Open Rate Woes: Why Not to be Fooled by Low Open Rate Numbers

Open Rate Woes
Why not to be Fooled by Low Open Rate Numbers

In This Article…

If you’ve implemented an email marketing program but aren’t satisfied with or are confused by low open rate numbers, Comm100 explains in this article why traditional open rate metrics don’t tell the true number of people who opened your email. Comm100 then explores how to use open rate numbers to improve your campaign’s performance even if the open rate itself isn’t completely accurate.

What is Open Rate and Why is It Important?

Open rate is the number of people (in percentage form) who opened and looked at an email. It is considered to be one of the most important performance metrics of email marketing because it ultimately tells you how much your audience cared about your email and how many people looked at it. You’ll see many statistics about what your open rate should be. Often, what you’ll be told is that, for an opt-in house list, your open rate should be approximately 20%. And that’s great, if your open rate is being tracked reliably. Unfortunately, it’s less and less possible to track open rates correctly, and, increasingly, the metric needs to be used in a relative term. Let’s first discuss why open rate metrics aren’t reliable any more and then discuss how you can make open rate useful to you as a metric.

The Imperfect Nature of the Open Rate

To understand why an open rate is an unreliable way to track email performance, you need to understand how an open rate is tracked. A small one pixel by one pixel graphic is inserted into the email that you send. Then, each time the pixel is loaded, the email registers as having been opened. In some advanced cases, the pixel is tied to the recipient and is only counted once. But the point is that the graphic needs to load in order for the email to get counted as having been opened. There are three problems with this tracking method.

The first problem is that for the open to register, your user must have the graphics loaded in the email. As Comm100 has previously discussed, many email providers and users never load the graphics in an email. Without the graphics loaded, it’s entirely possible that your email has been read but that the open or reading of the email has never been registered.

The second problem is users who choose to receive their email in a text only format. These users will read your email, but because the version of the email that they are reading doesn’t include any html, it also doesn’t include any images. Again, the opening of the email is never recorded.

Finally, and increasingly, the number of users who read their email on a mobile phone will only see the text version of your email. And, of course, seeing only the text version means not having an image, thus not having a pixel graphic, and thus not having an open recorded even if they do read.

It’s a generally accepted metric in the email marketing world that open rate reporting can be off from anywhere from 11% to 35%. That’s a lot! So while it may look like nobody is opening your email, it could actually be true that your email is doing quite well.

Three Ways to Make Open Rate a Relevant Metric for You

Once you accept that your open rate really isn’t your open rate, there are some ways to make the metric useful to you regardless.

Extrapolate the Real Success by Comparing to Better Metrics: Open rate is not a variable metric these days. However, click-through rates and (if your tracking is set up correctly) conversions to sales or sign-ups are hard numbers, which means that you do know how successful your email was by looking at them. You can work backwards from those metrics. Find your most successful emails in terms of click-through and conversions and then see what the open rate was on those emails. You’ll be able to then target what a good “relative” open rate for your email program is. It’s not a perfect number because factors like offer and creative assist with the click-through once an email is opened, but it can give you an idea of what to aim for.

Make the Open Rate Relative to Other Email Sends: You may not know what your true open rate is, but you know what the relative open rate between emails that you’ve sent is. If you sent an email on the first Friday of the month that got a 25% open rate and an email on the second Friday of the month that got a 10% open rate, then something that you did in the first email send was better. It may have been the offer, the subject line, the time of day or even just that people have more money at the beginning of the month. Whatever it was, you know that your open rate for that email was a better performance, and you should repeat what you did there in other opportunities to improve your overall open rate moving forward.

Use A/B Testing: It’s true that not everybody loves setting up a complicated A/B test, but with email it’s fairly easy to just split your list in half and send two different emails to see which one performs better. Comm100 certainly suggests, at a minimum, sending two different subject lines to learn which one will perform better to generate opens. Doing an A/B email test with two factors and then seeing which one fared better in opens can draw value from the open rate metric by showing you which strategy will work better in future emails.

It’s not as though email open rates are an entirely useless statistic or metric. However, they’re not used the same way that they used to be because they don’t log numbers that are reliable any more. Knowing how what you’ve done with your email has impacted its success or failure is the only way to make your email campaigns better. Use open rate metrics in comparison or as relative numbers to improve your campaign, but don’t be discouraged if your email tracking software says that your open rates are very low percentages! It’s likely that they aren’t as bad as it seems.

Whether you’ve mastered the open rate metric or are still trying to figure it out, the first step to a successful email marketing campaign is selecting an email provider who meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary tutorial on open rate metrics, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Timing is Everything: What is the Best Day of the Week to Send an Email to Your Customers?

In This Article…

If you’ve implemented an email marketing program and want to optimize how many people open and click-through your email, knowing what day of the week and at what time of day to send your email is a key element to improving metrics. Sending on the wrong day can impact your email performance negatively. In this article Comm100 will explain when the best days are to send email and what the best time of day to send is.

Is Timing Really Important?

If only sending a successful email campaign were as simple as putting together a compelling offer, a great creative, an enticing subject line and sending your message. But it’s not! In the quest to get your users to open an email, the day and time that you send an email is also incredibly important. Continue reading to find out when is best for you to send.

The Open Rate Tail: Don’t Send Day-Of Emails

The first thing that you need to know is that, while a large portion of your recipients are going to open your email the day that they receive it, not all of them will. As people visit their inboxes less frequently during the day and instead hit social networks, the number of days it takes between sending an email and a user reading it has grown. It used to be a commonly accepted metric that a marketing email or newsletters had a three day “open tail”. These days, most people allow up to five days for stragglers to open emails.

This is important to you if you send emails that relate to specific events. For example, an email about a prediction on a sports event or last minute tickets to a concert. Sending the email the day of the event means that, by the time a significant portion of your audience reads the email, the event will be over. At a minimum, send your email three days before the target event. If you want to be extra safe, increase that to five days.

What Time Is It?

It’s not between 8:00am and 9:00am EST if you’re an email marketer! According to a Pivotal Veracity study, early morning email delivery has the lowest open rates. This makes sense since the first time most people check their email is when they arrive at work, and the common habit is to delete anything unimportant in order to reduce clutter before the day starts.

If you’re emailing in North America, the vast majority of the population leaves in the Eastern Standard time zone. Subsequently, it’s best to focus your email send time on hitting that particular time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends).

While metrics are different for everybody, as a general rule, the best open rates tend to be seen in emails that are sent around lunch time (noon or 1:00pm) EST. This also makes logical sense as people tend to relax a bit with their inboxes at lunch.

The Day Dilemma

There are a few fast and easy rules about the best days to send. But as Comm100 will discuss at the conclusion of this article, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test to find out if they hold true for you.

Monday Blues: Monday’s are considered the worst day to send mass email if open rate is important to you (and, of course, open rate is important to you). The logic, again, involves the theory that most people spend most of their inbox time at work. When you come into work on a Monday, you instantly start deleting anything that seems like junk or unimportant email so that your inbox isn’t as overwhelming to you. This theory has been backed up by numbers in many email marketing studies. Unless your users have proven to exhibit a different pattern or you have a compelling reason to send on Monday, avoid Monday sends!

Weekend Warriors: It’s also a fact that internet activity in general reduces on weekends. This may be because people spend more time with their families, get outdoors more or are just burnt out from all their enforced online time during the week. Almost every online metric category slips on the weekends, and that includes email opens. Avoid big weekend blasts.

Midweek is the Best Week: Most studies support that sending email on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday will yield the best results. So, if you boil it down, you want to send your email campaign on a midweek day in the afternoon.

Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Make Sure These Hold True for You

Despite all of the rules above, the number one rule of email marketing is “Test. Then test again.” Your particular user base may respond very well to Monday or weekend emails. Maybe you have a lot of mothers who are up early and online, opening emails. The only way to know for sure is to test various send times and establish the best practices for your own list. Even within your list, different list segments may respond in different ways.

If you follow the “Midweek, Midday” rule, you will certainly get decent response rates. Then you can build on that by running some tests to figure out if there may be a more optimized time to send to your email list! Just be sure you remember to keep track of what you sent when!

No matter what day of the week works best for you, the first step in creating a successful email campaign is to select an email partner that meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary email sending best practices, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground whether you’re practicing the “Midweek, Midday” rule or trying to tempt weekend email warriors! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Is Email Right for My Product: What Types of Consumers Respond Best to Email Marketing?

Is Email Right for my Product?
What types of consumers respond best to email marketing?

In This Article…

If you’re considering implementing an email marketing program but aren’t sure if it’s really worth the time or effort, Comm100 helps you explore whether your product, website or demographic is ideally suited for email marketing in this article. Comm100 then gives advice on how to find the right email message for your market.

Is Email Right for Everybody?

As you’re evaluating whether or not to launch an email marketing element to your business, you may be wondering if your product, customer base or industry segment is the type that will be responsive to email marketing.

The short answer is that every consumer will respond to the right email message, but, if you’re thinking that certain types of segments perform better, then you’re right.

Without a doubt, the hospitality and travel industry and the entertainment industry receive the highest delivery, open and click-through rates of any industries, according to the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index. For all industries combined, the average open rate to an opt-in list is above 20% and click-through rates are 5% or more. What this shows is that, across all industries, users will respond to email marketing. However, there are some factors that you should keep in mind.

Is Your Demographic an Online Demographic?

One of the largest factors in determining how responsive your user list will be to email marketing is simply this: “How prevalent is it to purchase your product or service online versus going to a brick and mortar location?” While both types of consumers respond to email marketing, they respond in different ways and to different techniques.

If your product or service is primarily online and consumers typically purchase or research it online, then email marketing is a natural and somewhat easier fit for you. Travel services are an excellent example of this. By far, the majority of travel purchases made each year are made online. This is one of the reasons that the travel and tourism industry’s email marketing campaigns perform as well as they do. People operate in a primarily online environment for that sector. However, in order to make email marketing relevant even if your product or service is primarily an online product or service, you’ll still need to follow a few key steps.

Keep Offers and Content Fresh: Just because a person purchases your product or service online, it doesn’t mean that they want to be told every week about the quality of your brand and your top selling product. If they think that they’re reading the same content every time you send an email, they’ll stop opening!

Link Directly to Product Pages: Promoting a product and then linking to your homepage from the email just leaves users having to search through your site and often giving up on ever finding the product that they wanted to begin with. Link straight through to the product page for the specific item that you’re talking about.

Personalize and Segment: Inboxes are crowded places these days, and people spend less time in them. Use personalization in your emails and segment your list based on user behavior.

What if my product or service is primarily purchased offline?

You’re still safe to use email marketing! You just need to structure it differently. A great example of this is the clothing industry. People often prefer to purchase clothing in stores so that they can try it on. But you can still incentivize them to be interested in your email in several ways.

If you have a brick and mortar store, send them to it! Include printable coupons for your brick and mortar locations within the email. Make sure you mention those coupons in the subject line to increase your click-through rate.

If you’re online and offline, promote the benefits and offers: Even if something is primarily purchased in stores, there are benefits to purchasing it online (convenience, uniqueness) that you can promote. Also, offers are even more important here.

Purchasers of products that are often purchased offline will be receptive to email if there’s something in the email that they truly want. Just be sure and provide that to them!

Is this all true for B2B as well?

It is, though be aware that B2B email is much more difficult and you should expect slightly lower open and click-through rates. Business decision makers have more crowded inboxes than an average consumer. Additionally, they spend time in their inboxes (or at least the inbox of the email address that you’re likely to have) differently than regular consumers. A B2C consumer is in his or her inbox during leisure time, often looking for activities to create interest. A B2B consumer is in his or her inbox during work hours, usually conducting business, and must be even more incentivized to open your email in the rush of other activities.

B2B email marketing obviously works as it’s the staple of many a marketing campaign, but you’ll need to be even more diligent about subject lines, content and standing out as something exciting.

There’s an email solution that will appeal to just about any type of customer in any type of demographic. You just need to be dedicated to taking the time to find out what that is and optimize it. Take the time to think about what your customers would really want to see in their inboxes. And take the time to test several different ideas and see what users will really respond to. Email is a key customer communication touch point regardless of what type of customer it is!

The first step to getting started with email marketing, whether you’re an ideal demographic or one that will need to work a little harder, is to select a quality email sending partner. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground to just about any type of customer or client email list! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

The Big Image Myth: Why Your Email Newsletter Shouldn’t Have Too Many Images?

The Big Image Myth
Why your email newsletter shouldn’t have too many images, even if they look great on your screen!

In This Article…

If you are just starting to send marketing email and need advice on how to design an email template, or if you are currently sending email but aren’t satisfied with the click-through or deliverability results, this article explains why using large, graphic images in an email template will actually make your email less successful and detract from its overall performance.

Why Should I Second Guess Using Images?

Without a doubt, the number one error we see in companies who want to begin an email marketing program is the desire to design an email that looks exactly like a webpage or, worse yet, like a print postal mailer. In specific, Comm100 means designing an email that uses a lot of images within the email.

Comm100understands why email designers like images. An email, just like any other piece of marketing material, looks better when it’s got appealing images in it. If it displays properly to the end-user, it probably converts better as well. The problem, as you’re about to see, is that most end-users won’t see your graphics. As an added bonus, including graphics can get you sent to the spam folder.

How Do Images Get Included in Emails?

What you first need to understand is that there are two ways to send an image in an email. The first way ensures that the user will see the image, even if in some cases it’s only as an attachment to the message. This method is called “embedding” the image. Essentially, you’re attaching the image to the email. The plus side is that, in one way or another, the user is sure to get the image. The downside is two fold. Firstly, spam filters look for large, embedded images and often give you a higher spam score for including them (Lots of spammers use images to avoid having the inappropriate content in their emails read by the spam filters.). Secondly, if you pay to send your email by weight or kilobyte, this increases the size of your message. If you’re not careful, it can even make your message too big for the parameters of the email provider.

The second way to include images (and the far more common way) is the same way that you put an image on a web page. Within the email, you provide a url that is the reference to the image’s location on your server, exactly the same way that you would on a web page. This has several benefits. Firstly, you won’t get caught for spamming or for your message “weighing” too much because of the image. Secondly, you can make changes to the images after the email has been sent if you find errors in them. On the flip side, your recipient will need to actively turn on image viewing in their email client to see your images.

What Does It Mean When You Say “Have Image Viewing Turned On?”

Unfortunately, even as Comm100 speaks, image urls and image files are being used to plant viruses on computers and to collect information about people. For this reason, most email service providers, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail, set the default status on delivered messages to block images.

What a user sees when this happens is a large, white, empty space (with your image alt or title text if you’ve included it) and often a message to right click to download the images. Most people spend less than a minute scanning an email while they decide whether to read it or delete it. If you’re email is full of images, they don’t see much that allows them to make a decision. Chances are, unless users are already very loyal to your brand and interested in your content, you are about to get deleted.

Email users can overwrite the “images off” default in their email, but most of them don’t. Most studies and surveys reveal that anywhere from 40% to 60% of users read email with the images turned off. Any way you cut it, that’s almost half of your recipient base who won’t see your email with the images as you intended. And that’s not even counting mobile phone users!

How Much Do Mobile Phone Users Impact Image Viewing?

Increasingly, mobile phone users impact your email viewing greatly. Recent studies suggest that up to 20% of your users check their mail on text-only mobile phone applications. If your email is a single image, or is based on a great deal of images, you won’t resolve to those users at all.

So, What Should I Do?

Surprisingly, Comm100 would like to tell you that you should use images. You should just use very few of them and be careful where you put them.

Images definitely have a marketing impact. A portion of your viewers will see them and turn them on. If you just follow these basic steps with images, you’ll be fine. Also, remember that you can do a lot of things just using html tables and colors that will make your email visually appealing AND deliverable.

The Less Than 25% Rule: No more than 25% of the real estate in your email template should be image-based. You want at least ¾ of the email to be readable without images.

Alt and Title Text: This is the text that is contained within your image url that appears when the image doesn’t load (and in some cases appears when your mouse hovers over a graphic). Having this text beneath your graphics is important because you can still convey the message that was in the graphic even if the graphic doesn’t load.

No Trapped Messages! The basic rule is this: “If it’s important that your readers know a piece of information, it cannot be trapped in an image.” All important information, such as price, product title, value proposition and expiration date, must be in html text. This includes “Click to order” buttons. If those are images, you’ll have users looking for where they’re supposed to click, and possibly not finding it. Those should be html buttons.

Images are an important part of any marketing campaign or collateral. However, email presents challenges in that you can’t control how the end product displays to the user in all cases. It’s better to have an email that can be delivered and seen by the user than to have one that looks fantastic … but only when it’s loaded on your computer screen and not when it’s in an inbox!

Whether you love your email template or are just starting to optimize it for best results, the first step to a successful email campaign is choosing and email provider who meets your needs.
Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary of how to use images in emails, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground with or without large image files! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

quote from http://www.comm100.net/email-marketing-tutorial/the-big-image-myth-why-your-email-newsletter-shouldnt-have-too-many-images.html

Opt in? Opt out? What is single opt in and double opt in? Which is better for you?

Opt in? Opt out?

What is single opt in and double opt in? Which is better for you?

In This Article…
If you are starting to build an email list, either on your website or by purchasing or renting emails from others, this article explains the three different kinds of email lists and the pros and cons of each. Those email list types range from the most restrictive to the least restrictive. Each is explained in detail below.

What are the Types of Opt-In Lists?

You started building up your email list through a sign up box on your site or a checkbox when a person registers or purchases a product. Then, along came some fussy marketing consultant and said, “Is this an opt-in list? Is it a double opt-in list?” You probably looked at them and wondered what exactly they meant and why it mattered.

There are three ways to build an email list: Negative Opt-Out, Opt-In and Double Opt-In. Comm100 will describe all three options here as well as their benefits and drawbacks. You can then decide which is the right list option for you.

Negative Opt-Out Email Lists

You’ll sometimes hear this type of list called simply “Opt-Out” or “Negative Consent”. When a person registers at your website, makes a purchase or signs up for a free white paper or other freebie from you, somewhere in the small print is the information that by taking that action they are agreeing to receive email from you. The user can choose to opt-out and leave the email list later, but they’ve implicitly given you permission to email them.

The upside of this method is that it can grow your list very quickly. If everybody who takes an action on your site is then on your email list, your list can grow quite rapidly. Many of those people who wouldn’t have actively signed up for your email list if you asked them to will ultimately discover that they appreciate your email newsletters or promotions and will turn into active readers and customers.

The downside is that this type of list building can also increase the number of spam complaints that you receive when you send an email. Users who don’t remember signing up for your email, or who are angry that you tricked them into signing up, will quickly hit the spam flag when they receive your email. This has negative long and short term effects. In the short term, it makes your email metrics look less successful. In the long term, higher than average spam complaints will do permanent damage to your email sender reputation and could result in all of your emails going directly to the junk folder.

Opt-In Email Lists

In this type of email list, a user actively opts-in, or chooses to be on, your email list. This can be done either by having them check a box when they register or purchase or by including a special sign-up box on your website. Users enter their email, check a box that says that they agree to receive email from you and then submit that information via a clickable button. You can also choose to collect other customer or client information at the same time.

The benefit of this type of email list is that your clients are actively saying that they want to receive email from you. Therefore you’re building the most responsive email list that you can.

However, there are some drawbacks as well. Your email list will grow more slowly. People will not as often take the extra action to sign-up as they will simply forget to “not sign up”. Also, because this isn’t a “double opt-in” technique (see below), it’s entirely possible for people to sign-up their friends and family. When that happens, you can expect the much-feared spam complaints.

Double Opt-In Email Lists

This is the most difficult, but ultimately safest, way to build an email list. It also usually has the highest return on investment since it creates a list of entirely qualified leads. In this method, a person opts-in as described above. They then receive an email from you with a link that they must click in order to be added to the email list. Even if they’ve provided a valid email address and checked a box saying that they allow you to email them, they MUST click the link in the email in order to prove that they really signed up for your email list.

The problem with this type of email list, as you can see, is that it is the slowest way to build your email list. Often, even asking people to complete one action to sign-up for an email list is too much, let alone two actions! While many users are accustomed to the double opt-in process, they’ll need to really want your email product to sign up and then confirm.

The benefits of this type of list building are significant. You’re sure that you really are emailing to people who want to receive your email. While this won’t completely eliminate your spam or deliverability problems, it will reduce them. If you’re paying per email address sent to, it also means that you’ll experience a higher ROI on each send because your list will have fewer junk addresses on it. Finally, if you do receive spam complaints, you can more effectively defend yourself against them by proving that the person double opted-in (It’s good to create your confirmation link to log the email address, IP and date that it was clicked from.).

You’ll need to decide at what point on the spectrum you’re most comfortable. If simply growing the number of names on your list is the priority, Negative Opt-In is your best choice. The more qualified and “safe” you want your list to be, the more you should move up to an Opt-In or Double Opt-In list. Certainly, when renting or buying a list, you should ask if the list was originally Negative Opt-In, Opt-In or Double Opt-In.

No matter what type of list you’re using, the first step to successful email marketing is choosing your email sending partner wisely. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary explanation of list types, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground no matter how you obtained your email list! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

Hit the Inbox: 10 Tips to Keep Your Email from Going to the Junk Folder

Hit the Inbox!
10 Tips to Keep Your Email from Going to the Junk Folder

In This Article…

If you’re beginning an email program or you’ve been sending email already but know that you’re going into your recipients’ junk mail folders, this article explains how to improve deliverability. In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize your email program to give it the best chance of making into a user’s inbox. This process is called “deliverability” and is the first step to successful email marketing.

What is “Hitting the Inbox”?

One of the greatest problems facing email marketers is making sure that your email goes to the user’s inbox instead of the spam folder. When everything is driven by whether a user opens an email, that means that the user needs to actually SEE the email first. In truth, how many of us check our spam or junk folders regularly?

Getting your marketing email to actually go into the inbox is one of the most complicated parts of email marketing (and the part that fails the most often). Here are ten tips to keep your email from ending up in the junk folder.

1.Get on the Hotmail and Yahoo! White Lists

Hotmail and Yahoo! both keep lists of approved senders. Once you’re on that list, you’ll almost always go into the inbox. If you send a particularly spammy email, however, you can be removed from the list. The process can be frustrating and take a long time, but it’s well worth it.

2.If You’re Using Your Own Server, Make Sure it “Drips” the Messages

Spam filters at most email providers look to see how many messages you’re sending at a time. If you’re sending to a large list, even if you have a fast and efficient email sending server, have the server “drip” the messages out slowly. You really don’t want more than a couple thousand to hit any one email provider per hour if you’re playing it safely.

3.Break Large Lists Into Smaller Ones

There are many reasons to break large email lists into smaller ones, but the best reason is that doing so will mean that the spam complaints that you receive when you send your email won’t be in one huge mass. It is inevitable that even loyal subscribers sometimes mark you as spam. If you send your large list in smaller segments, the email provider (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) will see less spam complaints bundled together at one time.

4.“Clean” Your Email List Frequently

Most, if not all, email providers’ spam filters penalize your domain or IP with a higher spam score (meaning you are more likely to end up in the junk folder) if they see that you are sending emails to bad email accounts. A bad email account is an address that doesn’t exist, has been disabled or has a full inbox. These addresses should be cleaned (or “pruned”) from your email list regularly to avoid this. If you allow them to add up on your list, you will eventually be flagged as a spam provider.

5.Provide a Clear Unsubscribe Link

Nobody likes it when somebody unsubscribes from their email list. However, providing a clear way to unsubscribe (and then honoring that unsub quickly) means that users are less likely to get frustrated and just mark you as spam. The number one criterion for ending up in the junk box is the number of spam complaints that you receive, so avoiding them at all costs is critical.

6.Encourage Your Customers to Add You as a Friend or Contact

Once a user has added you to his or her contact list, friend list or address book, you will always end up in their inbox. Use every opportunity to encourage those on your email list to add you as a contact. Comm100 suggests doing it in the email sign up conformation email, on the confirmation page and during most customer service transactions. A typical way to ask customers to do this is to say, “Ensure that you continue to receive the quality information from us that you enjoy by adding us to your contact list.”

7.Test Your Email to Seed Addresses BEFORE You Send to the Main List

Before you send your entire email list the message you’ve worked so hard on, send a test message to each of the big email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, AOL and one generic office address that is viewed in an Outlook client). Send the test email using the exact same server and information that you’ll use with your main list. If you end up in the junk box on the test send, then you’ll end up in the junk box on your main send. The pre-send test means that you can try different subject lines and email content to try to figure out what sent you to spam.

8.Don’t Have Sloppy HTML Code

Spam filters check for bad html code, particularly if it looks like the code was done in Microsoft Word and then thrown into an email. Use a professional coder (preferably one who has done email templates before and knows the best way to make them resolve properly in an inbox) or a template provided by your email sending partner.

9.Don’t Use “The Big Image”

Sending an email that’s all one big image file is a bad idea for many reasons. Foremost among those reasons is that spam filters look for those types of image-based emails. Big image files often carry hidden messages that would normally get caught in spam filters (words like “free” and “Viagra”), so, when a spam filter can’t read any real text in an email and only sees an image, it assumes the worst.

10.Don’t Write Text that Sounds Like a Spammer!

This one should be obvious! The more “spam-like” text and phrases your email uses, the less likely it is to end up in the inbox. There are a number of free software solutions to check the “spam score” of an email before you send it, but there are also basic rules.

•Don’t use the word “free” too many times.
•Don’t use ALL CAPS.
•Don’t use lots of colored fonts.
•Only use one exclamation point at a time!
•Stay away from words you’d see in spam: Viagra, drugs, porn, guaranteed winner.
If you’ve seen it used in a spam message that you received, don’t use it in your own email message!

Even if you do all of these things and do them perfectly, you may still end up in the junk box. Email spam filter criteria change almost daily and can be impacted by things that you have no control over. However, if you, as a habit, send good email that your clients want, you’ll get into the inbox more often than not. Be sure to follow the above guidelines because, once an email provider thinks that your email is spam, it is very hard to get back into the inbox!

One of the first steps to getting into the inbox is to choose a quality email partner. Comm100, who provided you with this spam tip list, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground and into the inbox! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.

CAN-SPAM Compliance:What Is CAN-SPAM & Why Does It Matter?

CAN-SPAM Compliance
What is CAN-SPAM and why does it matter?

In This Article…

If you’re starting an email campaign or if you’ve been email marketing already but aren’t sure if your marketing emails are CAN-SPAM compliant, this article explains what CAN-SPAM laws are and how to make sure that your email program is complaint with them.

What is CAN-SPAM and Why is It Important?

It’s possible that you don’t even know what CAN-SPAM is. Maybe you think that it involves a popular processed meat product. However, if you’re going to send email to your customers, CAN-SPAM is a very important law that you need to know about. It governs whether the email you send is considered a legal communication or an illegal piece of unsolicited spam. If you don’t abide by it, you’re subject to fines and penalties from the U.S. federal government.

In this article, Comm100 will give you the history of what CAN-SPAM is. Then Comm100 will tell you what you need to do in order to be compliant.

A Touch of History: The Passing of the CAN-SPAM Law

In 2003, as inboxes were being flooded with unwanted email spam, the United States federal government took action with the passing of the CAN-SPAM law. CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. Essentially, the law set forth a number of requirements that need to be met in order to send commercial email to customers.

It’s important to note that the law makes a difference between a commercial email and transactional email. If you’re responding to a customer service inquiry or sending an automated email receipt of purchase, you don’t need to worry about CAN-SPAM. However, any email that contains marketing information or a customer solicitation must comply with the requirements of the law (and that includes promoting links to content on advertising-driven websites). Each individual violation of a rule in the CAN-SPAM requirements can leave you open to a fine of up to $16,000, so following the rules is important! Fortunately, there’s an easy checklist for you to follow.

CAN-SPAM Compliance Checklist

Once you get past all the government language, CAN-SPAM isn’t that complicated. If you just follow seven simple steps, you’ll be completely safe.

Step One: Be Who You Say You Are!

You can’t pretend to be another website or company just to get a user to open an email (or to get into the inbox). This is a popular trick offshore spammers use to get through spam filters, but it’s illegal. The email address that you send from (the “from” address and the reply-to address) must be your own. The domain that you promote in the email must either be your own or be one that you are authorized to promote, and it MUST be the domain that you say it is (i.e.: you can’t tell people that they are going to a site that sells coffee and then send them to an adult entertainment site). Basically, the information that a customer sees in the email has to actually be you or your business.

Step Two: Don’t Lie in the Subject Line

This one is easy. If your subject line says that opening the email will give the user a daily quote of the day, then that’s what needs to be in the email. You can’t use a subject line that promises a discount on groceries and then present an email that promotes anything other than a discount on groceries. In short, your subject line has to be truthful. The terminology of the law is that your subject line can’t be “misleading”.

Step Three: Tell Them That You’re an Advertisement

You can do this many ways, including small print at the bottom of the email. However, somewhere in your email, you need to make it clear that the email is an advertisement. It may seem obvious to you, but the law says that you need to make it explicit at least once in the email.

Step Four: You Need to Have an Actual Physical Location

This one is also simple. Somewhere in your email you must provide a physical postal address (street or postal box) where you can receive communications via mail. This ensures that you are not a scammer and also allows customers a way of sending a verified communication to you to remove themselves from your mailing list.

Step Five: You Have to Let People Know How to Opt-Out

You cannot (and should not) send a marketing email without letting users know how to stop you from sending future emails to them. This is called allowing users to Opt-Out of your email list. This is typically done at the bottom of the email. The only actual CAN-SPAM requirement is that it be easy for an ordinary person to recognize and read this information. Also important is the “universal unsub rule”. If you have multiple newsletters or email lists, you may allow a person to unsub from only one list. However, you MUST provide the option of unsubscribing from ALL future marketing email of any kind. Unsubscribing from all future marketing email is called a “universal unsub”.

Step Six: When People Want Off Your Email List, Take Them Off.

When somebody requests an opt-out or unsub from your email list or lists, you have up to 10 business days to remove them. When you send an email, the information or link to unsubscribe from that email must be valid for 30 days. You’re not allowed to charge a fee for removal from the list or require any information other than the user’s email address. Most importantly, the user can’t be required to do anything other than send you a reply email or visit a SINGLE webpage to unsubscribe. Finally, once a user has unsubscribed, you may not under any circumstance sell or rent that person’s email to anybody else. This is the most complicated part of the law, but it’s also the most important. And, if you don’t honor it, it’s the easiest to get in trouble for because people will get upset if they continue to receive unwanted email from you.

Step Seven: Make Sure You Know What Your Marketing Agency is Doing!

Also make sure that you know what your affiliates are doing! Make sure that you know what anybody who sends email on your behalf is doing! You are legally responsible for the actions of anybody you hire or authorize to send marketing email on your behalf.

There you go. Follow these simple seven steps, and you will be CAN-SPAM compliant. Most third-party email platform providers will actually make sure that any of these criteria that can be automated (such as physical address, unsub links and removing unsubscribed members) are automated. However, it’s in your best interest to always review your marketing emails before they go out to make sure that they meet every criterion on the checklist!

This CAN-SPAM compliance list was provided to you by Comm100. If you’re considering starting to email market or expanding your existing email marketing, Comm100 offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your
email marketing off of the ground and supports all of your CAN-SPAM compliance needs as well! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.
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Email Marketing 101: 10 Terms & Concepts You Need to Know

Email Marketing 101:
10 Terms and Concepts You Need to Know

In This Article…

If you’ve decided to implement an email marketing program or are ready to talk to your marketing team or a consultant about email marketing, this article will introduce you to the important terminology, concepts and metrics that you’ll need to understand. Once you have a basic grip on those concepts, you’ll be able to properly evaluate the success of an email campaign or the knowledge of any consultants you may be interviewing.

Learning the Lingo of Email Marketing
The first step to creating a successful plan of action is to understand the key elements of email marketing so that you can speak the language! Comm100 has boiled it down to a top ten, though reading all of the resources in this section of the website can give you a much greater jump start.

1. Open Rate

Open rate means, quite simply, how many people (in percentage form) opened the email that you sent. This metric, however, is becoming less important in anything other than a relative way. Email open rates are tracked using a small graphic in the email. Many email providers block graphics. Because of this graphic blocking, a client may open an email and have it not register as being opened unless the client actively turns on graphics. Some reports suggest that standard open rate reporting can be off by as much as 35%, depending on your email list.

What you should remember is that open rates should be highest when emailing your existing customers and lowest with cold leads. Comparing open rates across various sends is useful, too. It’s not a 100% accurate number, however.

2. Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is the number of clicks (in percentage format) compared to the number of opened emails (NOT to the entire send). Different companies measure this in different ways. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard answer for the question: “Is it all clicks or does only one click count per open?” This measurement is important because the entire purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page or website.

3. Deliverability

Deliverability means the number of emails from your send that actually made it to the inbox (as opposed to the junk folder or the black hole of “unknown address”). Getting your email into the inbox can be a complicated process, and Comm100 has gone into detail in a full article in this section.

4. Personalization

Personalization is when you use a client’s user name, first name or other unique information in the email that you send. To do this, your database needs to capture that information, and your email service provider needs to accept and include data fields that match. Be careful using personalization. It’s not appropriate for every industry. However, in the right context, it can improve email conversions dramatically.

5. List Cleaning/List Scrubbing/List Pruning

Keeping your email list “clean” is important. The more bad email addresses (typos, defunct accounts, etc.) that you have on a list, the more likely you are to get flagged as potential spam. Also, your reporting metrics won’t reflect your email’s true performance. Many email providers automatically prune lists of bad names as you go along. Explore your options with your email provider.

6. CAN-SPAM

CAN-SPAM is a piece of U.S. federal legislation that was passed in 2003. It’s a set of rules that you MUST follow when sending email if you want to not be classified as spam and potentially face federal fines and penalties. Comm100 has included an article in this section that details the rules. Make sure you know them!

7. Opt-In/Double Opt-In

There are three kinds of email lists. “Opt-In” means that your users have “opted into” your email list and given you permission to email them. “Double Opt-In” means that users have given you permission twice (usually via a confirmation link in an email). All other lists are considered cold lists or prospect lists (usually bought or rented). There are different benefits to each kind of list. See our full article to figure out which is best for you!

8. Unsubscribe/Opt-Out

Quite simply, this is the ability of users to unsubscribe from your email list. There are two types: Universal Unsubs and List Specific Unsubs. Universal Unsubs are users who unsubscribe from all future emails of any kind from you. List Specific Unsubs will unsubscribe from just a portion of your list. For example, they don’t want special offers but do want weekly newsletters.

9. HTML Email/Plain Text Email

These are the two types of email that you can send. An html email includes colors, tables and graphics. A plain text email includes only text. In truth, you should send both formats because not all email clients (and particularly some phones) accept html email. However, figuring out what balance works for you may be trial and error.

10. Bounce Back

Bounce back is the number of names on a list that get returned to you as “undeliverable”. This could be because the email address was mis-typed, the email address doesn’t exist any more, the email address has a full inbox, or any other number of reasons. This metric is most important when you’re using a bought or rented list because it shows you how many bad email addresses you purchased.

Email marketing is obviously more complicated than just ten concepts! But this will get you started. There are lots of great articles within this section to increase your knowledge. By reading this collection of articles, brought you by Comm100, you can easily come up to speed on how to run a successful email campaign. Don’t forget that Comm100 offers a completely free, hosted email and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off the ground and working on mastering the email marketing concepts from this article!

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Why Send Email?

Why Send Email?
How email and newsletter follow up increases customer lifespan.

In This Article…

If you’re considering implementing an email marketing program but aren’t sure if it’s really worth the time or effort, this article explains how email marketing can turn your customers into more loyal customers who, in turn, are more profitable customers. In this article, Comm100
explains the customer lifecycle and what type of email to send at each point to get the most out of your customers and your email marketing program.

The Customer Lifecycle and Email

All customers have a lifecycle with your company or brand. They start when they become a customer, are active as they make a certain number of purchases or site visits, and then lapse or exit your brand. Email is a reliable, robust and cost effective way to both acquire new customers and also to make your existing customers repeat, loyal customers.

Because even bulk email is easy to personalize, you can create messages that speak to customers’ exact needs at any point in the customer lifecycle. You can affordably contact and recruit new customers, and you can also continue to promote your company to customers after their initial purchase. Sending existing customers email reminders, special offers or even just information newsletters gives those customers a reason to return to your company or website and, ultimately, makes them more valuable to you.

Sending the right email at the right point in a customer’s lifecycle is the key to activating, retaining and even winning back customers. Here’s what to send, and when!

New Customers Leads: Big Offers, Big Brand Talk

If you’re using an email list to contact prospective customers, you need to remember that you are dealing with people who may not know your brand or your product. Cold leads are not inclined to purchase naturally, so you need to put a big offer in front of them! Emphasize your value proposition, but the nature of these emails needs to be a hard sell.

Also remember that you may expect a small return from these emails. That means that it is equally important that even if the email doesn’t spur an immediate action, it establishes your brand in the user’s mind. Make the email content engaging and promote your brand visually and within the text. Then, the next time the user thinks of a product related to you, they will remember your email solicit.

New Customers: Make Them Feel a Part of Something!

You’ve got a customer! What’s the best way to make sure that customer keeps coming back? Make them feel like they’re special and part of a conversation with your company instead of just a nameless face in your customer database.

Adding an automated email (with personalization if your database captures it) that generates after an initial sign-up or purchase is a great retention tool. The email should come from a key figure in your company (CEO, President, Founder) or a personalized customer service agent. The email should not only thank the customer for the purchase but also ask them for feedback, educate them about your company and give them clear directions on how to contact customer service for any of their needs.

Active Customers: Newsletters and Weekly Specials Keep Them Paying Attention

We all know that very few active customers will stay active customers forever. However, one way to extend the length of time during which they will stay active is to use email to give them both relevant information and incentives to continue purchasing.

A simple weekly email that includes a quote of the week or fun fact and that week’s special goes miles to keeping customers engaged. The one thing Comm100 wouldn’t recommend is using your weekly email only to promote specials. Content such as articles and factoids will drive opens and readership even when a customer isn’t in a purchasing cycle and therefore increases customers’ engagement time with your brand.

Short Term Lapsed Customers: A Little Push!

Most places define “short term lapsed” customers as customers who haven’t taken an action in the last thirty days. This may vary for your product and purchasing cycle. The most important email that you can send is to identify these “just lapsed” customers and send them an offer right as they are hitting the short term lapsed threshold.

At that point in their customer life cycle, customers will still have brand awareness and loyalty. It may take just a small offer from you to get them back into the purchasing cycle. Sending them an offer to respond to before they become further distanced from your company or brand will have the greatest impact on lengthening customer lifespan.

Long Term Lapsed Customers: New Customer Leads All Over Again

Don’t let that database of inactive customers go to waste! Many of those clients will have brand loyalty and existing reasons to return to purchasing from you.


Comm100 suggests emailing your long term lapsed list once a quarter. Unfortunately, you’ll need to pull out the big offers again. These are customers who, for whatever reason, went away. You’re trying to convince them to come back. What’s the benefit? They’ll likely be less resistant than completely cold leads.

Seasonal Customers: Remind Them That You Exist!

If you market a seasonal product, you should send a cycle of emails to your lapsed clients leading up to their seasonal purchases. They’ll certainly be getting exposed to marketing messages from your competitors and may just need a friendly reminder from you that you’ve successfully met their seasonal needs before. Identifying these users in your database and communicating with them at the right time brings them back, and extends their value to you.


Email marketing can be as simple as sending a weekly newsletter that summarizes what happened with your company that week, but it also has potential beyond that. Taking the time to identify customer patterns in your database and sending those customers the right message at the right time can increase your customers’ engagement and activity with you … and that will increase their revenue value!

No matter where you are in identifying the points of your customers’ life cycles, the first key to successfully emailing to them is to choose an email sending partner that meets your needs. Comm100
, who provided this complimentary tutorial on when and where to use email marketing, offers a completely free, hosted email and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off the ground whether you’re just sending to your active buyers or going deeper into your customer database!
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