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Friday, June 29, 2012

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Buttons, Charts & Other Supporting Images in Email Newsletter

Buttons, charts, and other supporting images should use the colors of your design elements to pull the reader’s eye to the images. Make sure the text color used on your images stands out and is readable. Most importantly, make sure the recipient understands the action with the corresponding text or icons in the Buttons. 


See the examples below:  

Shop Now button

Buy Now button

Free Shipping button    

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Digital marketing is built on the core principles of traditional marketing


Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd is among India's early pioneers and a leading provider of Digital Direct Marketing solutions and services. It is among the few players to effectively plan, develop, manage and execute digital one to one communication campaigns for a large number of reputed companies in India.

Mr. Manjunatha Kutarahalli is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kenscio. He has over 28 years of experience in technology and product management. He has vast experience in large-scale operations, building competencies in niche technology areas, turnaround and high growth companies that develop leading-edge applications for diverse industry channels and client needs.

In 2009, Mr. Manjunatha co-founded Kenscio Digital Marketing, a digital direct marketing company, catering services to world's largest players and managed to get 50 clients in its very first year. He did his M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras and then one-year senior management programme from IIM Kolkata. He is an electronic gadgets freak and enjoys writing blogs.

Mr. Manjunatha spoke to The Hindu Opportunities on careers in digital marketing field.

What propelled the digital marketing boom in India?

India's Internet population is growing at an exponential rate propelled by factors like de-regulation in the telecom sector, increased use of social networking sites, adoption of e-commerce, and daily deals portals trading goods and services in economical way, etc. So, to tap the growing Internet audience, marketers are now exploring opportunities to connect to them through digital mediums like the Internet, search engines, email, social, mobile, video etc.

Who constitute the typical audience of a digital marketing strategy?

The primary audience is from metros and tier 1 cities who are tech-savvy and want the convenience and comfort of shopping online from their offices or homes. There is a considerable increase in audience from tier 2 and 3 cities. Age group from 20 to 45 years is the most active audience, and they are also aiding their parents who are above 50s. Male shoppers are still the largest audience for online marketers, while women centric portals continue to expand.

How is a career in digital marketing different from a career in traditional marketing?

Digital marketing career covers the basics of traditional marketing and marketing in a new internet environment. A career in digital marketing would cover internet marketing paradigm, web analytics and intelligence – a quantitative way to interpret data and create market intelligence for decision makers, market research to include internet mediums, digital marketing issues, consumer behaviour and internet laws.

What are the unique roles available in digital marketing field? What are the skills required to assume those roles?

Digital media provides a variety of career roles. Content Marketing, SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Blog and Article Marketing, Reputation Management, Web Design, Video Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Media Planning are some specialised areas.

Each of these roles requires unique skill sets; sometime these are pure technical roles. For instance, a SEO marketing professional has to know how to optimise the website for better organic ranking in various search engines for key words consumers may be querying. An email-marketing specialist should possess email-marketing skills and be aware of relevant laws governing email-marketing communication. He should have an insight to consumer behaviour and analytics, and marketing spends and returns.

Should every aspirant of a career in digital marketing possess both technology and marketing skills?

Understanding of the Internet technology is a must for a successful career in digital marketing along with the core traditional marketing skills. An understanding of the Internet consumer behaviour, web analytics, consumer engagement with different digital channels, applicable rules and regulations governing each digital channels and for protecting consumers, are very important for a digital marketer.

Can professionals from traditional marketing upgrade to digital marketing? What does the transition involve?

Yes, digital marketing techniques and expertise is built on the core principles of traditional marketing. For those who have a basic degree in computers, transition is very easy. For those who don't have a basic degree in computers it would be a little difficult. Also, there are several certification, diploma and postgraduate courses on digital marketing from several institutes, industry, organisations and universities.

What does it take to be at the top in this field?

The success for any marketing function is to assist the business. Marketing spend is directly related to sales. As digital marketing is more measurable, the performance of digital marketing professional is easily assessed. So he has to master the marketing medium and show results. He has to experiment with different digital marketing mediums, and find where the customers are most engaged and which medium provides the best returns on the investment both for acquisition of new customers or influencing existing customers to buy more.

What are the challenges professionals in digital marketing face?

There are two kinds of challenges. Technical challenges include how each digital channel works, and the corresponding expertise required in those, implementation and day to day execution. Marketing challenge is to understand the consumer behaviour and assimilating marketing analytics and ROI from different mediums.

How is the future for digital marketing professionals?

The future for digital marketing professionals is bright. The country's Internet population is predicted to reach 25% of the population, and e-commerce industry to reach 100 crores in revenues by 2015. There is a big need of skilled manpower in this industry. So, traditional marketers should acquire digital marketing skills and new marketing professionals can take up digital marketing courses and pursue a bright career here.

Source: THE HINDU: » FEATURES » OPPORTUNITIES
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-opportunities/article3548483.ece

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Why a Fully Managed Email Service Provider (ESP) work best for your email marketing efforts?


Why Email Marketing?
Email is consistently rated as the world’s most popular and most widely used application on the internet and is now by far the leading means of business communication. It is second only to search in online marketing budgets with 97% of consumers and 94% of marketers using, piloting or planning email marketing programmes with 88% of people anticipating the effectiveness of email to increase in the next 3 years. In short, promoting your organization and its services via email is one of the most powerful, flexible and cost-efficient means of direct marketing and therefore it’s imperative that when choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP) that you select the right one who will match your needs perfectly.

What are the Different Types of ESP’s?
If you’re new to email marketing then embarking on your research can seem extremely daunting as initially there appears to be lots of organizations to choose from. One of the fundamental decisions you need to make is whether to outsource your email marketing or keep it in-house, and making this decision could have far-reaching consequences. There are a number of ESP’s on the market who provide a wide range of products, services and functionalities, so it’s imperative to understand the different types of ESP’s and their different areas of focus. To make things easier for you, we have analyzed the market and segmented it into four key categories as the following diagram shows:



Whilst each option has its merits, for the majority of organizations, an outsourced solution – whether a fully managed or ASP (Application Service Provider) solution – can be the most sensible option. ASP solutions are always up to date concerning any email marketing legalities and you automatically benefit from any system upgrades and new versions. Outsourcing will allow you to concentrate on your marketing strategy, letting your ESP take away some of the workload from you.


Solutions and Services Offered by ESP’s
Now you have seen a snapshot of the four different segments of the email market (Managed, ASP, Software License and In-House as seen in picture) you are now in a better position to take a look at the different solutions and services that each sector and ESP offer. These vary considerably from supplier to supplier so as always you need to make a hotlist of the most important services and solutions you are looking for. To point you in the right direction, take a look at the following guidelines, taking note of the solutions and services mentioned below which you feel are relevant to your organization:


  • Types of solution offered: Look at whether the ESP offers one product or a range of services such as end-to-end services, a technology, media campaigns, lead generation campaigns and market research.
  • Types of services offered: What types of services does the ESP offer. These can vary massively and can include some of the following: List provision; data management; data cleansing; best practice consultancy; broadcast, personalization and segmentation; real-time reporting; full campaign management; creative design and copywriting services; dynamic content solutions; hosting services; event triggered messaging and sequence messaging; integration with web analytics; if multicountry/ language campaigns can ESP support this – and so on!!
  • Email Deliverability: Does the ESP have an ongoing commitment to deliverability? Are they able to set up email platform on your own domain? Are they able to provide a dedicated IPs?  Are their email  infrastructure compliant with ISP's authentication requirements?  Are their platform can receive spam or complaint feedback loops from ISPs? How do they ensure that they don’t appear on blacklists and do they have a relationship with all the major ISP’s for white listing? Do they have a dedicated deliverability team?
  • Product Features: What features are important to you? E.g. rich media content capability, videomail, audio, integration, multi-channel capabilities, split testing, digital signatures to avoid phishing emails, management structure within the system, email receipts on online transactions etc. Build a list of all ESP’s who have these features as part of their solutions to aid your decision-making process.
  • Product Flexibility: Can the ESP be your partner today and in the future providing you with advice on market trends and new product capabilities?
  • Functionality: How comprehensive is the ESP’s functionality for planning, designing, executing and measuring email campaigns, compliance functionality.
  • Technology Platform: How easy to use is the technology? Can someone with no HTML training or know-how use the technology easily?
  • Email Data Security: Has your ESP taken all measures to secure your customer's email data? Is the technology infrastructure of your ESP has been hosted in a tier 4 data center? and policies are put in place for data security? and being audited by third parties? Is your ESP certified for Data security like DMA's Data Seal?
  • Reporting Capabilities: Does the ESP provide you with reports in your desired format allowing you to measure the success of the campaign? Whether you’re opting for an ASP or in-house solution you should be able to get comprehensive reports including open rates, click rates and bounces as well as advanced functionalities such as complex real time reports and the ability to link revenues generated from a specific campaign to individual email addresses etc.
  • Integration with Other Applications: Does the ESP easily integrate with your other applications like Web Analytics, CRM, E-Commerce, ERP and databases?
  • Training: Will the ESP provide you with full training and support on their product or service which you will be adopting? Does the ESP has a dedicated trainer? Can they offer onsite comprehensive training on the platform and best practices?


What Now?
Now you have had the chance to do some research into the different types of ESP’s on the market and the solutions and services they offer, you are now in the position where you can make an informed selection.




Sunday, June 10, 2012

Best Practices on Constructing an Email Newsletter and Improving its Performance

Many companies would like to send their subscribers a periodic email newsletter. The primary objective is to get their subscribers to read what the company has to say and keep the subscribers either informed about or take action.  How to keep the subscribers get hooked to the newsletter and make them act?

Here are some great ideas to improve your email newsletters for better performance.  

Subject line: Use concise subject lines, emphasizing the recipient’s benefit and prompt him/her to take action. Personalization and Individualization with Title, First Name (or Last Name), City, Login Id or Email Id will also greatly benefit.

Editorial for your readers: According to a recent survey, subscribers are engaged more by newsletters with an editorial, than a newsletter without a proper introduction. Another positive effect of the editorial is that you can highlight particular elements of your newsletter to your audience

Directory for a better orientation: If your newsletter consists of several articles, then a link directory is essential. This way your recipients can reach the article they are most interested in reading with one simple click. But make sure you don’t over burden them with too many articles.

Add to address book: Benefit from the positive effects an attractive image can bring you by ensuring that all images and illustrations are directly shown to your subscribers by simply asking your readers to add your email address to their address books. ISPs provides greater deliverability of your newsletter by directly putting them in the inbox of the recipient bypassing spam filters and enable images in the newsletter automatically.

Opportunity to subscribe: If a person receives a forwarded newsletter he/she should immediately have the opportunity to subscribe, so make sure you offer the possibility to subscribe after the obligatory unsubscribe link.

Show the recipient’s email address: State the recipient’s email address to raise the credibility of your email and facilitate readers who receive your newsletter several times to subscribe with the right email address.

Link to profile data: Your recipients should have the chance to update their profile. That way you are you able avoid unnecessary unsubscriptions.

Link to View Online link: Provide a view online link for subscribers whose email servers blocked the images, so that they can visit the landing page directly through their browser.

Engage with your audience: get people encouraged to share travel reviews/ advices / tips / pictures. Offer free reward points for people who help friends and family sign up for our newsletter.

Enable Social Media links: get your subscribers to interact with your social media accounts and share it with their networks.

Enable Forward to a Friend link: get your subscribers to share the email newsletter with their friends and also to invite them to join the newsletter subscription.

Take advantage of every single touch point: Think about every way you can increase subscribers, taking advantage of every contact you have with your customers and prospects. Have a subscription box on every page of your website; at events or in-store promotions ask if the interested person would like to receive the newsletter and preferably obtain permission there and then; add a footer to all staff emails; promote the benefits of signing up by enhancing the subscription value with customer testimonials and offering incentives for sign.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Email Marketing: Have you Found a Crystal Ball Yet?


If you are an email marketer you might have started to believe in destiny. With ISPs headstrong to tighten their policies for bulk senders, rubbing the good ol crystal ball and hoping for the best might seem like a good option. We don’t know much about crystal balls but can sure share some good practices that can help you control the destiny of your email communication.

Gmail has listed a set of guidelines and best practices for Email Marketers, when followed should yield favorable results.

Guidelines for Email Marketers

“The way Gmail classifies spam depends heavily on reports from our users. Gmail users can mark and unmark any message as spam, at any time. To increase the inbox delivery rate of your messages, make sure that all recipients on your distribution lists actually want to receive the mail.” – GMAIL

Presuming you do everything by the book i.e. ensure users opt-in to receive your messages, honor un-subscription, follow the best practices for HTML design, monitor bounces, and ensure your subscribers engage with you and so on; you should not need a crystal ball (or Aladdin’s lamp for that matter). That being said, you can request your faithful subscribers to white-list you!

Being white-listed by subscribers ensures:

1. Your mails almost always lands in their in-boxes.

2. Your reputation with ISPs is significantly improved, so consequently your deliverability improves even for the subscribers who have not white-listed you.

We have listed a set of step by step instructions that you can email to your subscribers and request them to white-list you:

White-Listing Instructions

To ensure the success of this exercise you may consider offering incentives!

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Colours in HTML Emails

In everything from images to fonts, colors play an important role in the email design process but can also create problems. For example, don’t choose a font color such as a muted gray on a gray background that makes your headlines and calls-to-action difficult to read. And don’t run the risk of hiding valuable information in your emails by blending the content into the background. Men and women react differently to colors, but several polls on color preferences by gender and age yield interesting results:  

Target AudienceFavorite ColorsLeast Favorite Colors
FemalesBlue, Purple, Green (all "cool" colors)Orange, Brown, Gray ("warm" and "neutral" colors)
MalesBlue, Green, Black (two "cool" and one "neutral" color)Brown, Orange, Purple ("neutral", "warm" and "mixed" colors)
All GendersPreferences for Green decrease with age; Preferences for purple increase with ageDislike of Orange increases with age
 
For more information on color preferences and perceptions, check out these resources:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm

http://desktoppub.about.com/od/howcolorworks/l/aa_colorsee.htm  

For Background Color, Use a white or very light-colored background with a dark to medium font color to make it easy for recipients to read your email message. Also, if you use background colors in sidebar boxes contain them within tables and avoid using a body background color, because Web-based clients remove the body tag and typically place its attributes within a table. Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook might retain the specified background color when replying to or forwarding the email, but other clients use their colors, making message text difficult to read in some instances.    

Monday, June 4, 2012

Email Marketing: How to Win back non responders?


Most of the marketers take things for granted that after having got the customer. They assume that their customers are engaged with their portal and brand. And their customers come back whenever they wish.  A lot of things can happen: Customers are increasingly having multiple brands offering them differentiation in the product range, servicing, speed of delivery, better customer support etc.  How does one know that their customers are loyal and engaged? How soon one would get to know that their customers have not engaged with them?

It is time for Marketers to get into depth of finding their customers behaviour.  Having understood the non engaged customer base, Marketers can now look into the win back strategies to getting their customers once again buying from them.

Here are some of the reasons, why your customers might have forgotten you!



The One-Way Conversation

Building active, long-term relationships with your customers should  be one of the prime objective of email marketers. At the core of doing email marketing well is remembering that building a relationship requires conversation.

 So what do marketers do when email recipients aren’t interested in conversing? We found that, as a whole,  marketers showed a lack of conversational skills in dealing width the apparently uninterested subscriber. The idea of email as a dialogue is missing. By pushing out email without regard for consumer interests or preferences, marketers are putting their email reputation at risk. A poor sender reputation, in turn, creates deliverability problems for their entire email program. By moving from a “one-way conversation” to a true dialogue, marketers can re-engage inactive recipients.


Preference Based Subscription

We recommend that email marketers ask subscribers about their preferences for email frequency and email subject matter when they subscribe or make their initial purchase.

Once preferences are known, they should be honored. While this best practice may not be realistic for all businesses, marketers should, at a minimum, make sure that expectations for mailing frequency are appropriately set.

Where customers are not offered the opportunity to express their frequency preferences, they should be offered the option of reduced frequency once a pattern of inactivity is seen.


Message Frequency

While there are some circumstances where an increase in message frequency is appropriate (e.g. before a holiday, to match recent subscriber activity or in response to a purchase), it doesn’t make sense to consistently increase message frequency on a monthly basis to inactive subscribers. If a subscriber does not respond when receiving an email message every day, they are not likely to respond when receiving more than one—and in either case, they are likely to be extremely annoyed. That increases the risk that the subscriber will click the spam button, contributing to deliverability problems for your company’s entire mailing list.
To maintain optimal frequency, monitor subscriber response—opens, click-throughs and conversions – over time. Note the points at which each metric shows a drop-off in response, and put business rules in place to manage your mailing strategy accordingly. For example, you could specify that you will only mail once a month to any subscriber who has no opens, clicks, or response for six continuous months. A re-permissioning policy (discussed below, page 4) should be a part of the overall email marketing strategy.
Deliverability at Risk

The longer marketers continue to mail to large numbers of inactive subscribers, the greater the chances that their entire program will suffer as the result of reputation problems. Lack of response indicates that a subscriber is not interested in the messages. Eventually that lack of interest will lead to spam complaints by subscribers who have reached their saturation point. Spam complaints directly and negatively affect a marketer’s sending reputation, adversely affecting deliverability  to all subscribers.

This risk is compounded when companies fail to include clear permissioning for promotional emails during the initial checkout (sign-up) process. Without clear permissioning, “subscribers” never really subscribed, and they have no expectation of what will arrive in their inboxes. These recipients are naturally less engaged and more likely to complain due to lack of disclosure.

In addition, some ISPs are increasingly paying attention to whether or not their users respond to commercial mail. If a marketer is mailing at a high frequency and receives a disproportionately low response or no response at all over a consistent period of time, their sender reputation could be negatively impacted. This could lead to having all of the company’s email end up in the spam folder or, worse, having it blocked outright.


Missed Opportunities

Marketers are missing the opportunity to increase sales by re-engaging subscribers in the conversation. In addition, they may be interfering with their ability to optimize email content for their entire email list. This occurs because totally uninterested recipients dilute email response patterns, skewing email metrics and making optimization hard to achieve.


Recommendation:

Don’t experiment—ask! Implement a strategy to get subscribers to renew their permission with your email program, ideally in combination with a preference center, to find out what subscribers want to receive, if anything, and when. Testing does have a place in refining your approach to re-permissioning and finding out what approaches are most effective in generating expressions of continued and future interest.


Recommendations

Include win-back messages in your strategy for re-engaging non-responsive subscribers. Use a methodical analytic approach to determining what offers and creative are most effective, as well as identifying the most effective message timing. Consider basing your offer on the subscriber’s previous purchase. The strategy should specify how many win-back messages will be sent, at what intervals, and at what point in the sequence you will send a re-permissioning message.

Former purchasers represent “low hanging fruit” in email marketing, as it is always less costly to reach out to former customers than it is to acquire new ones. By focusing on developing and maintaining a dialogue with subscribers—a dialogue in which the subscriber sets the terms—email marketers can re-engage subscribers who have been nonresponsive, and reap the benefits of increased sales.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Email Marketing - Using Right Fonts, and Colour in an HTML Newsletter

You might be wondering what is the right font, font sizes and colors to be used in a HTML newsletter?

In general, only universally-supported fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman should be used in email messages. Arial is a font that was specifically designed for ons-creen readability. Studies indicate that Web users prefer Arial, Verdana and Tahoma to others when viewing Web pages and email.

If you include fonts that are not loaded on your recipients’ machines, their email clients will substitute different fonts, which can affect your design. When using a special font (such as the unique font for a company logo), place it within an image.

Fonts can be specified in pixels, points or HTML font size value. Use a point size no smaller than 10 pixels, 10 point, or size “2”.

Beware of using white as a font color. While it is tempting to use a dark background and white font to make the text stand out, many spam filters identify the use of white (#FFFFFF) in a font tag as a possible spam trigger. Spammers often use a white font on white backgrounds to hide information from recipients. Use your color wheel to find contrasting colors that can accentuate your message and readability.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Email Marketing Services - Inbox Delivery Optimization Techniques - Dos and Donts


There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes.

Is that so simple?

Does your email marketing software or service provider guarantee email delivery optimization?

Certainly most do not!

There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes. Is that so simple?

Let us look at some of the email deliverability myths that most marketers seem to have.

  1. We don’t spam!
  2. We send emails only to opt-in lists
  3. Someone has blacklisted us for no reason
  4. ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly
  5. If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists


We don’t send Spam!

The marketers first need understand the definition of Spam! It is not just the Viagra or the porn stuff! Any message that doesn’t suit the need of the customer is spam, whether it is the message subject line, content, broken or dodgy HTML code, relevance, frequency of the emails, etc. Moreover, messages that do not comply with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) act may be classified as SPAM by receiving ISPs.

Marketers have to stop sending messages that are boring, mundane and uninteresting. Marketers need to check if their messages are CAN-SPAM compliant. Marketers have to monitor their campaigns reports like opens, clicks, spam complaints, and abuses from their customers and ISPs. If they don’t, they may be surprised to see sometime later, their messages are being categorized as SPAM and lying in junk folders or being blocked by ISPs.


We send emails only to opt-in lists

Sending email campaigns to opt-in lists is a good practice, because you are assured of good deliverability. But have you given control to your opt-in customers, the power to opt-out or unsubscribe in each campaign? If you haven’t, start doing it now. Even if you have given the power to opt-out or unsubscribe, are you acting promptly within a reasonable time (with one week) to stop sending further email campaigns? Have you opted them again, after a reasonable amount of time through another promotional campaign? Are you acting on bounces and taking action to get your list cleaned out of bounced email addresses? Are you educating your opt-in subscribers, to opt-out instead of complaining to ISPs about abuses from you? Are you capturing the opt-in subscriber preferences to send relevant campaigns that suit their interests and the frequency of email campaigns in a given period?

The success of keeping your list clean and emails reaching out to your opt-in customers lies in understanding the needs of the opt-in subscribers, measuring the success of each email campaign and working to address the issues above. If you don’t, even your opt-in customers will soon be opting out or complaining you to ISPs on email campaigns as SPAMs.


Someone has blacklisted us for no reason

Emails Marketers have to understand that email communication is being heavily abused by spammers around the world. For every genuine email sent, there are 90 others which are spam. Most of the email service providers and companies are putting tough measures to block spam emails reaching their infrastructure or for processing and storing Spam emails and damaging their employee productivity. There are service providers who constantly scout for spammers, monitor their activities on the web and maintain a list of their IP addresses and domains (blacklists). They provide various companies the blacklisted IPs and domain names, to block the email senders from those IPs and Domains. The black list service providers employ various complex and advance techniques to monitor increased email sending, patterns, and their web crawlers checking various things on their servers, and etc. to collect lot of statistics to classify them into the blacklists.

Hence Marketers need to understand the challenges if they are using their own bulk mailing solutions and constantly monitor if their IPs or Domains are blacklisted by any service providers. They should take immediate action, if needed with those service providers and get their IPs an Domains white listed.


ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly

Most of the opt-in customers have their email addresses on the major 4 ISPs Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Hence Marketers will be sending a bulk of their emails to these 4 ISPs. They have to ensure that their emails are getting delivered to recipient’s inboxes on these ISPs. Why should these ISPs block the marketer’s emails? They have several reasons and some of them have been stated earlier. Most of the ISPs provide free email infrastructure to their customers and hence they need to optimize their email infrastructure. They have to protect their recipient’s privacies and their reputation as the best ISP in the world.

The emails in those ISPs may also bounce for various reasons like account deletion, inbox full, etc. The sender email server or the email service provider has to remove these bounced addresses from the next mailing; else the ISPs may treat you as a spammer and deny service.

Major ISPs such as Google, AOL and MSN/Hotmail provide their users to complain on the sender of the emails or domains. The ISPs also have strong authentication and dynamic filtering mechanisms that your email software and service provider have to deal with.

If your email marketing software or email service provider doesn’t implement the authentication response mechanisms, adjusting to the filtering policies of the ISPs and dealing with the abuse complaints, there is no reason to complain against their unfair treatment!


If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists

This is a myth that marketers have! If they request the recipients to add the sender email address into the recipient’s safe list, then the messages will be reaching the inbox. While this may be true, it still doesn’t address the deliverability of the sender emails.

ISPs will deliver the email to the recipient’s inbox after their server has successfully received the email, passing through white listed sender IP reputation, authentication mechanisms, dynamic filters (which are changing every moment).


Then there are other questions that marketers need to understand.

  1. Does the marketer always use the same send email id for sending different promotions? Is there a need to use different email ids for different e-mail communications like newsletters, campaigns, promotions? What about from different brands or departments in the company?
  2. Do you see a recipient adding every marketer’s email ids into the safe list? What is the guarantee that you will not start sending irrelevant and innumerable email communications to the recipient?
  3. If you don’t have answers for most of these questions, then this trick will not work in most of the cases. The marketer is back to seeing his email moved to junk folders and soon deliverability takes a hit.



Email Marketing is a disciplined process and in order to get it right and realize the benefits, Marketers have to work with companies and agencies who really understand the science and art of email marketing.

If not, there will no differentiation between your marketing campaigns and the spammer’ campaigns.

Ultimately the recipient’s and the ISP’s are the better judges.

Hence it is very important to measure the success of each of your email marketing campaigns and fine tune your email marketing stategy not to blast, but use it to engage with your subscribers with relevant offers and deals.