath has their SenderScore Reputation Monitor).

Want to find out what your (or your client's) reputation is? Here's one way:

Plug your domain name into this lookup service

They'll tell you if it's on any of the blacklists that they search. If it is, then follow instructions on how to get off their lists (tip: you are guilty until proven innocent, every email you send them will probably be posted on a public forum, and you will be asked for proof of opt-in for each complaining recipient).

Thanks to these big email appliances, it doesn't matter what email service provider or email server you send from, or whether or not your content has spammy words in it. If your name is on these lists, your email won't even get delivered.

Nowadays, it's your email reputation that precedes you.

How Your Email Design Can Get You Blacklisted

One of our customers just got blacklisted by an anti-spam organization for his recent email campaign. The customer is a graphic designer, sending campaigns on behalf of his client. The list he was sending to was a list of his client's customers.

They were basically offering a prize to their valued customers, as a "thank you" for their business. Nice, right?

It was a beautiful email. The font was well-chosen, the colors were balanced and harmonious. Oh, and the copywriting---very funny. Not the "ha-ha" kind of funny, but the intelligent tongue-in-cheek kind of funny. Seriously, this was the kind of content that could win a design award.

Problem was, all of that content was inside one big, giant graphic.

And since most email programs block images by default, this is what most of their customers saw in their inbox:

With images off, the only readable content for them was that "Yoo-hoo, click here!" line.

And that's assuming any spam filters actually allowed an email with a big bright pink "Click Here!" to actually get through to the inbox.

So what happened after their customers saw that email? They naturally thought it was spam (and when I say "they" it was most likely one person---that's all it takes). So they reported it, and a copy of the email found its way to the abuse desk at the anti-spam organization.

The engineer who received the report, to his credit, actually did click his "show images" button in his email program. But what did he see?

If he scrolled down in his preview pane to get past the 150 pixel high logo, he saw the first line of copy: "Challenge yourself today to see how quickly you can click your cursor on that little link at the bottom of this email."

Now I know that sounds extremely spammy, but you'll have to trust me on this. It wasn't spam.  Because the following 5 sentences (if you scrolled down in your preview pane even more) went on to explain, in a very funny way, how they were giving away gifts to customers because they knew they were under a lot of stress, and they just deserved a little break. Basically a low-tech "game" where every customer is a winner. Cute. Trust me. I know it's hard to believe, because the image is blocked. But really---if you clicked on "show images" and then scrolled down in your preview pane about 600 pixels, and you took the time to read the whole thing, you'd clearly see that it wasn't spam. </sarcasm>

Problem is, that IT person in charge of the abuse desk didn't have the time to sit there and read the whole email. He had about 93 bazillion other pieces of purported spam to review.

So he made a gut-level decision to block all future emails from that sender, or with that sender's domain name in it.

We just worked with them to get the domain unblocked. Took 3 weeks of phone calls and emails. You see, when you get on a blacklist, even by accident, people aren't exactly in a hurry to help you out.

So here are a few tips for anybody that designs or writes email marketing campaigns:

1) Assume your recipients will have images turned off by default. How does your email look?

2) Assume your recipients will only read your emails in their preview pane. Does enough content display in that limited slice of real estate? Here's an email in AOL9's preview pane.

3) Assume that your email will be reviewed by an IT person who will take all of 3 seconds to judge whether you are a trusted sender, or a spammer. Are you trustworthy in the blink of an eye?

Tip: Create An Email Newsletter Editorial Calendar

Okay, how many of you actually have time to send email newsletters on a very regular, consistent basis? How many of you just send whenever you have time, and when you do, it's a struggle to think of what to say? I bet a lot of you are in the 2nd group.

Here's an idea for you. Setup an editorial calendar for your email newsletter. 

Christopher Knight has some good guidelines over at Email Universe, but you can also just keep things really simple...

Just open up your Outlook or Apple calendar program. Think about how your business performs throughout the year. Do you have seasonal peaks and valleys, where some email newsletters might help? Real estate agents can send "spring cleaning" tips to their clients in March (here's a nice example). We know a power generator dealer who sends hurricane preparation emails and checklists around July. Car dealers could send "prep your car for winter" tips in the fall. If Mothers Day is huge for your restaurant, send a newsletter a few weeks in advance, with a reminder to "make your reservations now."

If you sell software, you probably have a launch schedule for a new product or feature that you could plan around with survey campaigns, teaser campaigns, launch campaigns, and followup campaigns.

Whatever. Plan your content for the year, and set little deadline reminders to beep at you.

For my own MonkeyWrench and MailChimp newsletters, I usually have some idea of what I want in my emails 2 or 3 months in advance (well, at least the main stories and themes). I go ahead and setup drafts for those campaigns in MailChimp. Throughout the weeks before each campaign, I usually come across an interesting article or idea that supports my own content, so I'll login to MailChimp and add some quick blurbs or a link into my campaign for later. Otherwise, I'll forget.

Hint: if you sell email marketing as a service to your clients, sitting down with them and planning an editorial calendar based on their seasonal sales and schedule would probably make you look very professional. Way better than scrambling every month or quarter to blast out a half-baked email at the last minute.

Credits: I got this idea while perusing Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days at the local bookstore. The book had a section on "setting up a marketing calendar" and thought it would be a nice trick for our small business clients who use MailChimp. The book's got a lot of other nice ideas that small business owners might want to try. Two opposable thumbs up!

Real Estate Email Marketing (The Right Way)

One of the partners here in the office was recently in the market for a new home. He found a nice listing online, filled out a contact form to setup a tour, and checked out the home with the agent representing the property. It wasn't quite right, so he went elsewhere.  Several months later, he's still receiving email marketing from that first agent (mostly the "I have new properties available!" variety). He never gave permission to receive email marketing. He just used a contact form to inquire about one property.

Worst of all, they never include an unsubscribe link. No, that's not the worst. I'm in the market for a new home. I asked my partner if he thought so-and-so-dot-com would be a nice place to start. "They're spammers" he tells me.

I myself have exchanged emails with someone I met at a meeting, who later became a real estate agent. Keep in mind that I never once asked about real estate. Now I'm suddenly on her email marketing list. Every time she has a new property to sell, I get an email (and I'm CC'd along with about a hundred of her friends). Sigh. One more email, and I swear I'm going to Reply-To-All.

We've seen a lot of real estate agents sign up to use MailChimp. We can break them down into two types...

A) "I want to use email as a relationship tool to help my customers (and, of course, help my sales)."

B) "I've gotta make my quota, or I'm screwed. So I just bought a list of emails, and I want to blast an advertisement for this new property!"

I'm sad to say that right now, the majority of agents who sign up at MailChimp fall under Category B, and we have to politely turn away their business. Guess that's why I'm writing this post.

Just yesterday, we turned down an agent who got very angry with us. He basically purchased a list of 4,000 prospects and wanted to "blast" an email "flyer" for some new property he was representing. What a waste of time and money. We told him that was against our terms of use, and boy he let us have it.

But here's the thing. Part of his list consisted of about 80 people who had actually signed up at his website to receive more information about that property. Granted, they did not sign up for an email newsletter list. They were probably just expecting a one-time email response from him with pricing, availability, etc. I was about to tell him that he could contact those 80 people (because they'd surely remember him) and politely remind them of how he got their email addresses, then ask them if they'd like to receive more information now that the property was officially open for business. But before I could suggest all that, he accused me of "picking on real estate agents" and said that our human review process was letting spammers through (never mind the fact that we stopped him) and said, "Good luck with your revenue model when you finally decide to block spam." Alrighty then. I have to say that although we're not driving a different color Porsche for each day of the week, we do quite well supporting legitimate email marketers who send permission-based email.

Don't get me wrong. We have nothing against acquiring a list of prospects and contacting them. It's business. You just can't use MailChimp to email them. Jeopardize your own server, please. Actually, we couldn't recommend mass email at all for unsolicited sales. It's a waste of money, and you'll end up pissing off lots of people, and getting reported as a spammer.

Email marketing is best for maintaining a relationship with your existing customers, as opposed to acquiring new customers. Some real estate agents just don't get it.

Luckily, there are some who do get it.

Here's a nice example from MailChimp user Jodi Arnold, from John L. Scott Real Estate:

We like this because she's maintaining a relationship with clients. It's not some automated message from an MLS database. Jodi wrote it.

If you're an agent, and you've already placed a client into a home, why on earth would that client want to hear from you anymore? How would it possibly benefit your sales to keep emailing someone who has already purchased a home, and will probably not buy another home for several more years (let alone in the same market, from you)? Referrals. Stay on someone's good side, and they'll tell their friends.

How do you stay on top of mind? Occasionally send them truly useful content. Look at Jodi's email newsletter. It's got local events, commentary on local real estate news, the always popular "my house is worth..." data, and of course her closing statement of "I appreciate referrals..."

It's useful, it's honest, it's personal.

Jodi can boast a healthy sized list of local clients, a 0% unsubscribe rate, and an open rate that is double her industry average.

You might say, "this is hard work to put together content like this every single month!" You might also say, "This can get expensive fast, and what's my ROI?"

All very good points.  There's no way you can put together useful content that people actually want to read every single month. Not unless that's your only job, or you have a very good team of content producers in your company. That's why we made MailChimp a pay-per-email system, with no monthly fees. So send it every quarter. Or whenever you have time. But please---only when you have something useful to share.

I'm certainly no real estate expert, but if you think you have to spend countless hours in front of a computer to get leads (instead of in front of real people), you're probably on the wrong track. You'll never get the Glengarry list that way.

It's about quality, not quantity.

Using AJAX In Your Email Signup Forms

Nice tip from MailChimp user Aarron Walter. He tripled his clients' list signup rate simply by using AJAX to make their email signup forms easier to use...

One thing I have noticed on nearly all of the web sites I develop for clients where a mailing list is being populated via a sign up page (that describes most of my clients), the mailing list doesn't build up very fast, even on sites getting tons of traffic. I figured the problem could be that people weren't interested, they were put off by the amount of info they would have to enter, or they just missed the link to the mailing list sign up page all together. The latter two I had the power to solve. I built a very simple mailing list sign up widget that only required an email address, and placed it on the home page of some clients' sites (http://rwoodstudio.com, http://soupstudios.com, http://hawthornehouseinc.com). Using some fancy Ajax technology the user could sign up without the page refreshing, making the process fast, and unobtrusive to the browsing experience. Once the sign up form was more prevalent and less daunting our sign up rate tripled across the board.

Here's an article that will walk you through my solution for the problem:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/use-ajax-php-build-mailing-list.

Thanks for the tip, Aarron!

Coming Up With Email Newsletter Topics

Christopher Knight from EmailUniverse has some nice tips for coming up with email newsletter ideas.

One problem he talks about is how you'll always have good ideas and come across interesting articles, links, etc., when you're not "in ezine production mode."

One thing I've been doing lately is keeping next month's email newsletter in DRAFT mode in MailChimp. Then, as I come across ideas (or as I write blog posts), I go in and write a quick blurb in my email newsletter and save it for later. I'll schedule it to send (to myself) about a week before it's due to go out. Sort of a reminder to get it wrapped up.

Four Traits of Good Newsletters

Nick Usborne writes "Four Ways Good Newsletters Are Like Blogs."

I personally think a blog is a good companion to a newsletter. Mainly because with a blog, you can post your thoughts, links to other sites, etc. on a daily/weekly basis. Then at the end of the month (or quarter), write your newsletter and point to the blog for "the full story." It makes it a lot easier to put together your email newsletters.

If you haven't started a blog yet for your company, you should give it a try with Blogger.

Emails Blocked By Spam Firewall?

Companies have to deal with so much spam these days (here's a slew of stats for you), they're just outsourcing their email management duties to vendors like Barracuda Networks, Postini, and Symantec.

The nice thing about this trend is that those vendors can block spam a whole lot more efficiently than individual IT managers ever could.  So that means IT managers can spend less time updating their home made blocklists, and more time supporting real problems around the office.

The bad thing about all this is if you send a legitimate email marketing campaign that gets blocked by one of these vendors, it's tough getting un-blocked. They're not the same as getting blocked by an ISP (like AOL or Hotmail). Big ISPs usually have feedback loops that help marketers prevent blocks before they happen. These email firewalls are very proprietary, and rarely, if ever, share information with senders.

This means you've got to learn how to tell when you're getting blocked (note that I said "when," not "if") then how to deal with the situation...

How can you tell if your email campaigns are getting blocked by email firewalls and spam filters?

After every campaign you send, look at your bounceback numbers.

You should have a feel for what's "normal" for your list. If you haven't sent enough emails to know "what's normal" for you, here are some email stats by industry.

If you see an abnormal amount of bouncebacks for a particular campaign, that's a clue that something has gone wrong, and you need to look into it.

How To Read Bouncebacks

I'm not going to go into detail about bounced SMTP headers, but if you're an email marketer, you should know why and how to read them. (here are some tips from our knowledge base).

This is as much fun as poking your eyeball with a hot needle. So you really only have to do this if you spot abnormalities in your bounce stats.

In MailChimp, click into a campaign report, then click on "Bounces." You'll see "soft" bounces, and "hard" bounces. Check them both, because some email firewalls are deceptive, and send their bounces as "hard," hoping you'll never contact the recipient again.

Click on the "See why these bounced" links.

Next, you'll see a list of whose emails bounced.

Tip: If your list is huge, clicking through all these email headers could take all day. So look for groupings of bouncebacks. Like if 4 people from the same company domain name bounced, read their headers first. It's very likely their corporate email firewall blocked your email:

If you're using Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer 7, use "tabbed browsing" to your advantage. Just CTRL+CLICK on all the emails you want to read through, and each bounce header will open in a new tab. Then just tab through them (CTRL+TAB) and look for common clues.

For the most part, you'll just find a bunch of "email doesn't exist" bounces.

But this is (roughly) what it looks like when you've been blocked by Barracuda or Postini or one of the spam firewalls:

 

and sometimes, you come across a SMTP-reply like this:

What's cool about that one is they actually give you an email address to report the mistake to. That's very rare.

What to do if you're blocked by a spam firewall

So now you can tell if you've been blocked by a firewall. What do you do next?

Your best bet is if you know the recipient. Contact him and tell him, "You know our email newsletter that you signed up for? Your company's email firewall keeps blocking it. You should tell your IT people to unblock us."

What normally happens next is the IT person will ask your recipient, "Ok, who's the sender, and what's their domain name or IP address?" If you use an email service provider like MailChimp, chances are your email was sent from a wide range of IPs and domains, so you'll need to give them a list of all the IPs we use (here's a list of MailChimp servers).

Or, if you have a dedicated IP address, you can just provide that.

If you don't know the recipient, you can try contacting the recipient's IT team. 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Keep in mind that when you're dealing with IT people, you're pretty much guilty until proven innocent. They deal with crap all day. So be prepared to provide absolute proof of opt-in for that recipient (MailChimp stores all that for you).

Did you just import an old list of people, and you never collected IP addresses or date/time stamps? Oof, this is going to be an uphill battle for you.

Do not, under any circumstances, tell the IT person that "we do not spam." The simple fact of the matter is, their firewall says you're a spammer, so to them, you're a spammer.  Just politely explain how the recipient specifically requested your emails, and that you're being erroneously blocked, and gosh it sure would be nice if they'd unblock you. 

If the IT person believes you're legit, they can whitelist you to prevent this from happening in the future. Sometimes, the IT person says it's out of their hands, and that you (or MailChimp) needs to contact their email vendor. That's a hint that they don't believe you're legit. No amount of explanation from MailChimp will help convince them either.

So long as you're sending valuable emails that people truly requested, it's really not that hard to get IT people to whitelist you.

On rare occasions, it's something that your ESP has to clear up with Barracuda (or Postini, or Outblaze, etc). For example, if MailChimp introduces a new feature (like our forward-to-friend link, or our unsubscribe link) that's embedded in all emails sent from our system, the link that we use for that particular feature will suddenly appear in millions of emails sent across the Internet every single day. That tends to look suspicious to the email firewalls, so they'll start blocking all emails with that URL in it (until someone contacts them about it). That's when we call them up or email them and explain what's going on.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Luckily, email service providers (like MailChimp) have a dedicated abuse desk person to work with ISPs and Email vendors to keep these problems to a minimum. But a lot is on your shoulders, too. Never send to people who didn't opt-in, and always check your campaign stats for abnormalities. Alert your ESP if you think there might be a problem, but don't assume the problem's all theirs.

AOL Email Delivery Tips

Frank, straightforward tips from Al Iverson on how to deal with AOL delivery issues.

Lots of great tips. In a nutshell, he lists "three primary things that cause delivery issues when sending email to AOL:"

1. You're not whitelisted,
2. Your bounce handling is broken, or      you're not looking at bounces; or
3. You're generating too many complaints      or too many bounces.

 

At MailChimp, here's how we help you deliver your campaigns to AOL recipients:

1. First and foremost, we do everything we can not to piss off AOL.
2. We automatically clean bounces from your list. If you keep sending emails to bad addresses (whether AOL is the ISP or not) you're going to really piss off that ISP (see number one)
3. We automatically remove any recipients who report your email as spam (we do it with their feedback loop). When they click on AOL's "Report Spam" button, we get a copy of the email, we scan it for the sender, and we remove the recipient from the sender's list. If the email is suspicious in any way, we contact the sender.
4. We now offer dedicated IP addresses to qualified customers. With a dedicated IP address, you can apply for whitelisting status, email certification, setup authentication, and other things that lead to better deliverability. Contact us for more information.

Tip o' the chimp hat: Found the article over at Tamara's Email Marketing Best Practices.

Sending Too Much Email Marketing?

Found an interesting mini-case study over at Tamara's blog about how one marketer cut down on the number of emails it sent (some of their subscribers got up to 10 emails a week) to  about 2 emails per week. They don't mention where conversions were before the change, but now they get a 10% conversion rate.

Reminds me of an Open Rate example I like to show people. We watched a customer send email newsletters over the course of 2 years. You can see his open rate drop over time as they upped their frequency to twice a month, then to twice a week (click to zoom):

Look at that open rate drop. There are a lot of other factors that contribute to a declining open rate, mainly "Was the content any good?" But the main takeaway for me is: "If you've got nothing useful to say, don't send anything."

Email Marketing Tips for Web Designers and Agencies

I just did a guest lecture at the Art Institute of Atlanta. It was for Aarron Walters'  excellent Findability class. Always an honor to be invited to speak there.

These students aren't kids. They're mostly professionals who are already wor