Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

I have been a loyal Gmail user for along time. Lately though I have been frustrated with Gmail, mainly due to the images in my HTML emails not displaying correctly. Well they have announced some changes that shed some light on the image issue.

From the Gmail Blog:

Now displaying images in messages from your contacts
Monday, July 20, 2009 5:58 PM
Posted by David de Kloet, Software Engineer

When an email references external images, Gmail usually doesn’t display them automatically. Instead we show placeholders and present you with the option to “Display images below” or “Always display images from” that sender.

We do this to help protect your privacy from spammers, who can use images and links to verify that your email address is real.

But often the messages you get with images are from friends or family and there’s no reason to worry about your privacy — you just want to see the photo of your newborn niece or the invitation design they’re sending you. So, in these cases, we’ve decided to start displaying images by default. Now, whenever someone you’ve emailed at least twice sends you a message containing images, you’ll see them right away. Note that we picked this threshold of two messages to start with, but we may tweak it if it doesn’t seem right going forward. And we only display images by default for authenticated messages (using SPF or DKIM). Gmail and other big mail providers usually authenticate their mail, but other services might not, so it’s possible you’ll get an email from one of your contacts where images aren’t displayed by default.

If you prefer to go back to the way things were, you can choose not to display images from certain senders or from anyone. To disable images from an individual sender, click “Don’t display from now on” under the “Show details” link of an email from them with images. To disable images from everybody, select “Ask before displaying external content” under “External content” on the general Settings tab.

What does this mean to Email Marketers?

Gmail will display images by defualt for emails from addresses that are in that person’s Contact’ list. It will also display images if you have sent that address at least 2 emails and that the address in question is authenticating using SPF or DKIM.

What Can I Do in My Email Marketing Program?

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Been awhile since you sent to  your email list?

A long while?

Follow YouTube’s lead….(click to enlarge)

This is spot-on.  The only thing I would add to this would be… (more…)

I received an email from Jet Blue today that is great example of how to notify your subscribers that you are changing your “From” email address that you use in email marketing.

Subject Line: We are changing our email address…

This email can serve as a template for you.  Here are the elements that make this a success:

1. Clear Subject Line – No need to get cute with an email like this.  Get straight to the point if you want them to take action.

2. Whitelist the new Address – “Add us to your Address Book” is a clear call to action.  Some brands,such as Travelocity, go as far as to show the subscriber how to do this for each email client.  That choice is up to you.

3. Provide New Email Address – Jetblue provided the address not once, but twice in this email.  I would say the only optimization here is that they sent this email from the new address, not the old one.  This may have missed the inbox for a few folks who had whitelisted the previous address.

There are many environments that do not show your “From” mask, just the email address (see AOL post). It is important to both brand the email address as well as be consistent with the address that you use. If you do need to make a change, due to a new ESP or optimization, make sure you notify subscribers in a fashion similar to this.

Spam, that pesky industry that Email Marketers have to deal with, is on the rise again.  In a down economy, I fully expect Spam to increase heavily, praying on desperate people in search of cheap deals or a quick buck.

The Google Enterprise Blog has a post today, “2008: The Year in Spam”, which talks about the ups and downs of Spam and predictions for 2009.  The big bust of the McColo spam operation dropped spam traffic by 70%, but levels are up 156% since November 2008.

Spam is out of our control, but there are things we can control.  Following ISP best practices for domain authentication, using double opt-in, maintaining a clean list, and maintaining ferquency will keep you in the inbox, and hopefully the ISP’s will be able to keep the spammers out.

Read “2008: The year in spam”

There has been a crackdown in recent months by blacklists and ISP requiring COI (confrimed opt in or double opt in) more and more. Because of this, we have recently started moving to comply with this trend. It appears that we are not the only people on this bandwagon; I have received three re-confirmation emails in the past week, with the most recent from SumbleUpon.

A client of mine recently started this process with us and it is nearly 100% guaranteed to keep you from getting blacklisted. There is a very high percentage of your list that you, as a sender, will lose due to non-confirmation – the question is, is it worth it?

So for any senders out there that have recently done this or are considering doing a confirmation email, what are your thoughts? 

Yahoo! is introducing new email address domains – ymail.com & rocketmail.com. Good for users, bad for email marketers.

I have always hated my Yahoo! email address, so I jumped at the chance to get something better. Score! I got the same extension as my Gmail address (us email marketers have a lot of email accounts, and we actually check them all).

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The Federal Trade Commission’s latest update on CAN-SPAM regulations take effect in less than two weeks. Is your email compliant? Not sure?

We have the nitty-gritty on what the new provisions mean to email marketers. The updates include:
- Good news (what didn’t change)
- Five major provisions to review
- Definition of a sender
- How to handle re-subscribes
The Federal Trade Commission’s latest updates to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) become enforceable on July 7. So, it’s prime time for a look at the updates – and at CAN-SPAM in general – to make sure your email programs remain on the up and up.

Read the Full Article

Sender ID is a Microsoft initiative that validates the origin of e-mail messages by verifying the IP address of the sender against the alleged owner of the sending domain

To add a Sender ID record in Register.com, follow the steps below:

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We have all been at the EEC conference this last week listening to some of the top minds in email. One question that has come up a number of times over the years is whether or not you should have a dedicated IP when sending email. MarketingSherpa recently released a new paper Top 12 Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes. In this report Mistake #7: Deliverability: Content, Formatting & Lack of Self-Advocacy was to insist a dedicated IP from your ESP. This sounds great in theory, but not in practice.

Deliverability relies on a number of factors and one of them is volume. Low volume and/or sporadic volume hampers your deliverability dramatically. Since many ISPs base their blocks and temporary deferrals on complaint rate, your low volume and inconsistency of sending, albeit, dedicated could be one of the worst things you could do. All of those other senders might actually help your deliverability as long as your ESP employs best practices. So before you “insist” on a dedicated IP like MarketingSherpa says, ask your ESP if it would benefit you. Our job is to provide you with the best solution to get your email to the inbox.

Most all email clients do a great job displaying the masked “From” name in your inbox display. The new AOL email client is not so kind. As you see below, this is very important to address. There are 4 examples below, the better choice of email address is quite obvious.

I only check my AOL email maybe once every couple days. So when you get a crowded inbox, the email address is very important in the quick scan on what to open.

Some of these follow the biggest no-no’s of email marketing: “do not reply” and “NBMediaEmarketing” which is a parent company of a guitar magazine, a company that I have to struggle to remember what the actual company I opted into was each time. As for the MLB, I hate when they start with feedback, very generic. Also, why do I want to give feedback? Is this feedback? You get my drift.

Musician’s Friend does it right. Brand recognition before and after the @ symbol.

How does your from email address look in AOL?