If you are going to get serious about email marketing, you should also learn to segment your mailing list in order to send focused, more relevant communications to each group of recipients. In this chapter we’ll talk about:

1. Criteria you can use to segment your list
2. Segmenting list using G-Lock EasyMail capabilities

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By analyzing spam complaints you can determine how closely you follow best email marketing practices. To ensure that you see the complaints your messages may cause, you should follow these steps:

• Setup your “abuse@” and “postmaster@” email addresses and make sure they are valid and can receive emails. These addresses are recommended Internet standards set by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for complaint reporting. Receive the messages from those addresses and review them.
• Register the above addresses with abuse.net. It’s a clearinghouse for registered abuse addresses used by many network administrators and tools to route complaints to the proper destination.
• Register for a feedback loop. The large ISPs offering feedback loops are AOL, NetZero and Juno. AOL’s feedback loop, for example, is set up as part of its whitelisting process.
• Provide complaint instructions in your Privacy and Anti-spam policies. People may want to send a complaint directly to you but they don’t know how to do this. Include a link to your Privacy policy into the Email Admin Center or in the message footer.

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The "Email Admin Center" is becoming a regular practice in permission-based email marketing. The “Email Admin Center” is the area of an email put at the bottom of the message where the sender includes all the administrative information such as an unsubscribe link, profile update link, company contact information, privacy information or link, and other.

Why add the "Email Admin Center" to your email newsletters?

Firstly, the admin center allows you follow best permission-based practices which imply that you must provide simple and clear privacy and email policies in your newsletter.

Secondly, you can respect the CAN-SPAM Act that requires, among other things, to include a working unsubscribe option (reply to or link) and a postal mailing address.

Thirdly, you can provide the recipients with an easy way to change their email address or profile details by adding “Update Profile” link to the admin area.

The "Email Admin Center" lets the email marketers present all of the above information in a single easy to find location within the email message.

The "Email Admin Center" makes your email newsletter look more professional and assures people that the email is coming from a reputable company which cares about the subscribers. Building trustful relationship with the subscribers is as much important in the email marketing as the legal compliance with CAN-SPAM Act.

What to include into the "Email Admin Center"?

What you will present in your "Email Admin Center" depends on what information you collected about your subscribers, your permission email practices and the type of email messages you are sending. Below is the list of information you may consider including if applicable:

Required by the CAN-SPAM Act:

• Unsubscribe option – either a Reply-To address or a working URL.
• Company contact information – email address, postal mailing address, phone number.
• Link to the page where your company’s Privacy and/or Email Policy is stated.

Recommended:

• A little remind why the recipient is receiving the email – “You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our mailing list at www.glocksoft.com"
   
• The recipient’s email address of recipient – “You are receiving this email at johnsmith@company.com”
   
• Link to change the recipient’s email address
  
• Link to update the recipient’s profile (change preferences, personal information, message format)
   
• Whitelist information – “To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images to load in future mailings, please add support@glocksoft.com to your e-mail address book or safe senders list”
   
• View it in your browser – link to a web version of the newsletter (for recipients who may have troubles reading HTML emails)
   
• Send to a Friend –link to the form on your website that lets the recipient send the email message to others
   
• Subscribe link – this link lets people who received the email from someone else easily subscribe to your mailing list

It is important that you at least begin adopting the "Email Admin Center" in your newsletters. At first, you can include the minimum of required information and as far as you are advancing with your list building and email marketing program, you will be able to add more information to your admin area. As the adoption of the "Email Admin Center" practice grows, those companies that do not use it risk having a decline in the subscribers’ trust in their brand and revenue.

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Minimizing spam complaints is closely related to best email marketing practices and starts with the method of collecting email addresses. You should remember that nowadays sending unsolicited emails will only hurt you. To get the lowest complaint rates, you need to either use a confirmed opt-in method, or properly manage your single opt-in list. If you send to a solid permission-based list but still find that your spam complaints rate is higher than the optimal rate and/or is rising, consider the following:

• Use a recognizable sender name. Often people only scan the From field or Subject line or both to decide which messages to read and which to delete or report as spam. Use a sender name that’s simple, easily recognized, and expected by the subscribers. Make sure that your From email address is recognized as well because some email applications such as AOL display only the sender email address, not the name.
• Brand your subject lines. A message with a vague Subject line like "super offer for you!!!" will absolutely be reported as spam. You can make your email recognizable by including your company or newsletter name in brackets at the beginning of your subject lines, for example "[G-Lock Software]: New exclusive HTML email templates are available".
• Include the unsubscribe instructions at the top of the email. Some recipients may not scroll to the bottom of the message to find the unsubscribe link but may use the “Report Spam” button as an unsubscribe method. For this reason, consider including your unsubscribe instructions at the top of the email in addition to the footer.
• Ask the recipients to whitelist your domain. This will prevent a user-based filter from flagging your message as spam and either moving it to the spam folder or inserting “[SPAM]” to the message Subject. You can include the instructions on whitelisting your domain or email address in the Email Admin Centre area.
• Avoid spammy looking content. Try not to use garish, bold fonts; large, red letters, and the like. A message with a clean, readable design is not likely to be taken for spam.
• Don’t send too often. If the recipients used to receive your newsletter once a week or month, don’t suddenly start emailing every other day.
• Don’t send unexpected emails. Respect the subscriber’s preferences. If the subscriber opted in to receive your “Tips & News” newsletter, don’t send them e-commerce and promotion messages, unless they clearly requested them.
• Remind the recipient about subscription. Many subscribers receive dozens of commercial email messages every day and they may forget they signed up for your newsletter. It’s reasonable to add to your Email Admin Center the information about the user’s subscription: subscriber’s email address, opt-in date, and newsletter he/she subscribed to.

Spam complaints are an important aspect of email marketing that can’t be ignored. Multiple spam complaints get your emails filtered or blocked. If you don’t deal with complaints and don’t optimize your email marketing practices, with time spam complaints will lead to decreasing open and click-through rates.

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It’s important you monitor your bounceback rate after each email marketing campaign. Managing the bounces contributes to the list "hygiene" and meets the email marketing best practices. If you take time to monitor your bouncebacks and remove them from your list, this measure prevents you from consistently sending the emails to invalid email addresses and helps you avoid troubles with your ISP. Your email marketing service should let you read the header information from each bounced message, so you can see exactly why they bounced. You know not all bouncebacks are bad.

• Defining "Soft" and "Hard" Email Bounces
• Managing Email Bounces with G-Lock EasyMail

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Email marketers can be divided into 3 categories: The Good, The Bad, and The Clueless. The “Bad” are crazy madcap-spammers. These geeks don’t care what kind of damage they’re doing. They send millions and millions of pieces of spam every day. They’re evil, and they know it.

The “Clueless” are much more common. They are generally good people who don’t mean any harm. They’re “just trying to get the word out.” They’re often decent business people, who have been in marketing and sales for years. But since they’re new to email marketing, they make all kinds of mistakes, and they typically have absolutely no idea what kind of mess they’re making. Don’t be a "clueless" email marketer.

“Good” email marketers know their etiquette and follow these email delivery guidelines:

• Number one rule of email marketing: obtain people’s permission before you email them. Since your recipients must pay for every email they receive (monthly ISP bills, bandwidth costs, etc.), permission is the foundation of “good” email marketing.
• Build your own mailing list. Don’t buy the lists of email addresses. They are full of bad addresses, and people who didn’t truly opt-in to receive anything from you. Good email marketers collect the email addresses on their own sites. Of course, this is a longer and harder way, but at least you are sure for 100% that everyone on the list actually wants to hear from you. Your response rate will be considerably higher, and since the list is smaller, the cost of delivery will be lower.
• Clear your list. Despite the fact you are using an opt-in method of collecting email addresses, it is reasonable to check the emails for validity before sending the message to the list. Some recipients can change their emails and forget to update their profile with you. Whether manually or using email verifier software, check for invalid and misspelled email addresses, invalid domains and typos. Also, make sure you won’t be sending to people who unsubscribed.
• Know the laws. Be sure to read and comply with the CAN-SPAM laws. Generally speaking, if your email is a marketing or sales type of message, you need to follow the rules, or you can be fined for each email sent.
• Don’t send too often. You risk making your customers tired of you. Send only when you gave something important to say. Think on your content and frequency. Will you be sending email newsletters every single week or month? What will be in the newsletter? Will the content of the message be relevant to the recipients’ expectations?
• Don’t let your permission “grow cold”. If you’ve been collecting the email addresses for years, and you’re only just now sending your first email to everyone, a little remind of how you got the recipient’s email address is nice. If you didn’t email your subscribers for a long time, people can forget what email lists they subscribed to. You can include a line like "You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our mailing list at www.glocksoft.com" in the Email Admin Center at the bottom or at the top (if appropriate) of your email.
• Never use an anonymous email address in the “Reply-to”, or in the unsubscribe link. Use your company domain, and be sure the emails to that address go to a live person.
• Don’t send complex email (Flash, Sounds, JavaScript, Videos, etc). Use HTML email wisely – not “just because you can”.
• Include a plain-text version of your newsletter together with the HTML part.
• Always provide an easy way to unsubscribe. You can provide an option to unsubscribe in the Email Admin Center area. If you don’t include the Email Admin Centre into the message, be sure to include an unsubscribe link somewhere at the bottom of the message.
• Check the content against a spam filter. It’s a good idea to test how your HTML newsletter will pass through an anti-spam filter. You can check the content of your message with a special program Lyris’ Content Checker. Lyris’ Content Checker will tell you how your newsletter ranks in Spam Assassin. You will know which words in your message trigger the anti-spam filter. You will be able to disguise or change those words or phrases.
• Test your newsletter. Send it to friends, family, and colleagues. Try the newsletter in as many different email applications as you can. Open your own emails, and click them like crazy. Now go check your reports. Make sure all the tracking works like it should. Hit the “reply” button and see if you get replies to your account. You want to uncover and correct any embarrassing mistakes before sending to your real customers.
• Don’t CC your entire list. Most of the time the newbie’s make the mistake of entering their entire customer’s list into the CC field of the email program. This method of delivery has some downsides: a) you reveal your entire list to all people within the list, this may not be acceptable for everyone; b) someone from your recipients can click "Reply to All" button by mistake and the reply addressed to you will be distributed to all of the group; c) CC doesn’t allow sending a personalized email message to each recipient. At least you can insert the greeting like "Dear Customer" but agree that it is not as friendly as "Dear John".

For a "good" email marketer, managing and improving email delivery must be of a great importance. A successful email campaign can reduce your email delivery costs and increase conversions or transactions.

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Some time later after the launch of your email marketing program you may discover (based on your campaign statistics) that some of your subscribers didn’t open any of your emails within a certain period of time. You would most likely wonder why. We believe that the causes of such inactivity may be the following (we don’t include bounced emails in this case):

• Loss of interest. Some subscribers might have changed their interests and they don’t need your products, services, or content anymore. They are maybe too lazy to go through the opt-out process, or maybe waiting for the things to change.
• Boring or repetitive Subject lines. Keep in mind that your subscribers may have many emails to look through every day. To save their precious time, people often look at the Subject lines to decide which email is worth to be read and which is not. Boring or repetitive Subject lines from message to message can lead to the subscriber’s loss of interest to your newsletter.
• Rarely checked mailboxes. There are email accounts that are still active but rarely monitored by the user.
• Anti-spam filters. Your message may contain some recurring content (images, links, text) that causes it to get filtered by a spam filter – either at the ISP, corporate or end-user level. Because you may not get a bounced message, you may think that the message is delivered but actually it is not. Or, you message may be delivered to a "bulk" or "spam" folder in the recipient’s email client. Many recipients may not check these folders assuming that everything they contain is spam.
   

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Whether you are going to distribute email campaigns or have already started email marketing, make ready for receiving spam complaints. It doesn’t matter if you use a confirmed opt-in subscription method or not, your messages are likely to generate complaints.

In this chapter we’ll tell about:

• How people report spam
• How take control under spam complaints
• 8 tips to minimize spam complaints

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The Internet teems with practical advices, tips and tricks on email marketing: how to create an email newsletter, build an email list, get better response rate and so on. Such information is absolutely important and should be studied by email marketers, in particular, by those one who are just starting their online business. By the way, you can find much useful information on email marketing in the articles on my blog. Do you want to know how to make your emails easier and friendlier to your subscribers? Go on and read my 5 Real Steps to Easier Email

But in this article I won’t tell about any 1, 2, 3 … best email marketing practices and strategies. What I am going to focus on is a psychological aspect of the Internet marketing.

Multiple Workplaces Support

In  our G-Lock EasyMail Business edition you can create a unique workplace [which includes email messages, contacts, program settings and accounts] for each of your clients and easily switch between the workplaces inside the program. See the potential?

Firstly, it’s like having your own email marketing service — you can create many workplaces, run email campaigns for third party companies and individuals and see the cash flowing into your pocket.

Secondly, it’s a great possibility to outsource and delegate email marketing when multiple users run email campaigns sharing the same data. Let’s say you installed G-Lock EasyMail on 3 computers at your office. You create a workplace on a shared disk and now 2 other users of G-Lock EasyMail can access this workplace from on their computers. When one user updates the address book, or creates a new message, the changes are automatically recognized when another user opens this workplace on his computer.

No need to manually synchronize the data for all G-Lock EasyMail users which means you save precious time and can organize your team work in the most convenient way for you.