Email Marketing Best Practices

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Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing can either be a blessing or a
curse depending on how you approach it. Gone are
the days of buying a list and setting up a server
with software. Email marketers are now focusing
on targeted lists that are optin, and to improve
their ROI, they inform the list of who they are
and how they got their email.
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• If you are going to get into this game, there are
  some pitfalls you may want to avoid
• Buying a list
• Buying email software
• Buying email servers
• Adding IPs

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Buying a list of emails, regardless if it has
optin information or not, is too risky. The real
question should be, Why is the list owner
selling? If the list is responsive, its worth
its weight not to be sold. Most lists for sale
have already been traded and/or sold at least 20
times before it gets into your hot little hands
and prior to them selling it, many have seeded it
just to watch how many hands it arrives in. All
lists are seeded with traps or list owner emails,
so buying a list is just too risky.
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If you do not have a list and you decided to do
gorilla marketing (which 90 of startups do),
then you would be better off riding the coat
tails of a similar company (someone in the
industry but not direct competition). Pay them to
send your ad to their own list. Better yet, ask
if they would lease their list to you. This way,
their logo can be on your ad and their lists will
know where the ad is coming from. There are many
other ideas and options you can choose from. The
best advice would be to get as far away from
unfamiliar lists as you possibly can.
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So, lets say you have a list that is fully optin
all from your own marketing website(s), thus you
decide to save money by buying email software.
Any easy search in Google will find you in the
web of 250 email marketing programs with
promises of major rewards. This will cut my
costs of marketing by 90! you say to yourself,
but the software you are buying (unbeknownst to
you) is honestly old and outdated. Most were
programmed by a few intelligent Ukrainians about
10 years ago and ISPs recognize their signature
within the first 10 emails being sent. Email
software and add-ins (plugins to email clients)
do not get you into the inbox anymore unless you
know how to take it apart and fix their flaws.
Youre better off paying companies like MailChimp
or Aweber because they are completely whitelisted
and ISPs give them VIP treatment (more on that
later).
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Ok, so after serious consideration of the above
and your budget being tight, you stick with your
250 email software and decide that buying email
servers is the next logical step because hey, you
wont know until you try it right? Email servers
or virtual desktops come with IPs that have
already been listed and delisted at least a dozen
times or more and a lot of blacklists keep those
IPs on warning. The minute your server IP
approaches a threshold within a large free email
service provider like Hotmail, the quicker it is
to be blocked. Server admins monitor their
traffic and have excellent systems that alert
them of possible spam. You are likely to get
blocked within 3,000 emails from one IP at any
given 24 hour period of time.
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Lets say you figure that out real quick when
your open and click rates drops by half, so you
decide that adding more IPs will fix the
problem. This shotgun approach would have worked
well 10 years ago, but ISPs recognize this
snowshoe spam and can block an entire range just
as fast as they can one IP. Unless you purchase
hundreds or thousands of IPs that are unrelated
to each other along with the same number of
domains (scatter/tunnel affect) you will be stuck
with the same problem as before. Even if you find
a provider who can sell IPs in such fashion,
your machine can still be blocked (more on that
later, too).
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Finally, you get smart and decide to go the
honest approach. Wise choice. I have found that
if you contact large email service providers and
be completely honest with them about your list,
where you got it and what you plan on doing with
it, they usually will work with you to clean it
up, somewhat. You shouldnt just upload a list
and expect them to accept it without any
communication between the two of you. Some
programs allow you to send to the entire list the
first time, which is risky on their end, but you
will soon find out that you are banned from using
them if you hit a trap or exceed a high threshold
of bounces.
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Honesty will go a long way and large email
service providers truly want your repeated
business so contacting them via the phone (yes,
by using your mouth) and building a relationship
will pay off big in the end because their IPs
are solid and get into the inbox. I have heard of
many instances where emailers will setup multiple
small accounts into several large email service
providers and keep it small in order to send big,
but this approach is tedious, malicious and can
bite you in the ass if youre not careful. Its
not worth it.
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There are over 30,000 Internet Service Providers
worldwide and all of them share a common problem
between them, which is spam. Every year, a new
idea is shared among them all on how to avoid
spam spilling into their networks and they are
constantly spending millions to make sure their
users receive a minimal amount of spam in their
inboxes. They frown upon spam, yet some profit on
it and that is why there is both white hat and
black hat spam out there today. Sure, you can
save money by tricking them. But in the long run,
you can smear your companys good name and that,
my friends, is just not worth it.
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