Some experts will tell you that email deliverability is based on what you write in your subject lines or how you design your messages. In reality, deliverability is more involved than that. Deliverability is increasingly influenced by how your readers engage with your emails: Do they open your messages or delete them as soon as [...]

The following is a guest post from AJ Kumar at Single Grain. Thanks to Neil Patel for introducing us and making this post possible. – Justin Premick Your website and email marketing lists aren’t just business tools that help you connect with customers and prospects – in effect; they’re the digital manifestation of your presence [...]

2011 was a big year for social media (big changes to Facebook and the introduction of Google Plus), integrations (like our PayPal app and Facebook Connect), and discussing the future of email. Let’s take a look back at some of our top posts from this year. Here are our top 6 blog posts and top [...]

Gather in close, now. The tales I’m about to tell are not for the faint of heart. Tales of email marketing campaigns that would send a chill down the savviest subscriber’s spine. Gruesome broken images and fiendish frequencies await those brave enough to read on. Take caution: Your campaign could fall victim to any one [...]

Thursday, Yahoo! released an email visualization tool. Updated every second, it shows the volume of email being delivered through Yahoo! users across the globe. Click on the map, and it’ll zoom in to a breakdown of emails in that area (with all emails anonymized). Keep clicking, and it’ll display fascinating facts about Yahoo!’s user base. [...]

Dear Email Marketers,

You do know this is a bad idea, right? What? You don’t?

Maybe you’re new to the email marketing community. Or maybe you’ve been chatting with the Wrong Sort of Marketers.

And maybe you believe the promise that these leads specifically requested information just like yours.

News flash: they didn’t.

It’s time to set the story straight. Here’s what’s really going on.

Think about it – have you ever requested that your email address be spread far and wide so you could get a slammed with a ton of new, random email offers?

Yeah. Neither has anyone else. And yet list vendors have huge databases of names and email addresses. So the question is…

Basically, any address left lying around the web can end up in those databases.

Vendors scrape them off old lists. They pick them off web sites. They collect contact lists from conferences. They advertise free products, then stockpile the information that respondents provide.

Which means the people you’re emailing may not be remotely interested in your topic. And even if the vendor did use legitimate subscription tactics, none of these people expect to hear from you.

Some of you are nodding – you see the problem.

Others are rolling their eyes, thinking,”Yes, but I need customers,” your fingers itching to toggle back over to that list supply site.

Well, keep those fingers steady for one more minute. The problem won’t just be your recipients’ – it’ll be yours, too.

Sending to a bulk list might not mean a one-way ticket to the spam house – the first time, at least. But it will at a minimum mean a lot of unpleasantness. Here’s why:

1. The addresses on those lists get sold to all kinds of marketers. So they get all kinds of mail. So, they lodge all kinds of spam complaints. If ISPs like Gmail and Hotmail notice, they might put you on a blacklist, blocking your emails from all their users in the future.
2. Because of the way these lists are compiled, many of the addresses you receive will be misspelled, abandoned or non-existent. When a big chunk of your emails goes to such addresses, ISPs, again, might notice. Again, they might block all future emails from you. List merchants know this. It’s such a sure thing, they even offer a refund of credit for those addresses up-front.
3. And if you’re sending through an email service provider and you get blocked, other messages they send from the same IP address could also be blocked. So you’ll actually find that no reputable ESP will let you import a purchased list anyway.
4. Finally, let’s talk sales. Aren’t they the ultimate purpose of your emails? Unprepared recipients aren’t likely to think, “Oh gosh, I was just hoping for yet another offer from a company I don’t know! Let me click over to their site and buy something!”
   If you were hoping to sell to this list, you might want to adjust your expectations.

So yes, perhaps you’ll have a very large list for a few minutes. But after the bounces, spam complaints and lack of response, you’re likely to find yourself worse off than when you started.

Plus, you’ll be associated with spam. Is that how you want to spend your marketing budget?

Okay, you’re saying. I get your point. But I still need to make sales, and I need people to sell to.

We get that. So we’ve written up lots of ideas for building your list. They’re simple, they’re above-board, and they work.

In the words of our Import Specialist, Chase Kramer, “What’s really important isn’t sending to a bunch of people that aren’t all that interested and hoping for a few sales. It’s positioning yourself so that a month from now, a year from now, two years from now and beyond, the sales are coming to you.”

And beyond the sales, you’ll find you have something immeasurably valuable: a list of people who are truly interested in what you have to offer – your own village of customers.

Sincerely,

Amanda & the AWeber Team

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No painted yellow lines exist on the road to email marketing mastery. Blogs, books, and case studies are piled into mountains, and climbing them can be daunting.

Fortunately, your fellow email marketers have left signposts along the way. Their comments, tweets and reviews signal which resources they found most useful. Their comments add their voices into the discussion, making that resource even more valuable.

One hill in those mountains of resources is the AWeber blog. Our readers’ comments and tweets show which posts they appreciate most. Those posts are assembled below to give you insight into some of the biggest issues that could crop up in your path.

The Posts Most Traveled

How to Add an Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Page

This Facebook application lets you invite your entire contact list – and anyone else who visits your page – to sign up for your emails.

Watch the video in this post to find out how to set this up, step by step.

“Do Not Reply” Address? Don’t Bother

If you send emails from an address that doesn’t accept replies, you’re sabotaging your campaign and your relationship with subscribers.

This post and the responding comments explain the mistake you’re making and discuss the effects in detail.

3 Ways To Build Urgency In Email Subject Lines

A sense of urgency in your subject lines might prompt more subscribers to open your emails. Getting too dramatic, however, jeopardizes your credibility.

Find out how to strike the right balance with compelling, straightforward subject lines.

How to Market Like Nine Inch Nails

This industrial rock band has a marketing strategy as alternative as its sound. Email’s conversational, customizable nature means it’s an ideal medium for putting this strategy to use.

Read this post to discover ways you, too, can market like a rock star.

{!firstname}, Think Before You Personalize

Personalizing emails with subscriber names has been reported to send opens and clicks skyrocketing. It might do the same for you – but it might also cause other problems.

Learn what they could be, and then discover some deeper, more useful ways to personalize.

Engage Subscribers: Six Fun Email Ideas

Written as a response to no-spend New Year’s resolutions, this post is appropriate for any time you hit a lull in sales. Instead of pushing discounts that customers don’t want and you can’t afford, use this time to build loyalty with these entertaining ideas.

Test Results: How Long Should Your From Line Be?

Before customers even get to your subject line, they encounter your from line. But what do they see there?

Different ISPs have different cutoff points, so your from line might be chopped in a way that leaves subscribers questioning who you are. Find out how to rewrite your from line for maximum recognition.

If You’re Lost, Ask Us For Directions!

If you find yourself confused by anything in these posts, you are welcome to contact our helpful and friendly Customer Solutions team. We’ll be happy to provide the best directions we can to guide you on your journey.

If, instead, you have a brilliant insight about any of these posts that you want to share, please feel free to leave your own comment. We look forward to reading your take on these topics!

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2009 was the year of social network integration, testing send windows and organic list growth. While 2010 will bring its own trends, these changes aren’t going away.

Here’s a quick refresher of things that went down in email marketing last year.

These posts highlight some new AWeber features, a few colorful examples and the soundest advice we can offer.

2009: The Year of Posts in Brief

Using Email to Grow a Community: AWeber Talks to User Ramit Sethi
On his personal finance site, Sethi teaches his readers to be rich. Here, he gives a bonus lesson in email marketing success. His tips on building an email community are as valuable as gold.

How To Add an Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Page
Adopting social media techniques was a major move that many email marketers made in 2009. This post teaches you how to add an opt-in form to your Facebook profile, directing new contacts straight to your email list.

And since Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and over 700,000 local business accounts, it may be just the place to expand your online presence.

Design Inspiration From Fellow AWeber Customers
Three cameos of customer newsletters show what’s possible for small-time email marketers. Their clean design and quality content offer inspiration far into the future.

Have a Look At the New Web Form Generator
By far our biggest release of the year, the new web form generator was welcomed with open arms! Gone are the days of manually editing HTML; our web form tool helps you create professional and aesthetically pleasing web forms with absolutely zero HTML knowledge.

Test Results: How Long Should Your From Line Be?
“From” line length can largely impact the open rate of an email, yet it’s easy to overlook in the design process. Review what lengths are ideal in the major email clients.
This type of analysis should also be applied to subject line length. Make sure your subscribers can read the reason they should open each email!

{!firstname}, Think Before You Personalize
Personalization can be powerfully effective when used in the right ways. It can also be easily misused. Learn how to avoid the mistake of assuming that a string variable makes a message personalized, targeted or relevant.

“Do Not Reply” Address? Don’t Bother.
This post examines the trend of using an an unattended email address that discourages replies to emails, and explains why you should never do that with your own campaigns.

Deliver Smarter Autoresponders With Send Windows
Sometimes, certain days or times are ideal for subscribers to receive your emails. Find out why, and then learn how to increase your follow-up messages’ effectiveness by setting up send windows.

2010: Use It Wisely

Email marketing, with the biggest ROI of any marketing channel, is a path that can lead you to success. We hope these posts serve as stepping stones on your journey.

For more inspiration, read through the other email marketing tips that 2009 brought.

What would you like us to talk about in 2010? What steps are you planning to take in the new year? Let us know!

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One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

It’s not often we invoke Sesame Street on this blog, but today it seems appropriate.

Let’s play a little game: which thing doesn’t belong in your email marketing campaigns?

• Presenting subscribers with other ways to interact with your business – like on your blog, Facebook group, Twitter account or even in person at events your business will attend.
• Writing in a conversational tone – like a “real person” talking to your subscribers.
• Requesting feedback from subscribers on how your business – and your emails! – can better meet their needs.
• Trying to learn why people unsubscribe by asking them.
• Starting with subscribers’ permission and creating relevant emails that seek to build a relationship with your potential customers.
• Sending your emails from a “No Reply” or “Do Not Reply” address.

If you guessed “Sending your emails from a ‘no reply’ or ‘do not reply’ address, give yourself a pat on the back.

“Do Not Reply” Addresses Have No Place In Your Email Marketing Campaigns.

Period.

All the other ideas in the list above aim to make your email marketing more social.

“Do Not Reply” addresses, on the other hand, try to take a permission-based, conversational marketing medium and mold it into an online version of TV or billboard advertising.

People who use “Do Not Reply” addresses…

• … try to have one-way conversations in their marketing.

  Problem is, a one-way conversation isn’t a conversation at all. It’s a monologue.

• … treat subscribers as a cost whenever they’re doing anything except buying something.

  To them, feedback isn’t free research on how to market better; it’s a cost to be avoided.

• … don’t get that the main thing that affects your email deliverability is basically whether you make subscribers mad. Make them mad, they click the “spam” button. Enough of them do it, and you have a delivery problem.

  To subscribers, spam isn’t just unsolicited bulk email, it’s any email they don’t want. And not many people want to hear from people – or companies – who refuse to hear back from them.

  Business who use a “Do Not Reply” address don’t understand that they’re asking for spam complaints.

Good News: Most People Understand This. Better News: More People Will.

Most people don’t send their email marketing campaigns from “Do Not Reply” addresses – which was exactly what we expected to find when we ran stats on the “from” lines in all of our users’ campaigns a while ago. You guys are good

That said, there were a few people who were creating campaigns in AWeber and using addresses like noreply@example.com, do-not-reply@example.com and so forth (at their own domain, not example.com) in the “from” line.

We realized we needed to close that loophole and educate those customers, and we’ve done so.

When you create a campaign in AWeber, we check the “from” address for many common variants of “Do Not Reply” addresses. If a customer enters one, they’ll be notified that this is not OK and will be prompted to choose a new “from” address.

Our hope is that with a little guidance and education, we can help those businesses become better email marketers.

What Do YOU Think of “Do Not Reply” Addresses?

Have you ever sent a campaign using a “Do Not Reply” address? Ever received one? What do you think of them?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

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In the comments of our recent post on email whitelisting, John asked about how to deal with spam complaints and shared what his experience with them has been.

After looking back through other posts on spam complaints, I didn’t see one that fully addressed his comment the way I wanted to. And I’ve heard similar comments and questions from other people.

So let’s talk about it.

Problem: Getting Spam Complaints When You’re Not a Spammer

Here’s what I took away from John’s comment, along with quotes from his comment:

• He’s getting a higher complaint rate than he’d like. ¹
• His emails are not promotional. (“We are still in start up mode and not [even] selling anything. Our emails are short two-paragraphers linking to a high-content blog post.”)
• His subscriber base is “entirely web-based sign ups” so these should be people who want his emails.
• He emails weekly (“so it’s hardly too much or too little that they forgot who we were”).

In short, it sounds like John’s trying to do the right things.

So what’s going on here?

Spam Complaints Happen For Many Reasons

Not all spam complaints occur because the email is “spam” as it is traditionally defined.

Here are a few scenarios where complaints might occur (and what John – or anyone else – might do to avoid them):

1. It’s easy to click “spam” – and not as easy to find the unsubscribe link.

   Solution: make it easy to unsubscribe – consider putting an unsubscribe link near the top of your email.

2. Some recipients don’t trust unsubscribe links and/or have heard they shouldn’t click them unless they remember subscribing.

   Solution: remind people when/where they signed up and why they’re getting your email (you can use personalization fields to include information like the date/time/URL that a subscriber signed up on.

3. The email was requested but not relevant.

   Solution: make sure that your emails closely address your subscribers’ needs and wants. Track what subscribers are responding to in order to create more relevant campaigns as you go.

4. Similarly, the content or timing of the email was not what the subscriber expected (perhaps because expectations about the specific email content and frequency were not explicitly set when the subscriber opted in).

   Solution: set expectations clearly when subscribers opt in. Tell them what they’re going to get, when they’re going to get it and who it’ll be coming from.

5. The subscriber didn’t like something about the email – or something else about the company sending it (“I had a bad experience on Company X’s website/in Company X’s store, so now I’m marking their email as spam.”).

   Solution: request feedback from prospects and customers. Find out what they do and don’t like about your emails – and your business as a whole. Customer service, product selection, pricing, policies, everything… they can all affect subscriber perception of your company. Then take that feedback and improve.

There are certainly other possible reasons for spam complaints, and other courses of action that you might take, but by addressing these areas of your email marketing, you can reduce your exposure to spam complaints and maximize your email deliverability.

What Have You Done To Reduce Spam Complaints?

Have you addressed these causes of complaints? Other ones? What have you found to be effective?

Share your thoughts below!

1. For the record, part of John’s complaint rate is due to the low volume of email he’s sending. One or two complaints raises his rate significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect that as he connects with more subscribers, he should see lower complaint rates – if he follows the advice here, of course!