Have you been sending the standard email format month on month to all your audience? How can you keep their interest levels up? What should you do when your readers never open, read or respond to your email?  Here are a few thoughts.

Re-Engagement:
Define who you term as a non-responder.  Are they not opening your email, are they not clicking on the email? Over what period of time?  Is a 12-18 months is the appropriate window of time to measure this? Perhaps if you track when you received permissions, that would be a better way to judge, is it not?

There are a lot of reasons why people don’t respond to email but non-responder may not necessarily be a non-buyer. Perhaps some people choose to not engage through email. The non responders to have an impact on deliverability, though. If a large percentage of your email audience does not engage with you at all, over a long period of time, then overall the ISPs may start filtering your messages as junk. You may have noticed that the daily deals, or news emails that you don’t open anymore start landing in your junk folder.

A re-engagement strategy will be a good idea to get your audience to respond. (more…)

Have you seen emails go out in the sun and get totally tanned? Well, they should have used a sunscreen with a Sun Protection Factor of 30.  Whaaaa?

Ok. I am kidding. The SPF in your sunscreen has nothing to do with the SPF in email marketing.   In this post I hope to convey in very simple words, without getting into any jargon what SPF is about.

SPF in Email Marketing is an “Authentication Mechanism”. It’s like a badge that your email carries and produces when the bouncer at the ISP asks for it.

1. Who wants this authentication? The ISP who is showing you the email, for example Yahoo is the ISP that checks the email before letting it into your Yahoo Mail inbox. (Substitute Yahoo for Gmail, Hotmail etc.)
2. What is being authenticated? The email is being checked to see if it was sent by a spammer.
3. Who authorizes, or establishes if the email is genuine? Your website.

Here is how this happens:

1. The ISP asks the email for its “ID” card or badge before letting the email in.
2. The email then shows its “SPF” which is like its badge showing which website it has come from.
3. The ISP then goes sneaking to the website, asking if the ID is genuine. The website looks at the badge and says “Yup. That’s my email, alright. Please let him pass.”

Here is this exchange in the format the “Internets” understand well, via stick people (who else?)!

So you see the final authority in making sure that your emails land in the inbox is with your website. Your website needs to “authenticate” the email. The full form of SPF is Sender Policy Framework (seriously, I think the Internet people who come up with such names should go out in the sun more often!). If you don’t have SPF, you don’t get in the inbox. Simple.  Just like you should not go out in the sun without sunscreen don’t start your email marketing without SPF.

How is the SPF thingy done?  That’s for next post. In that post I will share the SPF details in slightly more technical terms.

You want to do email marketing. But you are faced with a lot of difficult tasks ahead. Perhaps these are the questions that you are asking:

“We don’t have a list of emails with us!”
“How should we create our email?” How should it look? What should be its design?”
“What should we write in the email?”
“What should we write in the subsequent emails?”

We understand these pains. We answer them every single day. You are not alone in facing these problems. Big companies, to news websites to small and medium enterprises who have recently started their websites – all of them face these questions.
(more…)