Email
Marketing and Spam Blockers
Email
marketing is a good way to stay in touch with customers
because when people come online, one of the first thing they
do is check their emails. Email list is still the most
valuable asset online. No wonder email volumes continue to
grow. EMarketer study found that e-mail volume in the US
will rise to nearly 3.3 trillion by the end of
2009.
Keep your audience email with
you. Your blog or any other facilities online should have email
notification built into it. But one of the major problems
online is unwanted commercial bulk email otherwise called spam.
When you send bulk mail, it drains and affects the server so
the authorities are after those who send unsolicited commercial
bulk mail. And they have built technologies and filters that
prevent bulk mails going into inbox.
After researching or developing
products, you send email to a list only to discover that the
subscriber never saw it because a spam blocker or filter sends
your emails into a spam box or bulk folder—spam will frustrate
your traffic.
What about if it is solicited? In
the early days of the Internet, people willingly subscribed to
mailing list but now they’ve stopped. Nobody wants ads. So it
is almost impossible to get a large solicited email list.
DoubleClick study found that 64.7% of all legitimate emails
sent are never opened. Filters and triggers will block your
emails and newsletters even if it is
permission-based.
People can now identify a
commercial email by merely looking at it. So if you send 10,
000 bulk emails, only about 3000 gets in, and 100 are actually
opened and 40 read while the rest are deleted. Some people
report email as spam and delete it even though they subscribed
themselves. If you send a confirmation email so that you can
know those who really want you, you will only shrink your list.
You will be surprised that nobody will subscribe unless those
that want to research your product or market.
And if you spam, you will get
listed in spamming database. Spamming database is where email
providers verify what is and is not spam. Every time you send
out an email, it’s has an IP address attached to it. If your IP
gets into the database: your ranking may go down, your host
could de-host you, your payment processor could banned you, and
you could be sending emails that are being blocked If you link
to blacklisted sites, you often get blacklisted too.
To avoid getting caught in spam
filters or being blocked by ISPs: don’t spam; let your
subscribes add your site to their address book; some words and
phrases trigger spam filters like weight, subscribe, sell,
download etc. The trick is to add symbol (like an apostrophe,
asterisk or dash) in the middle of words. And hope that filter
doesn’t arbitrarily block you.
If you are selling something in
your subject line, spam filter will likely block you. Spam and
email overload have actually cut down email marketing success
by about 60%. Use it only to substitute other traffic
techniques.
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