The Messaging Times

Email is sticky stuff. This is great if you design a message that you are proud of and would like to see passed around. Not so great if you make mistakes, release sensitive information or send it to the wrong group of people.

* 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

One of the benefits of working with a company whose products are used in over 160 countries by individuals and organizations of all types and sizes, is that you get to talk to some really interesting people. Recently, I talked to the Harlem Globetrotters and a guitarist for the Oak Ridge Boys, both GroupMail customers.

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

Recently, I revisited a 2007 article by Jeanne Jennings (of ClickZ fame,) one of today’s leading experts in email marketing. In 15 Tips for Getting Email Delivered to the Inbox, she offers some wise advice and even eludes to the cost of implementing each delivery-enhancing element.

I’ll add two three four more tips to her comprehensive list:

1. Send a text-only part of your message along with your HTML email. That way, text-only recipients (and there are some) will get your message and it may please certain filters. (FREE)
2. Keep your HTML design simple. Don’t complicate the campaign too much for the sake of snazzy design. Email is not a website. It is a platform for communication. Good content is good content, whether it is wrapped in award-winning design packages or not. The more complicated your design, the more likely filters will flag it and the more likely that it will have problems rendering in some clients. (FREE)
3. Monitor your sender reputation and periodically check to see if your mail server IP address is on any DNS based email blacklists. (FREE)
4. Have your recipients renew their subscriptions annually. Request that your recipients confirm their email addresses, update subscription information and express their interest in continuing to receive your emails. Be proactive and keep your list well maintained. This will also give you a chance to solicit additional information from your list (maybe include a request for birthday information for special promotions, sans the year or course.)

Can you think of any more delivery tips?

Email Marketing is pretty complicated business. When you start communicating with any large audience, there are so many things to consider.

• Who are you communicating with?
• What is the objective of your communication?
• What style of presentation will you use?
• What are your main points?
• What action do you hope your audience will take?
• How will you persuade them to take that action?

In email marketing, some of these points are complicated further because there is technology between ourselves and our audience. Technology is great stuff. Without it, we’d have to gather large audiences together physically every time we wanted to tell them something. But it also creates problems.

• Technology might cause your beautiful HTML message to lose formatting in some email clients.
• Technology might cause your message to be filtered out of your audiences inbox; meaning that some of your audience won’t even see your message.
• Technology requires that you have some skills to covert your ideas to a visually pleasing presentation.

Our latest release of GroupMail will make it easier to jump over some of these technological obstacles. Our web developers added 20 email marketing templates to make it easy to convert your good ideas into a professional email presentation. They tested these templates on the most popular email clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to ensure that the HTML formatting of the templates render well for the majority of your audience.

This way, you can just concentrate on the message that you want to convey to your audience.

You can find out more about our new email templates on our GroupMail blog.

Although most email recipients today receive HTML email, some prefer to receive a text-only version of your message. GroupMail allows senders to include an automatically generated text version of their HTML message or a custom text-only message part for those recipients who prefer text-only format. If you create a text-only part for your message, then that portion will display only when recipients have their email clients set to view text-only format.

More importantly, the text will display to antispam filters who check the image/HTML to text ratio. Adding a text-only part to your HTML message will help to satisfy this criteria of antispam filters.

To create a text-only portion for your next email campaign, simply click on the Plain Text Message Part tab at the bottom of GroupMail’s message editor when composing your message.

Here, you can select to have GroupMail auto-generate a text version or create your own custom text version which is neatly formatted for text-only recipients.