e-mail marketing best practices

E-News: E-mail Marketing Best Practices
Lisa Munns, E-News Editor May 23, 2006

Chances are, if you’ve been involved with email marketing for any length of time, you’re aware that AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo! are the “Big 3” when it comes to email addresses. Industry trends and our own databases have shown that for the past five years, these three lead in not only page views but also in the number of subscribers. The primary reason these three have stayed at the front of the pack is their ability to control spam, provide maximum storage space, and accessibility.

AOL and Yahoo work pretty much the same way. Good email marketers know that they have one shot at an AOL or Yahoo! address. If that email doesn’t make it past the SPAM filter, consider it dead. The Email Service Providers (ESP), or domain, systems are designed to recognize SPAM as messages that continually try to “ping” an inbox over and over. If you’re working with one of the larger ESP’s, chances are they have a deal with these companies to not let email continue to try to get in inboxes. Messages that continue to “ping” an inbox are at risk of “Black listing” their senders. Black listing means that from then on, all email providers will recognize the sender as a spammer, and won’t let any messages from that sender through.

Hotmail puts much of the filtering in the hands of the consumer. It allows consumers not only to customize their own security settings, but also includes new “Sender ID” technology. If a suspicious e-mail arrives, Hotmail does not display the message. Instead, it warns the user that the e-mail appears to be potentially fraudulent and asks them if they want to block or allow that message and any other e-mails from that sender.

Gmail is rapidly becoming a huge player in the email world. Since its launch in August 2004, there has been a huge increase in the number of subscribers. This is primarily due to the vast number of fun features Gmail has to offer. First, the amount of storage space allows users to hold on to email for a much longer period of time. Second, Gmail has introduced a search feature which is very similar to the popular Google search. Gmail has also adopted an idea used similarly by other ESP’s by blocking any images in an email unless users click on a link requesting them to “display external images,” so marketers could potentially see lower click through rates for links related to images.

back

student horizons, inc.
4903 auburn avenue
bethesda, md 20814
301/951-7101 - phone
301/951-7104 - fax

Your email:

Send to a friend:

Sign up for more newsletters