Posts Tagged ‘newsletter’
Breaking Through the Spam Filters
May 7th, 2008 | 
Author: Once upon a time, it was easy to email total strangers. All you needed was their email address. Most people would give you their email addresses and were excited to hear from you, even if you were sending a marketing letter. Times have changed. People are inundated with spam, scams, and more.
If your business relies on sales or leads through the internet, your mailing list is a critical part of your business. It is common to have thousands of email addresses in your marketing database. If you are sending emails to your list, you need to know that the people on your mailing list are actually receiving your email. This affects your newsletters, account notices, and personal emails. You want to be able to contact your customers. How do you break through the spam filters and reach your clients?
So what is the problem?
Every spam filter program uses a complex set of rules to filter out spam. The rules keep getting stricter, so more emails end up in the spam folder than ever. Users rarely go through their spam folder looking for emails. If they do, then they can white list your address.
It is more than just convincing your customers to "want" to read your emails. You have to make sure they will actually receive your email in their inbox. You cannot count on them to do this on their own.
NOTE: If you use a spam filter, please go through your spam folder periodically and add any valid senders to your white list or to your address book. Spam filters will not block anyone from your address book.
The Solution
There are several methods for improving your delivery to your clients. Choose any, or all, of these strategies based on your own needs.
Use a Newsletter Service – Newsletter services have already taken the necessary steps to comply with the CAN-SPAM act and have already had their mail servers added to the white lists on all the major internet providers. This helps with newsletters. You will still want to take extra steps to ensure your other emails are making it all the way into the inbox.
Choose Your Words Carefully – Search engines look for emails with web addresses in the message, the word "free", graphics, and other triggers. To make sure your email is getting delivered, create a test email account on Yahoo.com, MSN,com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, aol.com, and other major domains. Enable spam filtering on those accounts. Send a test email to those accounts and see what happens. Do not add your sending address to those address books or white lists. The object is to use that test to determine what words to put in your email so that it gets delivered to your list.
Instruct Your Visitors to White List You – Display a message on your site that tells users how to white list emails. Basic instructions that simply say, "Add the following address to your white list," will usually do the trick. Most users will follow that advice. Send them the same info in your very first email to them. Be sure the very first email to them has a subject line that encourages them to open that first email.
TAG Your Subject Line – Every email from your newsletters and account management services should include a tag in the subject line. This makes it easy for them to identify your email. I like to put square brackets around the tag. Emails from my newsletter service might say, [AI News]. Then instruct people to watch for that tag in the subject line.
White List Your Own Address – Most people do not know this, but you can actually get white listed at the major email services. They all have a process. You can go to each of the major email providers, fill in a form, make a few promises, and they will add you to the list of white listed senders. You will have to promise to comply with the CAN-SPAM act. It is important that you learn the requirements and follow them carefully. It is not difficult.
The bottom line is that email is a permission-based marketing system, but permission is not enough. You need to educate them so that they actually receive your emails. You need to know that email is NOT a reliable delivery system. Never assume your emails get to the recipient. If you have something important to say, you should put the important message on the web page and then you can programmatically determine who read the message and who did not.
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The Numbers Never Lie
Most business websites share the objective of getting people to visit the website and take action once they get there. The desired action will vary from site to site. You may want your visitors to sign up for your newsletter, contribute to your blog, or to purchase some products or services. Whatever it is, when a visitor does it, it is a success.
What is a Success for You?
You might have more than one type of success on your website. You might call it a success if someone contacts you and provides their phone number or you might only call it a success when they put in their credit card number. Maybe there are several different successes on your website. Step 1 is to identify what exactly is a success and make sure there is a method for tracking that on your website.
Identify your successes and identify the way to identify them. The confirmation message that follows a sale or the thank you page after someone contacts you are two possible examples. If you accept member registrations, a success would be the page that displays after they confirm their registration. Identify all these successes and how to identify them.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a statistics package that you can use free. There is a simple setup process to get started and there are more advanced features when you are ready for them. One of those advanced features is the “campaign”. Once you have identified the successes you can use that information to setup Google Analytics campaigns.
Google Analytics supports many different reports and it might take you a little while to find the ones that help you the most. The main thing that most people look for are:
- Number of visitors per day
- Number of pages viewed by each visitor
- Keywords used to find your site
- Sites that referred visitors to your site
- Number of successes based on your campaigns
Comparing these numbers can give you great insights into what is going on and why. If you sell a book on your website, you can track how many people used related keywords to find your site, how many viewed the page that actually promotes your book, and how many people actually buy the book. Comparing the numbers will give you insights as to where people are stopping. That becomes your area to work on.
Another advantage to Google Analytics in contrast to statistics built into your web hosting account is that Google only reports legitimate visitors. The technology used by Google is more accurate. You get numbers that you can use. Other statistics packages might report higher numbers, but those numbers are only good for bragging rights, not for optimizing your online business.
The Numbers Never Lie
It is so important to know what is going on with your website. How many visitors do you get each day? How many of those visitors are looking at your products and services? What keywords are they using? What are they buying?
It takes good numbers to make good decisions. If you are not getting enough successes on your website, consider making changes to your website. If you are not getting enough traffic to your website, consider other marketing strategies. You can only tell what to fix by first identifying what needs fixing.
Earning Trust in a Suspicious Market
When the first entrepreneurs began their online businesses, they all were relying on the same advantage. The advantage was that a small company and a big company look the same online. You can put up a website and have just as much success as a large competitor. The Internet was the great equalizer. Ah, those were the good old days.
The rules have changed. Internet shoppers can usually tell the difference between a small operation and a major Internet business. The “big boys” are easy to spot. They have built up reputations with their customers. People trust Amazon.com, Buy.com, and so on. These companies were born as Internet companies, but they have successfully earned the trust of millions.
Smaller Internet companies still have outstanding opportunities to succeed online. The amount of money spent online is still exploding year after year. Even though there are fantastic opportunities ahead, the trends are moving towards the established sellers. Smaller companies have to work much harder to earn the trust of their customers.
Here is why:
- Identity theft
- Spammers
- Online Fraud and Scams
- Phishing Sites
- Selection
- Price
- DOA Websites
The central theme to most of those reasons is “trust”. Customers need to know they are doing business with a credible company. Okay, now that we know the who, what, and why … what can we do about that?
Earning the trust of a stranger requires a strategy based on your own products, services, and industry. There are a few general ideas that can help you get started with building trust:
- Testimonials
- Big Guarantees
- Photos and Videos of staff and/or customers
- Free offers
- Trial offers
- Bonus gifts and limited time offers
- An 800 number
Once your customer places an order and everything goes smoothly, that customer will trust you. Then you can sell them something else, hopefully something more expensive. As you continue to build trust, you will be able to sell them more stuff. You will also start to get referrals from your customers and a referred customer is almost as good as a repeat customer.
The key is to do everything possible to earn enough trust to create that first sale. Your first sale might not make you much money, if any, but it is important because it helps you build trust and that is how you earn your next sale.
Your success depends on your subsequent sales. So many companies will fight hard for that first sale but fail at creating repeat customers.
Do you:
- Have a follow-up marketing plan?
- Have more products, services, or options to sell?
- Have a newsletter?
Remember, it was nearly impossible to generate that first sale. Your success depends on generating subsequent sales to the customers who have learned to trust you.
