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Archive for the ‘email campaign’ category

Spam Score – What’s Your Number?

March 27th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the top ten email campaign tips to get your message through to the user’s inbox. The last hurdle in this process is the spam filter, which warrants more explanation about how it works.

SpamAssassin is one of the leading open source spam filters that is widely used, and will serve as our example product about how it figures out if a message is spam or not. When a message comes in, it examines its content, structure, and format and applies a series of rules to evaluate it. Each rule has a number of points associated with it, which can be modified by each email administrator. The default setting is that if a message has more than five points, it is considered spam.

Here are some of the rules and their default point values:

Rule	Points
Structure
Html and text content within the email differ	0.739
Message only has html part	1.457
Delivered by host with no reverse DNS entry	0.1
From is blank	0.760
From starts with numbers	1.499
Header contains unclosed bracket	2.206
Date header differs from received time	0.44 to 3.199 depending on difference
Very long headers	2.5
Missing blank line between header and content	2.5

Content
80% or more blank lines	1.0
Https link to ip address instead of domain name	2.897
Talks about price per dose	1.623
“no perscription needed”	2.619
Subject has ! and ?	1.390
Subject contains G.a.p.p.y-T.e.x.t	1.020
Subject contains “as seen”	1.000
Subject starts with dollar amount	1.421
Subject contains “Your family”	1.043
Subject contains “Your bills”	2.622
Subject talks about losing pounds	1.466
Subject is all caps	2.077
Local part of the To: address appears in subject	2.020
HTML content font color similar to background color	0.124
HTML font face is not valid	0.884
Includes html form to send email	1.0
Has images with words in them	1.526 – 2.460 depending on quantity
Malformed HTML	0.994 – 1.334
Contains “Dear “+ something (old letter greeting)	1.605
Talks about lots of money	0.63 – 1.875
“ACT NOW”	.0792
“guaranteed!”	0.939

And hundreds more! See a complete list at SpamAssassin

If your message looks like spam, it probably is. If you want to get your message through to the inbox, use a system that will take care of the structure components properly, like TrackVia’s Email Campaign feature. Then send content that isn’t spam and doesn’t look like spam according to these rules.

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Posted in email campaign

Tags: email campaign Spam Score

Top 10 Tips for Effective Email Campaigns

March 13th, 2009

Whether you are sending marketing information or a newsletter, your email is only worthwhile if the end user gets to see it. Here are our top 10 suggestions for effective email campaigns:

Don’t send spam. Really. Put processes and procedures in place to make sure you and your servers are not sending spam. If a client wants to use your system to send spam, make sure your end user license agreement says that you can cancel them – and then do it! If you send spam the email administrators of your recipients will eventually figure it out and blacklist you from sending any email to them at all!
Have a database to track and send your emails. If you manage a list of any significant size, it takes too much time and effort to implement the other things on this page with just a spreadsheet.
Have a one-click unsubscribe link. In each email, there should be a link that the recipient can click on that automatically removes them from your mailing list. To save you time, it should just update your email database so that the person is not selected the next time you do a mailing. Don’t send these people another email!
Monitor blacklisting. If an ISP or corporate email server thinks you are sending spam, they often “blacklist” your servers, which means they won’t ever accept email from them again. A lot of times they will put you on their blacklist as a precaution, but if you explain why you shouldn’t be, they will usually remove you. Watch the email sending logs and keep an eye for who might have blacklisted you, and then contact them and ask to be removed.
Monitor your email server’s reputation. Several companies online keep track of each server that is sending significant quantities of email and assign them a reputation score based on a number of criteria. The better your score, the more likely it is that ISP’s will accept your email. Things that hurt your score: sending email to bad addresses, people complaining your email is spam, high volume.
Remove email bounces. If an email bounces, don’t keep sending emails to that address. It is not going to start working on the 40th email! Use a technology such as Variable Envelope Return Path (VERP) to automatically disable the user in your database. TrackVia accomplishes this through Email Flags. One flag is for “opt-in”, meaning the user hasn’t unsubscribed like in #3 above, and another is “valid address” meaning that it didn’t bounce the last time you sent it to them. Using flags lets you report on what percent of your list bounced or unsubscribed after each email blast.
Email authentication. Since greater than 90% of all email is spam and goes undelivered, ISP’s look for these email authentication techniques to show that your message is coming from a server and in a format that is likely not spam. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) tells the ISP which servers are allowed to send emails on behalf of this domain. DomainKeys/DKIM proves that the message wasn’t modified in transit and that the content of the email is what was intended to be sent.
Volume. Spammers stereotypically send a huge amount of email. If you are sending hundreds of thousands of emails, you’d better have a good reason or they’ll think you are a spammer too.
Respond to email filters. Some companies have systems that don’t let the first email from anyone through to its intended recipient. Instead it first sends a reply asking you to click a link to ensure that a person really sent the email. Once you click the link, it will deliver this message, as well as future ones, without hassle. If you want your email to get through, you have to click the link.
Spam filters. If it looks like spam, it probably is. Certain words, phrases, or the structure of your email can cause the ISP to put your email in the recipient’s spam folder. Each suspicious item has a score associated with it, and if your score exceeds a threshold (usually 5 points), it is considered spam. Avoid things like:

Sound like a lot of work? It can be, or you can use a better database that does all of the server side work for you when it comes time to begin an email campaign.

Additional Posts with Email Campaign Topics:

Put your professional network to work in a database

The Web Email-Enabled Database

No Longer Dread the Holiday Card Process

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Posted in TrackVia Database, email campaign, online database

Put your professional network to work in a database

January 29th, 2009

Networking… an important aspect of every successful professional’s career but especially important now. The act of networking has changed with the introduction of the many online networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and even Seth Godin’s invitation-only Triiibes network are great tools for staying in touch with new and old colleagues. But not everyone is using these tools and let’s face it you don’t want everyone having access to your profile. These tools have really enhanced the ways in which we stay in touch with our networks but relying on these tools to manage your contacts is just not enough. As I write this, there is a reporter on TV talking about a recent increase in identity theft on Facebook. If your profiles are compromised, what happens to those contacts? Perhaps it is a good reminder to keep your contacts in a database that you control.

Once you return from your networking event, make it a point to put those new contacts into action before you forget the conversations or lose the cards all together. Here are a few tips for getting those business contacts organized.

1.   Immediately scan or enter your business cards into Excel or other spreadsheet/database (TrackVia users can easily import this data into an online database via an Excel import)
2.   Enter information on the date you met the contact and interesting points from your discussion
3.   Set a date to remind yourself to stay in touch, add value or share information
4.   Include location information – when you travel, sort your database and schedule stops during your trip
5.   Send a newsletter or email to your database letting people know what you are up to
6.   List social network profiles when applicable
7.   Back it up! (If it is in a TrackVia database, your contacts will be automatically backed up.

And if you need to refresh your networking skills, here are a few links to networking tips:
1. Tips for networking in Silicon Valley on GigaOm
2. Entrepreneur shares some insights from book, Smart Networking (see value section)

Once you have your contacts organized, go test your networking attraction factor.

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Posted in Excel Import, email campaign, online database

The Email-Enabled Database

January 2nd, 2009

I read with interest the recent announcement that Yahoo! is opening up its email service to third-party software. That’s probably good news for programmers who want to build email-enabled applications, but what about ordinary business users? Since email is a staple of communications in the business world – now totaling 200 billion messages per day, according to Cisco – wouldn’t it be nice if you could integrate email with your business database without hiring a programmer?

With TrackVia, you can. We’ve always had good outbound email integration – for example, email campaigns, and emailed reports, calendars, and statistics that are delivered on demand or via automated distribution schedules. But now, we’ve launched some neat improvements to our integration with inbound emails. By inbound email integration, I mean having your TrackVia database check an email address and pull copies of received messages into the database.

The best of these upgrades is that TrackVia can now be set either to create a new database record for each email received, or to intelligently find a match with an existing database record and update it. When a match is found, TrackVia can automatically update a field in the matching record. For example, if a previous job applicant emails an updated resume to your HR department at careers@acmeinc.com, TrackVia can automatically add the new resume to the applicant’s database record, and change a status field to “new update!” so that the new resume is easily noticed.

With this update-matching-records option, TrackVia is a great way to track and manage business processes that involve email. In addition, we added support for secure email connections, for leaving a copy of email messages on your email server, and other technical bells and whistles.

If you want to join the email integration revolution, please contact us! We’ll help you send your email traffic into your TrackVia database and start better managing your share of those 200 billion messages a day.

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Posted in email campaign, features, general

No Longer Dread the Holiday Card Process

October 28th, 2008

It’s the holiday season and the dreaded holiday card mailing is fast approaching. After a game of “not it” – you feel pity for the poor soul who is assigned the task of pulling together a list of contacts from the company database for the annual company holiday card.

It always seems to be the case that in the process of pulling a list, you realize how outdated your contacts are, how many duplicates exist and how many of the contacts are no longer with the companies that they are listed next to.

Using these simple steps, we hope to make this process easier. Think of it as an early present:

1. Collect:

Import contacts into TrackVia via an Excel Spreadsheet. Click to view a pdf with a step-by-step guide to downloading your Outlook contacts into Excel
With our new Excel import feature you can easily update (addresses, emails, company names) your existing records

2. Organize:

If every manager in your office keeps their own list of contacts, easily de-dupe so contacts only receive one card from your corporation
Add a field in your database of primary contact’s name for your mailing list and then send “tailored messages” signed by the appropriate contact using mail merge
Track who you sent cards to and who you received cards from by denoting the appropriate fields (card sent/received)
Upload an html template to create your own look and feel for your holiday greetings
Create custom views to send tailored messages to your contacts. For example, thank current customers for their business and let prospects and former clients know you look forward to working with them again in the new year

3. Share:

Mailing – use the mail merge feature to create mailing labels and/or personalized holiday letters for snail mail correspondence without having to perform a difficult mail merge with two different systems
Electronic – use the mail merge feature to personalize the email with fields from your database and then send the message via the built-in email campaign tool