Back to the basics: role accounts

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Each day email marketing becomes increasingly sophisticated. From MTA throttling techniques to big data, the email marketing space has changed tremendously over the past few years and the pace of change is ever quickening.

Role account personThat said, there are still basic building blocks to email marketing that the customer controls and needs to ensure are setup. Role accounts are one of those basic items that every person who engages in email marketing needs to setup and actively monitor. A role account is nothing more than an abuse@ and postmaster@ email account for the domain you use in your “From” email addresses, such as abuse@whatcounts.com and postmaster@whatcounts.com.

Some users will not use your unsubscribe links and instead will just forward their unsubscribe request to one or both of the role accounts. It’s vital that you set up these accounts and frequently check them. Internet Service Providers like GMail, Hotmail, etc. will send complaints to those role accounts.

Another best practice with your role accounts is to register them with Abuse.net. Many ISPs and blacklisting organizations want to see legitimate email marketers like your company registered in this database. It helps to show that you’re not trying to hide where complaints should be sent.

Adding role accounts is very easy. Make sure your domain has them and that someone is actively monitoring these accounts to maximize the performance of your email marketing program!

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Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Delivery

GMail Spam warnings and their meanings for email marketers

March 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

As we posted on Facebook yesterday, Google’s GMail service now gives you some hints as to why an email is flagged for spam. If your newsletters are being trapped by GMail, you might want to have a look and see what the reasons are. Here’s how. First, make sure your GMail account is subscribed to your list. If your message is flagged for spam, go into your spam folder and find it.

Gmail - Spam (46) - cspenn@gmail.com

Click on the message to see details about why it’s in your spam folder:

Gmail - New submission from Quick Poll: Facebook Pre-Fill - cspenn@gmail.com

GMail will list one of 8 different reasons why the message is in spam:

  • Why is this message in Spam? We’ve found that lots of messages from newsletter@no1.gr are spam.
  • Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
  • Why is this message in Spam? It contains content that’s typically used in spam messages.
  • This message was likely forged and did not originate from your account.
  • This message may not have been sent by: cspenn@gmail.com
  • Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links or reply with personal information.
  • Be careful with this message. Many people marked similar messages as spam.
  • Be careful with this message. It might contain a virus or a malicious link.

Let’s take a brief look at what each might mean for your email marketing program.

Reputation Problems

These two messages indicate that you have a reputation problem – that a lot of people are marking your messages as spam:

  • Be careful with this message. Many people marked similar messages as spam.
  • Why is this message in Spam? We’ve found that lots of messages from newsletter@no1.gr are spam.

If your email marketing is flagged with either of these messages, your reputation is in the trash. You need to consider things like re-engagement campaigns, pruning your list of bad or non-responsive email accounts, and generally improving your reputation among subscribers. People might be flagging you for deceptive subject lines or your unsubscribe link is so buried that they just flag you as spam instead. Bottom line: you need to send more good email and less bad email. Crank up your value, remove bad subscribers, and dig in for the long term reputation recovery.

Authentication Problems

These two messages indicate there’s an authentication problem with your email service provider and your account.

  • This message was likely forged and did not originate from your account.
  • This message may not have been sent by: cspenn@gmail.com

There’s a good chance that your DNS records are not set up correctly and/or you’re not using Sender ID, SPF, and other common email authentication mechanisms to certify that you are who you say you are. Fix those, and your messages should stop getting flagged for these criteria over time.

Content Problems

These two messages indicate that you’ve got a content problem.

  • Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
  • Why is this message in Spam? It contains content that’s typically used in spam messages.

Your content has problems. It’s been judged not valuable or contains content that is such a hard sell that it triggers Google’s content-based filters. Things like all-image emails or overuse of sales promotional words and phrases are to blame here, so make sure there’s legitimate editorial content in your messages to balance out the sales pitches. Bottom line: send more valuable email, email that people actually want, and they’ll stop flagging it as spam. Make sure you have prominent unsubscribe links and use the List-Unsubscribe header option if your email service provider offers it so that people who don’t want to be on your list can leave instead of flagging you as spam.

Serious Content Problems

These two messages shouldn’t be seen with your email marketing.

  • Be careful with this message. It might contain a virus or a malicious link.
  • Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links or reply with personal information.

Generally, these are reserved for messages that are phishing scams. If your email marketing is being flagged with either of these two messages, you have a serious problem. Chances are, someone has hacked into your server or account on your email service provider (a case for strong passwords) and is sending scam emails from it. Contact your IT administrator or email service provider account manager immediately to get help.

If you don’t already have one, consider setting up a free GMail account and subscribing to your own newsletters just to get access to these kinds of spam reporting mechanisms. GMail is one of the first email services that offers this level of transparency about why a message is spam to the end user, which is immensely helpful to you as an email marketer.

For WhatCounts customers using our Professional, Broadcaster, or Publicaster editions, contact your account manager if you have questions about implementing any of the solutions discussed in this article. We’re happy to help. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer but would like to be to get access to a dedicated account manager who can help solve problems like these, please contact us today.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Delivery, Strategy

Authentication: the key to better email deliverability

March 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

Mailboxes

Spam is considered to be unsolicited bulk messages that are sent at random from people you do not know. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc., try their best to determine what is spam and what is not by using algorithms to filter out the “bad” before it reaches their users.

Unfortunately, sometimes legitimate, permission-based email marketers have messages classified as spam and directed to the Junk folder rather than the inbox or, even worse, messages blocked. The following measures can help you communicate your legitimacy to the ISPs as you work to make your way to the right folder. So, let’s start AUTHENTICATING!

Step 1: Set up Sender ID / SPF Records

Sender ID and SPF are similar but separate authentication mechanisms to help you verify your identity to the ISPs. Sender ID is Microsoft’s version of SPF, and they both require a TXT entry into a DNS server associated with the domain of your Friendly From address. Entering these TXT files into the appropriate DNS allows the ISPs to verify that the email engine you are using (such as WhatCounts platform) is allowed to send email on your behalf.

In other words, you are likely sending your email marketing campaigns through a mass-mailing system, but entering a Friendly From address (or email address your recipients will recognize). For example, I may be sending a message out to my subscribers from WhatCounts, but I want it to appear like it is from me, Lindsay at lclark@whatcounts.com. In order for the ISPs to verify that the WhatCounts platform is allowed to send email on my behalf, I would need to enter the Sender ID and SPF records into whatcounts.com’s DNS.

If the ISPs cannot get verification that a 3rd party platform can send on behalf of you or your company, they may assume that you are spoofing a From address in an effort to send spam. They will then swiftly dump your message into the Junk folder.

Step 2: DKIM Digital Signature

A digital signature helps to verify the sender of the message while also ensuring that the email has not been altered in transit. Some ISPs look for this “message integrity” guarantee before determining whether or not it is spam. Most email service providers (ESPs), like WhatCounts, will automatically digitally sign email campaigns on your behalf. Contact yours to ensure it’s done.

Step 3: Deliverability Improves

And if not, we have bigger issues.

If you take these steps and still find yourself being bulked, the complaint rate (users marking your email as “spam”) is most likely the culprit. Many ISPs will begin sending your messages to the Junk folder or blocking if the complaint rate begins to creep up. If your complaint rate is rising, it could be due to the fact that people often use the “Mark as Spam/Junk” button as an opt-out mechanism.

Sound familiar? Ask yourself “why are these recipients wanting to opt-out?” Opt-outs and complaint rate more often than not come down to the quality of one’s list and the expectations set during original opt-in.

Naturally, program goals and tactics change over time, but it is important to periodically review the expectations you originally set for your subscribers. Does your content differ from the content they signed up to receive? Frequency changed? New distribution types added? Name of company changed/altered?

The goal is to get these people to recognize that they opted-in for this AND to encourage them to unsubscribe via the links in the email rather than marking your email as spam. Recommendations to achieve both:

  1. Start putting your company name somewhere in the subject line. If you already do, start putting it in front.
  2. Make sure subject line is direct and matches the content inside.
  3. Move the unsubscribe link to the top of the email, and make it bold and noticeable. This will not encourage more people to opt-out, but it will encourage those with the intention to do so to use the link (they’ll find it right away).
  4. Add a pre-header to the top of your email that explains why they are receiving this email. “You are receiving this email because you once signed up to receive communication from XYZ Company.”
  5. If you have “date opted-in” as a column in your list, personalize this sentence by saying, “You are receiving this email because you signed up to receive XYZ Company communications on 6/1/08. If you are no longer interested in receiving our emails, please click here to UNSUBSCRIBE.”
  6. Follow email best practices by segmenting more in order to send targeted emails; metering out sends; and A/B split testing subject lines, creative design, day and time of send, etc.

Implement these measures and your email deliverability will begin to improve. If you are a WhatCounts client, feel free to contact your account manager today with questions. If you’re not a WhatCounts client but would like to be, click here to contact us.

Lindsay Ferrara
Strategic Manager, WhatCounts

Filed Under: Delivery

Deliverability: Canada’s FISA Law

December 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

MARCOM in Ottawa

Did you know that Canada’s anti-spam laws are tougher than nearly anywhere else in the world?

If you are an email marketer, the chances are quite high that a portion of your subscriber base is located in Canada. If this is true, it’s imperative that you are aware of the new Fighting Internet Wireless Spam bill (FISA), that became effective on December 15, 2010. Since then, there has been much discussion about this new law. It goes to great lengths to define what is acceptable practice by defining what does and does not constitute permission when it comes to electronic media, including email marketing, SMS, instant messages, and social (unlike the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, which just pertains to email marketing).

FISA is a big win for permission-based email marketing; it really complements the long-time ISP standards. If you have been following the advice of WhatCounts (as well as the rest of the email marketing community), then you are likely already in good shape, with the exception of a few housekeeping tweaks. (There will be a six to eight month window before any enforcement in order to allow businesses time to make any necessary changes.)

This law covers all Canadian recipients, but the real trick will be in trying to determine if your subscribers are located in Canada. A good start is any domain ending in .ca, which is considered to be a Canadian recipient.

Differences Between FISA & the CAN-SPAM Act

  • Provisions vs. Law.The biggest difference between the CAN-SPAM Act and FISA is that the CAN-SPAM Act only makes provisions for an opt-out mechanism, whereas FISA is a permission-based law. In other words, under CAN-SPAM, you are (by the letter of the act) allowed to send email to anyone so long as you have a working opt-out mechanism and the list isn’t harvested. Under FISA, you have to have gained “explicit consent” before you can send. Explicit consent is defined as where the recipient has given permission to receive communication from the sender. There is also the concept of implied consent that covers an existing business relationship with a subscriber where you can email them for a period of two years from when the business relationship was established. After two years, you must have gained explicit consent to continue sending them email.
  • Harsh Penalties. Another important difference between the CAN-SPAM Act and FISA is that FISA allows an individual to a right of action that allows any person to seek damages in court, not just Internet Service Providers. Penalties can be very steep; fines range up to $1 million against individuals and $10 million for businesses. These types of penalties are not aimed at legitimate marketers, but rather egregious offenders (in other words, “spammers”).
  • More Identity Required. More on the housekeeping side of things, as you all know, CAN-SPAM requires valid email header information and postal address; subject lines that accurately reflect the nature of the email; and a functional unsubscribe mechanism. FISA goes a little further in that the identity of the person sending the email needs to be identified. It requires the name and contact information of the company to be shown; an easy method of contacting the sender of the message (this is currently being interpreted to mean that the company’s phone number should be included); and, of course, an unsubscribe mechanism.

    • Again, if you are already practicing permission-based email marketing, there is not much to change other than adding some additional identity information to your creative. However, keep in mind that the most important thing here is permission – make sure you have it or gain it. If you don’t have permission, then don’t send. As mentioned above, create segmentations for all .ca domains, and then review the permission you have for all these subscribers.

    FISA is taking permission-based email marketing to a new level. Instead of permission just being “best practice”, they’ve made it the law. I would expect legislation in the very near future here in the U.S. that is modeled after FISA.

    This article was originally written by Ken Pfeiffer.

    18 Ways book cover
    Audience to Evangelist
    Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
    		 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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    Filed Under: Delivery

    Spam Laws and Non-Profit Organizations

    November 9, 2011 By

    How to SPAMOne of the interesting quirks about non-profit email marketing is that non-profits are sometimes exempt from parts of the CAN-SPAM law in the United States. Generally speaking, if a non-profit organization is sending out email that does not contain commercial advertisements or promotions, its messages may not be governed by CAN-SPAM. Given that the holiday season is coming up (as of this writing) and non-profits are cranking up their marketing campaigns for end-of-year donation drives, I thought we should review some of the basics quickly.

    There’s a catch to anti-spam laws that some non-profits have learned the hard way: the CAN-SPAM law is largely meaningless. Why? Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are allowed to decide which email they choose to receive and have full ability to set their own filtering standards (under the CAN-SPAM law). Basically, each major ISP – such as Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc. – decides for itself what constitutes spam and what doesn’t and applies their own in-house algorithms to incoming mail regardless of the law. For example, if enough users of Google’s GMail application flag your non-profit message as spam, it will be classified as spam in the GMail system and will not be delivered even if it’s in full compliance with the law.

    ISPs continue to evolve their algorithms for what constitutes spam and what doesn’t, but most of them share similar characteristics. Here are three important things to consider and plans of action you can take.

    1. What users think is spam, is spam. Nearly every major email client and ISP offers some way for a user to communicate that a message is junk. The ability to flag a message as spam is easier than most unsubscribe mechanisms, and has a significantly negative impact on the rest of your email program.

    Plan of action: Consider putting an unsubscribe message at or near the top of your email messages so that people unsubscribe rather than flag you as spam.

    2. Reputation matters. Nearly every ISP has a digital “memory” of sorts, and overcoming a bad reputation is significantly more difficult than maintaining a good one – and trashing your reputation is surprisingly easy to do.

    Plan of action: Create and use an editorial calendar for your email marketing so that you never send out a rushed, poorly thought-out campaign that will have a significant number of your subscribers marking your messages as junk.

    3. Intent doesn’t matter. What you as an agency or organization intended to do with your email marketing unfortunately does not matter to the computers and servers that judge spam. Even if your organization’s cause is incredibly good, computer systems can’t recognize that and thus don’t incorporate it into spam flagging mechanisms.

    Plan of action: The only long-term, sustainable, sure-fire email strategy that will consistently get your email delivered is the golden rule of all email marketing, for-profit and non-profit alike:

    Send relevant, timely, targeted, valuable email to people who asked for it.

    As ISPs continue to change and make their spam detection algorithms more powerful, following the golden rule will be your only way to get your organization’s messaging delivered and advance your cause. Ultimately, ISPs will continue to make the decisions about what constitutes spam and what does not even if laws change, so make sure you continue to put the golden rule at the heart of your non-profit email marketing program.

    Christopher S. Penn
    Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

    18 Ways book cover
    Audience to Evangelist
    Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
    		 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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    Filed Under: Best Practices, Delivery, Strategy

    What you can learn from Hard Bounces

    October 27, 2011 By

    Most email programs or service providers monitor for and remove hard bounces after the first instance.  ”Why?”, you might ask. Because it’s a best practice, why else would they?  Well, for starters ISPs will usually gravestone/delete inactivate subscriber accounts after 30 – 90 days of inactivity.  Knowing that email marketers and other email senders will attempt to send email to that address (at least 1x per month) the ISP will provide them with a gentle reminder that this user’s account is inactive or the address no longer exists at this domain.  That is pretty much that in the world of email marketing, or is it?

    Something struck me the other day while researching a delivery issue for a client, I always knew there are two main types of hard bounces, Unknown and Inactive users, but I hadn’t really thought about the syntax of the bounce messages.  The two seem to count the same as far as reputation metrics are concerned; nobody’s home, stop knocking. What can you learn from the two that you can translate into better reputation?

    The first of the two types is known as the “unknown user” hard bounce.  This hard bounce type (also known as Synchronous Bounces) means the account/recipient has never had an account at this domain, or it has been so long ago that this address is now completely dead.  What we can learn several lessons from this type of hard bounce especially where sign-up pages and list acquisition is concerned.  For example, it is an indication that the user doesn’t want you having their real email address or they misspelled the address on your sign up form on purpose.  There are also the coerced email addresses.  Coerced email addresses often times show up when there is a benefit to providing an email address but there is no ramification to the visitor, nor is there an extra benefit to providing a real working email address.

    • What can you learn from this type of Hard Bounce – If you provide an immediate benefit to subscribers who give you an email address, you need to verify it before proceeding any further in the marketer – recipient relationship.  You can do this by sending a welcome message through your transactional email system.  It is vital to remember that the email address has never existed with the ISP/Domain, so why are you attempting to send marketing mail and wasting valuable resources, yours and the ISPs.  Anti-Spam filters will flag your IP & From domain if your hard bounce rate exceeds their thresholds.

    The second of the two types of Hard Bounces is the “Inactive User”.  Often miss-categorized as a soft bounce, this bounce type indicates that the user/recipient has abandoned this address and the ISP has recently scheduled the address to be gravestoned or deleted.  Each ISP is different in the area of gravestone timing, but for sake of argument most ISPs depending on the total account life (length of time the account has been active) will allow for an inactivity period of just inside 30-90 days.  For example, my personal Hotmail address (active for almost 12 years) can be inactive for 89 days before Hotmail will gravestone the account and set it back into the pool for anyone to grab.  If I were to attempt to claim is within the 30 day window (days 90 – 119) the account would then be back in my possession.  I might lose all my saved email but the account name would remain my own.

    • What specifically can you learn this type of Hard Bounce – This lesson is about active vs. inactive subscribers.  It tells us that this user just recently stopped interacting with their email account and therefore your company’s well-crafted, well thought out emails.  Try to keep a list of active and inactive users (- 90 days).  This way you can alter frequency schedules specifically for the inactive crowd.  The benefit of doing this is the reduced chance that your emails will trip the ISPs Hard Bounce threshold.  Your IP & Domain reputation will thank you.

    You can go about setting up re-engagement campaigns and they can do wonders for recovering inactive subscribers (non-openers).  However, this technique won’t do much to assist in recovering “inactive users” of the hard bounce variety.  It is more about avoiding the negative reputation wake that these subscribers leave behind.

    Filed Under: Delivery, Latest News, Strategy Tagged With: ,