Volume 1 - Issue 7   E-News: E-mail Marketing Best Practices Lisa Munns, E-News Editor       June 7 , 2006 And the Winner is...Yahoo! If you have been involved in email marketing for any length of time you are aware that AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail have an iron grip on teenage email addresses. A look at our own database of over 500,000 high school students over the last year revealed that over 80% of our students use the big three for their email domain. These three domains have effectively stayed ahead of the pack by offering greater accessibility, large free storage capacity and strong spam filtering. AOL and Yahoo! work much the same way with email marketers. While many domains allow repeated “pinging” of mailboxes, both AOL and Yahoo! give marketers only one shot at their addressees. If the email doesn’t make it past the AOL or Yahoo SPAM filter or if the recipient’s email box is full, then consider the email dead. This is why many of your emails experience high-bounce rates to these two domains. Plus, high bounce rates can result in being assigned to a blacklist, where you will be reported out to other email domains as a spammer. Since so many high schoolers utilize these two email services, this situation tends to create a real deliverability challenge for college admissions marketers, particularly when the college chooses to send their emails via internal platforms. Utilizing an outside email service provider can help achieve greater deliverability. These providers maintain relationships with the large email domains and, thus, achieve better deliverability results. Student Horizons and our technology partner EMail Labs for instance, are able to guarantee higher deliverability rates and avoid “blacklisting” in the emails we send specifically because of the relationships we have developed with various email domains including AOL/Time Warner, Yahoo!, Microsoft (Hotmail & MSN), Earthlink, Cable and Wireless, Hurricane Electric, Roadrunner Cable Networks and Juno/Netzero. We guarantee to AOL and Yahoo! that all of our emails are “permission-based” and in return they guarantee us safe passage through the SPAM filters, but as with every mailer, we only get one shot. Even with a pre-developed relationship, the system is not perfect and you need to be vigilant in managing your deliverability and avoiding blacklisting, even when you outsource your email to a third party. A week or so ago, for instance, we had a broadcast email we sent for a school in which all of the AOL addresses bounced. Per our agreement, AOL is to pick this up and report back the problem. In this case, the email slipped past AOL monitoring and we found out after the fact. Because we were closely monitoring the mailing and because of our relationship with AOL, however, we were able to rectify the situation quickly and resend the email to the AOL addresses. Microsoft has structured Hotmail differently. Instead of internally controlling the filtering from the source server, Hotmail puts much of the filtering in the hands of the consumer. Hotmail users customize their own security settings in much the same way as independent SPAM filtering software. The Hotmail software includes new Sender ID technology. If a suspicious email arrives, Hotmail does not display the message. Instead it warns the user that the email appears to be fraudulent and asks the user if they want to block or allow that message and others from that sender. Therefore, Hotmail will not have the universal deliverability problems that you will experience with AOL and Yahoo!. The problems with Hotmail will be more individual and provided that you utilize an HTML code validator and a SPAM content checker, you should not have great problems with delivering to Hotmail or MSN. The New Kids on the Block As Google becomes the 800lb gorilla in the technology space, Gmail is beginning to penetrate the teenage market. Gmail has large free storage capacity which allows users to archive significant numbers of past emails. Gmail also has a handy and robust search feature similar to Google search and other add-ons which appeal to a younger audience. Similar to other email domains, Gmail blocks images in the preview pane unless users click a link requesting them to display external images. Therefore, marketers should develop emails that can effectively communicate the key messages without the help of images. Marketers should monitor Gmail as we predict this domain will continue to grow within the teenage market. Glossary of Terms Domain Name: The unique name that identifies an Internet site or the text name corresponding the "address" / URL of a particular Web site. This is also how you describe the name that is at the right of the @ sign in an Internet address. Blacklist: After identifying the sending server's IP address and before any e-mail is transmitted, the receiving server can query any blacklists and block incoming mail from anyone on this list. This results in the intended recipient never receiving your e-mail. Whitelist: The same premise as a blacklist, but instead of blocking the email it verifies that the server should accept it. If you are on this list recipients will continually receive what you are sending. Spam Filter: A spam filter is a program that will actually capture e-mails that look like spam before they are sent to your in-box. Spammer: someone who is blacklisted because their e-mail is considered spam. I welcome your inquiries about this topic or any other questions related to e-mail marketing. Let us know if there is a subject you would like us to cover in future issues of E-mail Marketing Best Practices. lmunns@studenthorizons.com 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