There are wonderful examples of the good, the bad and the ugly. Definitely worth a read before you send out your next email marketing campaign.

During the summer months, GroupMail is running a summer promotion on Facebook. Every time they do something fun, they post a video with a discount link for one of their award-winning GroupMail email marketing software. The latest offer was inspired by a summer evening trombone session with the lead trombonist from the Count Basie Orchestra in attendance. This event resulted in a 50% discount for the GroupMail Personal Edition. You can see the video below:

* The discount links are provided in the comments below each video.

To keep up with the GroupMail Summer fun and the associated discounts, check out http://facebook.com/groupmailsummer

When you “like” the page, you will get automatic notifications in Facebook whenever a new summer event occurs that inspires further discounts.

Today, as a result of a very fun sailing adventure on the Bellingham Bay, they are offering 50% off the GroupMail Marketing Pack; which is a bundle of the GroupMail Business Edition email marketing software and an annual subscription to GroupMetrics (email tracking) and GroupSurveys (online surveys).

You can keep up with the special summer deals (and the fun that they’re having) on their GroupMail Summer Facebook page at http://facebook.com/groupmailsummer

I’m running a GroupMail Summer promotion on Facebook this month. Every time I do something fun this summer, I am posting a different discount link on Facebook.

To keep up with my summertime fun and resulting GroupMail discounts, visit our GroupMail Summer Facebook page at http://facebook.com/groupmailsummer

Unfortunately for me (and you) this is nonsense of course. Not only is the message immediately identifiable as spam (addressed to “undisclosed recipients”, etc.) but whoever thinks that the Federal Reserve is going to contact you out of the blue to give you a few million dollars is out of their mind.

What amazes me most, whenever I receive spam like this, is the fact that as ridiculous as the message is; there is a percentage of recipients who will believe it’s true, contact the sender and send money to them to release the money.

* To see this and other comic strips from The Messaging Times, just click the strip.

We’ve all sent an email at some point that we wish we hadn’t. Usually, the moment of clarity comes just after we click send. Unfortunately, that’s one click too late. In order to ensure that your message is really ready to send, it is important to develop a final email checklist for your email marketing campaigns.

“Checklists are an essential tool for most professions. Pilots certainly use them before climbing to 30,000 feet. Developers do before they build an 80-story building. Web designers do before they launch their new site. The fact is, no matter how many times you do something, it is important to check that everything is done each time. Actually, routine tasks require the most checking, because when we are too familiar with a process we tend to go into autopilot mode. We think that we can do it with our eyes closed. But that is when mistakes happen; when we close our eyes for one second too long — when we allow our momentum to automatically carry us to the “Send” button.”

To avoid post-traumatic send nightmares, create an email checklist and refer to it every time you send a campaign. Here is a sample of some things you might put on your email checklist:

1. Is my “From” field correct for this email list (some marketers have different “From” names depending on their audience)?
2. Is my “Subject” relevant to the email list that I’m sending it to? Is the Subject formatted correctly (headline format, caps for all first letters)?
3. Is my subject spelled correctly? Is it worded well?
4. Is the group list that I’m sending the message to correct?
5. Is my message clear and relevant to the group list that I’m sending it to?
6. Are all links within the message working correctly?
7. Are all graphics included in the message loading properly and quickly?
8. Is my call to action obvious?
9. Are all words spelled correctly?
10. Is my contact information correct?
11. Are the details in the message accurate and up-to-date?
12. Are my merge fields inserted correctly throughout the message?
13. Has somebody else checked the message?
14. Have I sent a test message to myself yet?

For more on the importance of email checklists read Edit Twice, Send Once and The Importance of Email Checklists

GroupMail is used in over 160 countries around the world by individuals and companies of all types and sizes. It’s an effective, efficient and low-cost way to communicate with large groups of people.

GroupMail for English customers

GroupMail para clientes españoles

GroupMail pour les clients français

GroupMail für deutsche Kunden

Whatever language you speak, wherever you live in the world, GroupMail will make it easy to stay close to those you need to communicate with.

More often than not, the questions come from our not-so-famous (but equally important) customers, like one gentleman who asked if GroupMail could send messages to a list of six million email addresses that he had acquired [yesterday]. Of course, my first inclination was that this list of six million was acquired by some means other than opt-in, permission marketing. I explained that technically, the software allows users to create groups of an unlimited size, but that processing messages to such a volume of recipients would necessitate a robust mail server among other things. It turns out, he wanted to just send them through a free mail server like Hotmail without spending any money on anything but the software.

For the sake of all of us, I dissuaded him.

Another call was a bit more realistic in scope. A woman had an opt-in list of 5,000 recipients and wanted to use GroupMail to send personalized HTML newsletters to her list on a monthly basis. Her ISP (one of the big ones) has an email sending policy that prohibits customers from sending more than 200 messages per day through their STMP mail server. They also block Port 25 so GroupMail’s Direct Send mode wasn’t an option. Bulk Send mode doesn’t allow personalization, so that wasn’t an option for her either. I explained that GroupMail or any other desktop email marketing software doesn’t circumvent the email sending policy of her ISP. I suggested that she:

1. Contact her ISP to see if they have a business account that allows more messages to be sent each day (Comcast, for example, allows residential customers to send 1,000 messages per day while their Business customers can send 24,000 per day);
2. use a secondary outgoing mail server, like AuthSMTP, to route her messages through; or
3. acquire a web hosting company who offers full SMTP services and process your messages through your domain-hosted server. Sometimes, domain-hosted SMTP servers are more liberal with their email sending policy than large ISPs

Again, she didn’t want to spend any money on sending her messages out.

As your email list grows, so does your budget. While email remains to be the most cost-effective method for communicating directly with your prospects and customers and provides the best ROI; it’s not free. Aside from the costs required for email marketing software and access to a supporting outgoing mail server, effective email marketing requires time and effort on list maintenance, design, testing, delivery and measurement.

Effective email marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. But it certainly isn’t free.

Update: Seth Godin discussed another cost of email marketing today in his post, Friction

To understand what went wrong, you can look at the log file of the message sent. Luckily, it’s easy to do in GroupMail. Just go to your Sent Messages folder and right click on the message that had delivery issues.

Click on View Logs and select the log file that you want to analyze. The General Status Log contains all available information about the message in question.

Click to View the log file selected. Because log file language can be complicated to understand at first, copy the log file text for the message in question and paste it into an email to the GroupMail Support Team. They will be able to analyze the log file for you and explain what happened and how to resolve it.

In the case above, the user authentication for the account I was sending from changed and I hadn’t yet changed my GroupMail account settings to reflect those SMTP Authentication changes. For an explanation of some of the more common Error messages that emailers are faced with, read My messages will not send – they all fail, what do I do?

If you ran a campaign that had some errors, but don’t understand what caused them, please send the General Status Log as an attachment to an email to support (at) infacta (dot) com. Our technical support team will be able to analyze your log file and determine what caused the problem.

What story do your log files tell?

Spam scores are annotated by a numerical value from 0-10. The lower the better.

Spam filters scan your message before it reaches your recipient and assigns a score based on a long list of criteria. Here are some examples of things that will add points to your spam score (remember, adding points to your spam score is bad.)

• Subject starts with dollar amount
• Subject talks about losing pounds
• Subject: contains G.a.p.p.y-T.e.x.t
• From: domain has series of non-vowel letters
• Subject is all capitals
• HTML comment is very short
• HTML font size is large
• HTML includes a form which sends mail
• HTML has a low ratio of text to image area
• Contains ‘Dear (something)’
• Claims you can be removed from the list
• Talks about how to be removed from mailings
• Information on getting larger body parts
• Talks about millions of dollars
• Home refinancing
• Lowest Price
• Contains an URL listed in the SBL blocklist
• Phrase: F R E E
• Links to common unsubscribe script: ‘getmeoff.php’

The list of elements that these spam utlities use is long. Some of them are strange. Some of them are very specific. Some of them are unusual, like adding to your spam score if you talk about how someone can get removed from your list even though the CAN-Spam Act requires that you have an unsubscribe mechanism in each message that you send.

To improve your spam score (lower it), take a look at the current list of tasks performed by SpamAssasin – and eliminate as many of them as you can from your campaigns. You’ll never have a perfect spam score. There’s no such thing. But you do want to keep it as low as possible.

To complicate things a little more, SpamAssassin is just one of the antispam filters used to assign spam scores to your message (Barracuda is another.)

You can test your email against antispam filters before sending it out to your recipients. One easy way is to send your message with TEST in front of your Subject Line (i.e. TEST My Newsletter) to spamcheck@sitesell.net. They will revert with a spam score within minutes and outline specific elements of your message that contribute to that score.

In the end, like with your credit score, it is best to know what your spam score is rather than ignoring it and hoping that it will improve if you just don’t think about it.  Both can be improved when you take proactive steps to do so.