Like most things, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

The CAN SPAM law, the only one that regulates how emails may be sent, doesn’t even require that the first-time collection of an email address be an opt-in. You are free to email anyone you ever had a business relation with. The only restriction is that if you had someone in your mailing list who unsubscribed and you want them back, you should get an affirmative consent. So technically the organizer in the aforementioned example has every legal right to email you.

But just because you can do this, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

The CAN SPAM law is a pretty low bar that defines the border between an unethical approach and a criminal offence. Don’t take it as the guideline to a fully-fledged business ethic. Just because your recipients can’t sue for the (allegedly) unsolicited emails it doesn’t mean they can’t report it as spam. It doesn’t keep spam filters from blocking you (read more about how spam filters work here, here and here). Popular smart filters are crowdsourced, which means you don’t need a conviction from a jury to be flagged.

It’s pretty easy to run an email campaign that complies with the CAN SPAM act. Just offer your recipients a way of opting out and you are okay from a strictly legal point of view. The regulations are so loose that you can even email people you have never had a business relationship with and get away with it. However, the price may be quite steep and not worth the hassle. You will get:

• Oodles of unsubscribe requests. Those who aren’t interested in receiving emails from you and are kind enough to click the unsubscribe link rather than the SPAM button will opt out.
• Complaints that may wreck your reputation. Get ready to handle lots of spam complaints. Your IPs may get blacklisted or, if you outsource your campaigns, your account with the email service provider may be terminated.
• Poor campaign performance. Unless you are after a quantity over quality approach, you will find that your clickthrough rates and conversions are hardly worth the hassle.
• All in all lots of work for little results.

There is hardly any difference between B2B and B2C marketing when it comes to the recipient. Who reads messages when you email a company? A person. Who can report you for spam? A person. Who buys your products? A person. Who opens the emails and clicks on your links? A person. You got the idea: treat your B2B and B2C customers the same and you’ll be safe.

Business-to-Business tactics

Use customer details acquired by your offline sales team. If you aren’t already doing it, have your sales force get your customers’ email addresses. Returning clients will be the first to give their email addresses without asking any questions – they will understand you need it to improve communication and keep in touch with them easier.

Collect relevant information about your business customers such as: number of employees, main areas of activity and annual revenues. You will need this to segment your list and send in relevant offers. A company with 200 employees and a state-wide network of copy shops won’t be interested in your latest $300 inkjet multifunctional device, whereas a lawyer’s office with three employees will have no use for a $60,000 printing equipment that can print and bind thirty 200-page books per hour.

Telemarketing can be a great way of getting business leads. Get a list of companies from your local Chamber of Commerce, have your sales crew call them up to introduce your company and ask for contact email addresses without any further sales pitches. More companies than you would believe are going to agree to receive emails from you.

Business-to-Customer tactics

End-users are harder to convince into handing over their email addresses. They usually take all promotions with a grain of salt and you will have to convince them you aren’t going to spam them or sell their addresses. Incentives are a great way of having them join your mailing list. A free ebook, a chance to win a prize or premium content delivered only by email are good tactics.

Viral marketing can also get you quite a lot of B2C email leads. Offer your existing newsletter members the possibility to spread the word – a way to forward your content to their friends or social media group. Make sure you get their friends’ permissions before emailing them though – a recommendation cannot be considered an agreement to receive emails from you. Of course, you need to make the content interesting and unique enough to want to be shared, a viral campaign isn’t easy to pull off.

Offline meetings can also be a great way to get qualified leads. Schedule a public presentation of your product and have everyone confirm attendance by email. Advertise it around local social circles, as well as printed media. Follow up with a thank you note to all attendants and request permission to email them further offers – the majority will likely agree.

Are there any other tactics you have tried or any experiences you would like to share? Hit the Comment form below.

Spell it right

Again, I don’t necessarily advocate magazine-style writing skills (even though a few interesting turns of phrase could give you a boost in clickthrough rates), but if you cen’t rite anglish then outsource your content creation to someone even remotely proficient. The majority of native English speakers are put off by confusions between your and you’re or its and it’s, so you can safely assume that your unsubscribe rates will go through the roof if your English is even worse.

KISS

No, you don’t have to kiss anybody to make your email campaign work. KISS stands for the design principle: Keep it Simple, Stupid. Don’t overemphasize your point, keep everything short and punchy. Keep paragraphs simple (1-3 phrases at most), as it makes everything easier to read. Make use of bulleted lists whenever you need to get several ideas through in a concise and easy to follow manner. Don’t use overly complicated words (e.g. don’t use “the storm abated after a few hours”, let up is more understandable by English speakers of lower proficiency levels).

Call to action

Always begin your copy with the idea that you are going to elaborate on throughout your newsletter, and wrap it up by challenging your readers to do something. Don’t just leave the end hanging in thin air, don’t let your readers wonder “I’ve read this, now what?”. If your copy is something purely informative (like an article you only distribute to your newsletter subscribers) you can simply end it up by thanking your readers for their attention and offering them an incentive to invite their friends to your mailing list. Say something along the lines of “Stay tuned for next week’s tips and tricks and don’t forget that we are donating [insert your favorite charity here] ten cents for every user you refer to our newsletter”.

Pressure and urgency

To get the best clickthrough rates, your email will have to put some sort of pressure on the reader and impose a sense of urgency. You don’t want your readers to slack off, you want them to do whatever you asked in the call to action and do it now. You can do this by putting time limits on your offers and other restrictions that will force the reader to take action immediately.

DNS Stuff

DNS Stuff is truly a must-have for all do it yourself email marketers. It features a wide range of tools meant to check if your DNS and PTR records are set up properly, alerts you by email or SMS the instant your IPs are blacklisted by major anti-spam networks and allows you to troubleshoot and diagnose your email servers when they fail. If you are maintaining your own mail servers, you can’t live without it.

They offer a 7 to 14 day free trial so you can fully test their platform and see if it suits your needs. To learn more about the services and products offered by DNS Stuff have a look at https://www.dnsstuff.com/products.

SenderBase®

SenderBase is the world’s largest email monitoring network. It provides a nice service for monitoring email volumes per domain, allows you to look up the reputations of various networks, has statistics on top virus and spam senders and can tell you whether your network poses a high threat and is likely to be blocked by spam filters.

SenderBase is backed up by more than 100,000 contributing organizations world-wide, which equates to an unmatched view of how email gets sent around the Internet. It is a free service, courtesy of IronPort Email and Web Security.

MX Toolbox

MX Toolbox comes with a series of tools that allow you to do various lookups on a domain. You can check the IP or host name for reputation, get the DNS MX record for the domain, check SPF or TXT records, get the IP address block information for the domain (useful for learning who the uplink is).

A feature you will find particularly useful is the up-to-date blacklist checker that puts to shame a majority of RBL checkers out there. It lists only the services that spam filters use these days – and does a pretty great job too.

Next to these free services, you will also enjoy a series of paid ones: MX Toolbox offers email archiving, hosting and delivery services as well. You can have a look at their premium products here: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/Public/Content/Products/.

As you probably noticed, some are commercial and a few cost a lot. If you aren’t ready to spend that kind of money on your mailouts, it might be better to outsource your email campaigns. Don’t expect to simply invest a bit and pull tenfold worth of revenue almost right away, even if you have a large list. It can take you months to segment your list to get the optimal ROI. I have already explained the pros and cons of each in an article last year, why don’t you go back and have a look at it?

Offer relevant content

Content was and always will be very important. Send your readers PDF white papers, MP3 and video courses and, in general, anything that will cater to their interests and bring an added value. In other words, you are to give them reasons why they should stay subscribed. Not all media can be embedded in an email, but one of the purposes of email campaigns is to generate click-throughs. Send them to a download link on your site where the content can be accessed.

If your blog or service isn’t laser-targeted on a certain niche, you may want to segment your list and deliver a personalized message that focuses on your readers’ specific interests. For instance, if you run a general news site you may have readers who are solely interested in Business and Technology and don’t care about your Politics section.

Review your design periodically

Your HTML newsletter shouldn’t just reflect your company brand and values, but also present content in an intuitive and easy to follow manner. The design of your email should be in line with common usability principles: important content and eye-catching phrases go at the top, legal disclaimers and unsubscribe information at the bottom and so on. Don’t mix and match, there is not much room for innovation here. However, you should audit your design every once in a while and see if it follows industry trends.

Co-ordinate your email campaigns with your marketing strategy

While the main website should be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts, it’s alright to promote your other Internet presences. Your newsletter should encourage your readers to join your Facebook page and to follow you on Twitter. As long as you promote engagement and encourage readers to join in conversations, things should be alright.

Use reliable delivery services

If your emails don’t reach the mailbox then all your marketing efforts are useless. It doesn’t matter how well designed your newsletter is or how specially crafted a message you designed – it’s all useless if the email is flagged as spam. Use a reliable email service provider or stay away from email marketing altogether.

The art of emailing is evolving and you should keep up with the new trends. Do it properly and you will reap the benefits.

Don’t be redundant

A lot of companies start a Twitter account, a Facebook profile, put up a mailing list then share the exact same bits of information across all media. Give your visitors reasons why they should subscribe to each of your platforms. If you post an article on your blog, copy/paste it to your Facebook, email it to your subscribers and link to it from Twitter then you might get some extra exposure but it won’t help users who are in your mailing list and follow you on any of the social platforms.

Give your visitors a way to instantly engage in an activity

Focus on engagement rather than simply putting a message through. People read email more often than they log on to social media profiles, so backing up your social media campaigns with a few cleverly designed emails might do magic in terms of subscribers base. You don’t have to post all-new content in your newsletters (even though it would be nice if you could). Post snippets of your best performing articles and link back to the originals. Tease your readers and ask them to perform a certain action. Email them and ask to get a conversation started.

Get the snowball rolling

Use your email list to build awareness, invite your subscribers to visit your social media profiles, then use your Facebook and Twitter to get more subscribers to your email list. Tweet about your mailing list and email about your posts on Facebook. Use the multiple channels to build more buzz around your business, but remember not to be redundant.

Use the right technology

You will need to track goals. Just as you track conversions on your social media campaigns (you do track them, right?) don’t just send the newsletters out in thin air and hope for results. Monitor your campaigns: see how many people opened the email and how many of them clicked through your links. Remember to monitor demographics if it’s important for your goals.

Social media and email marketing is not a matter of either-or. Combine both and you will get the best out of both worlds.

Broken CSS

While it’s perfectly alright to use CSS with emails, your code has to be structured a bit differently when you want the HTML to be rendered by an email client. First of all, using inline CSS is safest and should be fool-proof. If you really have to embed your stylesheet, place the code inside the BODY tag instead of HEAD like you would normally. Web designers out there will call this outrageous, but it has to be done this way no matter how terrible it may sound: email clients and web-based email services often strip out the HEAD tag in HTML emails to keep your code from interfering with theirs.

The email gets delivered to the junk folder

While there may be a plethora of reasons why your email gets flagged as spam, here are a few tips that are under your control:

• Did you use a “spammy” phrase? Words like “FREE” in the subject, or excessive use of aggressive call to action lines (“Buy it now”, “Limited offer” etc) can get your emails flagged. Read more on how spam filters work here and here, then go back and make the necessary modifications.
• As funny as it may sound, getting delivered to junk happens a lot due to the fact that you put “Test”, “Testing” or “This is a test” in the Subject line. Yes, email filters flag that as a spam.
• Your company filters don’t “like” the sender. It could be that your ESP has been blacklisted either by your company filters or some spam monitoring agency your company works with. Contact them and ask what’s going on.

Emails not being delivered to the mailbox is one of the key reasons why people switch to reputable email service providers rather than doing the emailing in-house. If you run into this issue again and are fairly certain it’s not your fault, consider switching to another provider.

That certain super-duper thing doesn’t work

Flash objects, sounds, videos or ActiveX components won’t work in emails. Don’t even try it. Just because it worked as it should in your WYSIWYG editor it doesn’t mean it will function well in Outlook, Thunderbird or a web-based email service. If you really have to do it and/or are sure it will work, at least design it to fail gracefully – display some neat error message or an HTML-only alternative rather than spitting out some nasty error codes or even worse, breaking the whole design.

These are some of the technicalities that you may fail at in your first email campaign. Learn from the mistake and try again.

An email delivered to a recipient who is not in the TO field can trigger some spam filters, as the technique is commonly used by spammers. It is usually alright to email a handful of recipients on the same server this way, but going overboard with it is just pushing your luck. Mailing hundreds of recipients on the same server with the same address in the TO and FROM fields will get you flagged.

Emailing your list with BCC can be feasible if you only have a handful of subscribers. Once you scale up, however, you will find that:

• It gets harder and harder to manage subscriptions. If you only have 100 people in your list and get one or two modification requests per week you could probably still do it with your desktop email client. But once you reach the 1,000 mark it will be a major nuisance to subscribe and unsubscribe every one manually.
• A majority of mail servers only allow a fixed number of addresses in the CC or BCC field. If you control your mail server you can disable the cap (look up “recipients_max” in your exim configuration) but if you are mailing out through your ISP or a shared hosting account you are likely to be facing severe limitations.
• The “Mail Merge” feature in Outlook can speed up mass mailing and can somewhat overcome the server-side limitations, yet you should only consider it as a viable option if you have some other automated way of managing your list and handling subscriptions.

Last, but not least, remember that accidents may happen.  Here’s a little incident that I witnessed a few years ago, back in days of my last 9 to 5 job.

I was working as a sales manager in a brick and mortar company that was retailing copy machines. We had five sales assistants, each with a portfolio of around 100 customers. We were using Outlook to communicate to clients and send out occasional newsletters. One of my colleagues accidentally copy/pasted her distribution list in the CC field instead of BCC and hit Send. The result? Nine people stopped working with us since they didn’t agree with our “unprofessional way of doing business” and two complained they were being swamped with unsolicited offers from competitors. Seems like some people from the distribution list simply assumed that it was a God-given right to use our customers base to get them a hundred new prospects. A single mistake lead to the loss of around 10% of my colleague’s portfolio.

Today I will brief you on how community-based filters work and domain/IP authentication and filtering.

Community-based filters

These spam filters are a great application of the crowdsourcing concept. Rather than building up a set of rules on what spam looks like and then updating and tweaking them as spammers get smarter, major webmail providers have implemented the so-called community based filters. Whenever a user receives an email and clicks on the ‘Mark as spam’ button, a complaint is filed on the provider’s servers. Once a lot of complaints have been registered for a certain sender, that address is blocked.

If you scale up your email campaigns to millions of recipients, you will run into this issue, no matter how ‘white-hat’ and legitimate your messages are. There will always be some black sheep in the crowd who would rather click the ‘Spam’ button than go through an unsubscribe process or people who simply forgot they have a running subscription with your service.

As discussed in December last year, this could be a valid reason to outsource your email campaigns to some specialized service provider. If you insist on taking matters in your own hands, you should hire someone to communicate with all major ISPs on a constant basis and have your IPs white-listed as soon as spam complaints kick in.

IP-based blacklists

Some major spam filters will synchronize with ‘Blacklists’, services that keep an eye on IPs that ‘misbehave.’ If your IP address is in such a list, ISP’s are likely not to allow your email to pass through.

Such practices could affect you even if you don’t send out spam. If a blacklist service decides to list an entire IP range and you are on it, then your emails won’t get through either. Fortunately, this can be taken care of—most of these services will de-list you upon request and only list you back if more complaints occur.

Domain authentication

Major and trusted ESP’s have teamed up with spam filters in an attempt to check whether an email coming from a domain really originated from there. While there is no unitary authentication protocol, Yahoo and Microsoft have created their own authentication protocols—DomainKeys and Sender Policy Framework.

Conclusions

Don’t be paranoid. As long as you play by the book, don’t spam your list and follow the basic guidelines outlined in this three-part article, your emails shouldn’t be flagged. However, if a majority of your mails don’t get to the  inbox,  check the blacklisting service(s) and/or the ISPs to see if that’s the problem.

You aren’t following a schedule

If you publish a newsletter, you must set a frequency and follow it religiously—be it once a month, twice a week or five times a day. The call is yours, but set up a schedule and stick to it. If your business is a one-man-show and you have to go on vacation, make sure you schedule your posts in advance and have your mailing service deliver it as per the initial schedule. You don’t see a TV show cancelled on CBS because the moderator caught the flu—why should you cancel your newsletter if you are flying to Bahamas for the next two weeks?

You don’t deliver what you promised

If you advertise your readers ‘tips on how to feed your parrot’ on your newsletter signup page, then your emails should tell them how to do it and not show videos of your Yaki pet flying around your living room.

Your content must be useful and in line with what people expect from your newsletter. Getting a reader to sign up with your mailing list shouldn’t be the end goal of your campaign. Don’t rely on your readers staying with you forever—you can lose your subscribers in the blink of an eye.

You don’t have a call to action

“Call to action” is a marketing/advertising concept where you ask your audience to do something. It should be smoothly integrated in your text so that it answers the unspoken question “Ok, that was interesting. Now what?”

You need your readers to respond to whatever you have said, but you need to ask them to do it. An example of a call to action would be to end your email with something in the line of “If you like our newsletter, hit the Reply button and tell us why!” Want them to click a link? Ask them. Do you want them to buy? Tell them! Don’t assume that your readers will know what you have in mind and act accordingly, be specific and tell what you want them to do.

Overall poor message

Just because you are a great manager or an outstanding public speaker it doesn’t mean that your thoughts laid on paper have the same effect as your voice. A lot of people have a hard time expressing their opinions in writing even though they could easily put their message through in an offline conference. If you feel that your newsletters don’t have the desired impact, try to get a professional ghostwriter to write a few emails for you.

Newsletters require a lot of work and you should be prepared to learn and improve your skills, day by day. Do it the unprofessional way and you will be basically throwing money out the window. Try to avoid the mistakes above and you should see and increase in your response rate.