Author Archive: Art Quanstrom
What is my email reputation?
What it means to have a reputation online and how you can start actively managing it
Reputation is a word that comes up a lot when you’re working with commercially sent emails. You have a reputation with Internet Service Providers, you have a reputation with your audience and, in some cases, you might even have a reputation with the company that facilitates your email campaigns (an Email Service Provider, like Emma).
But what does it mean to have an online reputation? And how is it measured? Do you know if you’re doing anything to hurt your reputation? And what can be done to repair the damage?
The answers to these questions aren’t always easy to come by — and they involve lots of pieces — but I’d like to focus today on subscriber engagement and how it affects your reputation.
You likely think about email as just another form of communication. You send an email because it allows you to quickly tell your customers, friends and subscribers something that wouldn’t be easy, or even possible, to convey in person. Within minutes, 1,000 people know about your upcoming event. Try doing that in person, and you’d spend weeks traveling door-to-door. Try doing that over the phone, and you’d waste precious hours that could be spent planning the event.
But let’s imagine for a moment that you decided to embark on that door-to-door adventure. What do you think you’d find? Hopefully, plenty of people would open the door, recognize you and welcome you into their home, happy to hear about your event. But you’d also find some people cooking dinner or chasing their kids around in the backyard; they might open the door, but they’re too busy to give serious attention to your message and don’t invite you in. Perhaps a few people would take one look at you, wonder why you’re there and dismiss you hastily. Others might not even know why you’re there, and wait for you to simply disappear.
In fact, your email campaigns have pretty similar patterns, and we call that subscriber engagement. Email responses parallel each of the above scenarios. You see people who open, click and act upon your email; people who open and skim; people who see it, register who’s sent it, but ultimately delete it; and people who ignore it altogether. These responses help define your reputation with an ISP.
Take a look at your latest mailing’s results. Compare your numbers against industry averages, like the information available at the Email Stats Center. You can get really specific, based on industry or type of email, but to simplify things, you could stick with the current overall averages of 23% for your open rate, 5.9% for your click-through rate and 96% for your delivery rate.
Maybe your open and click-through rates fall within industry averages. That’s pretty good, but don’t call it a day. Take a closer look at the people who clicked on your email’s links. Believe it or not, these people are very important to your success and are likely to be the cornerstone of your good reputation. How can you engage them further? Consider setting up link-based trigger emails, or, depending on the number of folks, this might be a case where personally reaching out is a smart idea.
And what about folks who aren’t clicking? Since we’re talking about your reputation here, the truth is that unengaged recipients could be negatively affecting it. Consider sending a special email to folks who haven’t opened or clicked in the last year. Ask them to confirm their opt-in, and remove them from your list if they don’t. That might be hard for you to do, but if a person hasn’t opened or clicked in the last 12 months — and if they aren’t re-engaging now — it’s time to let go. Sometimes it’s better to have loved and lost than to have sent people a bunch of emails they weren’t interested in.
Okay, some of you still aren’t convinced. I can hear you saying, “No! I’m not letting go of these addresses. I built this list from the ground up! These people signed up, and they’re mine to keep!” I’ve got to be frank: The days of list size determining your success are over. “Stale” audience members are setting a bad example for all of the really engaged people who also hold an address at that receiving domain. Think of it this way: You send to 10 people at a domain, one opens and nine ignore it, and this exact pattern occurs once a month for a year. What do you think your reputation is with that domain? Are you a sender of well-received emails, or do you send emails that the average person isn’t interested in? If you want your online reputation to be positive — and if you want to increase the likelihood that your emails will end up in future recipients’ inboxes — it’s time to let go of those old email addresses.
Focus on the people that really love what you do. If you do that, your campaign results will be better for it in the future. You’ll be sending to folks who are, well, inviting you into their homes, and your online reputation will get better, too.
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What’s in a name?
How Gmail's recent changes affect your Emma emails
Gmail recently made one more change in what seems to be a constant stream of upgrades to their email service. Now, Gmail displays additional information about the sender of each email, revealing something to recipients that they might have missed before — that you’re using a 3rd party service (Emma) to send them email. This information has the potential to be a bit confusing at first, but it’s all part of Gmail’s attempts to ensure the right emails reach your recipients’ inboxes — and the junk gets filtered out.
Most email services have sophisticated email security measures in place, and they’re good at filtering out almost all of the bad emails sent to you every day. However, there’s still a relatively small amount of malicious content that makes its way to your inbox. These emails don’t readily announce themselves as spam. It’s easy to recognize spam for enhancement pills and Nigerian prince scams, but what about an attempt to collect your personal information (bank account number, passwords or SSN) masquerading as a password change notice from Facebook or a Google + invitation? That could be trickier.
To combat these attempts (which are generally called phishing attacks), Gmail now displays more information about where emails are coming from. For customers of ESPs like Emma, this means that our server information will show up alongside your RSVP address:
Now, if you get a message from a service saying you need to change your password, and you’re confused, it should be easier to make a decision about the trustworthiness of that email. You should see a from address, which is regularly displayed, and the *via* part should have a domain that matches that from address. If it doesn’t, there may be reason to investigate a bit.
For emails sent using Emma, the text via e2ma.net will be displayed. Some recipients may have questions at first, though a history of good communication and an engaged readership will outweigh that confusion. If you’re concerned that this change could negatively affect your campaigns, here are a few things you can do:
- Encourage people to add you to their address book. This won’t remove the *via* notice, but being in a recipient’s address book does have delivery benefits and will, at the least, give them confidence in the origin of your message.
- Avoid using a free-mail email address as your RSVP. This will almost certainly cause authentication issues. Seeing *yourdomain.com* via e2ma.net is one thing, but imagine *yahoo.com* via e2ma.net. Your recipients’ lack of knowledge about how your domain is hosted works in your favor, but because yahoo.com is a pretty well-known domain, people will rightly assume that emails from yahoo.com should only be *via yahoo.com*.
- Authenticate using Sender Policy Framework (SPF). SPF is a standard email authentication method and is really easy to set up. Check out our SPF setup page for more details.
As always, we’re here to answer any questions you have, or to chat about this change to Gmail and how it affects your campaigns.
Ever wonder what happens to your email after you hit send?
An easy explanation of the complex world of email delivery
Every day, Emma customers log in, create campaigns and send them to their audience. For most of you, that last sentence is not a summary of the process as much as it is the process, as far as you’re concerned. But, did you ever wonder what actually happened when you hit send?
Before I started my career in email delivery, I imagined sending emails looked like some sort of Rube Goldberg Machine: a bowling ball rolling down a track, opening a door that pushes a knife into a string, releasing a mouse that takes the cheese off of a scale, which then unweights and causes a small explosion — no, a huge explosion! — to propel said email to the other side of the Internet. In reality, it turns out it’s surprisingly similar to this model.
There are a ton of pieces to the email-delivery puzzle, and the first piece is you. It could technically be your content, but in chicken-or-the-egg situations, I lean towards the one with ambulatory ability. So, you create your campaign, save and proof it, but then what? Well, the short story is that Emma takes that content, wraps it in your stationery and then sends it to one of our “mailers” (technically an MTA). The mailer adds the email header information that identifies: the email’s sender (also known as the RSVP address), where the email is being sent from (our servers and IP addresses) and to whom it is being sent (your audience members).
If you’re a visual learner, there’s a nice infographic of the email delivery process by Focus.com here.
But that’s just a small piece of the mystery. Let’s dig in …
So you’ve got a message that’s ready to be sent, and it’s up to the mailer (MTA) to make sure it goes to the right place. First, the MTA establishes a connection to the MX record, found in the DNS for the domain to which you’re sending. (For example, you might be sending to domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com or companyname.com.) A domain’s DNS is a one-stop location that other machines use to communicate with the domain’s various servers, and the MX record is there to process any incoming mail.
If the connection is unsuccessful, there may be a permanent issue (like the domain not existing) or a temporary one (bad connection, Internet connection issues) that may be resolved when Emma reattempts delivery. (Emma typically makes up to four delivery attempts, if the first connection is unsuccessful.)
If the connection is successful, it’s time to send that email. This is done using a process called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Traditional SMTP transactions have these main parts:
- HELO or EHLO (an extended SMTP command) identifies the sending server and the receiving server.
- MAIL FROM identifies the email’s sender (your RSVP address).
- RCPT TO identifies the email address you’re trying to reach. There’s one of these for every address you send to.
- DATA is where you transfer the actual information — HTML, text, images — you’re trying to convey via email.
Usually, this entire transaction goes by pretty quickly (in a matter of seconds or minutes), but there are some reasons why it may be slowed. Some servers take longer than others to respond to the different parts of SMTP, usually by design to allow time to check the information being passed their way, and that can result in a timeout on the connection (and eventually a soft bounce, though that is rare). When they do occur, the Emma delivery team has the ability to alter our expectations for connections to that domain so that we wait the appropriate amount of time for responses. Of course, there are other common issues like unknown users, full mailboxes and potential authorization failures when SPF or Sender ID records are present but are improperly configured or invalid (speaking of which, now might be a good time to have your IT folks update your SPF record). Once the SMTP transaction is complete, and the message has either been accepted or denied, your email is ready to be delivered to the recipient the next time they access their email from a computer, phone, tablet, etc.
What you can do
Now, just because an email is successfully delivered doesn’t guarantee it ends up in the recipient’s inbox. To ensure the email lands in the inbox, you should follow these best practices:
- Ask your recipients to add your RSVP address to their address book or trusted sender list.
- Have your IT folks update your organization’s Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record.
- Avoid words and phrases that can be caught in spam filters.
- Don’t let formatting changes outshine your campaign content.
There you have it: the wandering path of an email. It seems complicated, I know, but the powerful machines that handle email delivery are notoriously good at completing all of the necessary steps. Still, it’s certainly not cheating to have a little guidance, and Emma’s here to help you create and send solid campaigns and to offer explanations when delivery issues arise.
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Want to read more about email delivery? Check out Mary’s post about list hygiene or Claire’s post about the differences between permissions and opt-ins.
What do Smart Labels mean for your inbox?
Last time I posted here, I talked about Gmail’s Priority Inbox, its potential effect on your readership and how to combat that by engaging (or re-engaging) your audience. Well, now we’ve got to talk about Gmail’s new Smart Labels, a Gmail Labs tool that automatically marks emails as “bulk,” “notifications” or “forum” in order to better equip you to get through the onslaught of emails you receive each day.
There was a time pretty recently that I wouldn’t have turned on this feature (that’s right, it’s not automatic and actually requires you to search it by name) because my inbox’s organization — or lack of — didn’t bother me. Lately though, things have gotten a little more hectic in there, so I decided I would donate my personal email life to science and see how I liked Smart Labels.
And the results, you might ask? Well, I do wish they’d warned me ahead of time that Smart Labels removes any emails marked as notification, bulk or forum from your inbox. I don’t think that the majority of email users are going to like that once they realize that even emails they *want* to read are getting filtered out. Luckily, this option is easily turned off, and once it was, Smart Labels did help me take inventory of the emails I’ve received.
It’s important to realize that this isn’t a tool meant to do the work that your spam filter failed to do. It’s a tool to help people who don’t have an internal human email filter, or who don’t have time, to get through their emails efficiently so they can get on with life.
As an email marketer using a service like Emma (or any other ESP), your messages will be marked as “bulk.” How this will affect open and click-through rates is still up in the air, since we don’t know who’s really even using this feature yet or how they’re assimilating it into their normal email-opening routine. What we do know is that the mere presence of something like Smart Labels reinforces the importance of engaging your readership in ways that make your emails more valuable than their “bulk” status might suggest.
- Your subject line has to pop off the screen and immediately show recipients the value of your email.
- Create content that, over time, makes each email more valuable than the last. Build trust in your readership that you have something to say — and that it’s good.
- Reward people who read the most. In your quest to stay relevant in your audience’s inboxes, make sure they know they’re relevant to you, too.
The best practices for email marketing may be evolving and assimilating new ideas, but they’re not changing completely. Ultimately, it’s all about giving people what they want and packaging it in a way that makes the decision to open, click and interact with your messages an easy one. As we’re faced with new obstacles to reaching our audience — and we can only assume that more changes are ahead — our focus on those best practices will be the key to staying relevant.
Navigating the new email landscape
Three tips for keeping up with email industry trends like Gmail’s much-talked-about Priority Inbox.
If you’ve been an Emma client or an active email marketer for a while, you’ve probably got a pretty solid group of customers receiving your campaigns by now. In an email utopia, they’d all be opening and clicking everything you put in front of them, hanging on your every sentence. But if the industry averages published by people like the Email Stats Center are to be trusted, it doesn’t really happen like that. A double-digit click through rate makes you some kind of email marketing superhero.
So are your recipients just not that into you? Or are their mailboxes so full of marketing messages that you’re lost in the shuffle? Email providers like Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo seem to think it’s the latter, and all three are trying to do something about it.
Yahoo partner OtherInbox created Spring, an add-on application for Yahoo Mail that automatically sorts and files marketing messages into pre-defined folders. Microsoft quickly followed suit by introducing Sweep, a function that allows you to choose what you want to read and then sweep the rest out of your inbox and into folders of your choice. And of course, Gmail released Priority Inbox — and typical of Google’s overall ingenuity, there’s a new wrinkle. They’re actually looking at Gmail users’ interaction with the mail they receive and making some assumptions about what’s really important to that person.
So what does this mean for you, fearless reader? Well, in short: It’s time to get to know your audience better than you ever have before. Internet Service Providers are watching you – how you send, who you send to and what they do with your messages. It’s time for you to dig into those response results and craft a thoughtful plan to reward your engaged audience members and re-engage those you may have lost on the way.
Don’t know where to start? Here are a few tips.
1. Welcome new audience members. Starting on the right foot in any relationship is a good thing. Make sure your subscribers remember why they signed up and why your emails will be important to them in the future. You can read more about welcome trigger emails right here on the blog.
2. Reward your most faithful readership. Say thanks for the support that these recipients have given you. Keeping these most engaged members happy, opening and clicking makes for good-looking response results and helps you maintain a good sending reputation.
3. Learn to let go. Sometimes, it’s just necessary. Search for people who haven’t opened or clicked in the last six months and send them an opt-in confirmation email. (Here’s how.) Let them know that you still want them around, but that you also want to respect their wishes if they decide not to receive your emails any longer. Those members who confirm their opt-in are reengaged and more aware of you than ever. Then you can remove the ones who choose not to confirm — and with them, you’ll be removing a part of your audience that’s dragging down your response numbers and potentially hurting your sending reputation.
If you need help getting started, just let us know — and don’t forget to take a look at our Help section, full of tips for becoming a well-informed, responsible email marketer. If you’re sitting there thinking “I’ve been doing this all along,” feel free to share your story with us in the comment section.
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
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