Tag Archives ⇒ campaign

List Building – Spam Prevention

· Brandon Hann

Contrary to the title, there is no foreseeable way to completely prevent all spam. It’s just something we’ll have to live with as long as we use the Internet to do business. In fact, even brick and motar businesses suffer from it by getting junk faxes alongside their junk mail.

In the case of list building, there are two kinds of spam. On one hand, you have your own emails to worry about–you have to make sure that the content of your messages are not being classified as spam in your user’s inbox. On the other hand, you have spammers that sign up to your site or newsletter in order to access your free downloads or to write bogus comments on your site to promote their useless junk.

Sending spam

I wrote a full article on email delivery rates discussing the importance of creating messages and newsletters that do not end up in your user’s spam boxes.

This is a vital step in preventing spam for your users and ultimately protecting your site’s reputation. If you’re sending messages being classified as spam, you’re also putting your ISP on the line because it’s their resources that y
you use when sending your email marketing campaign.

Receiving spam

To prevent getting spammers from your squeeze pages, you’ll want to implement anti-spam techniques such as the double opt-in procedure. This is when you have an email marketing signup box such as a newsletter where the user inputs their name email address. Shortly thereafter, the user will receive an email asking to confirm their subscription request.

Automated spam bots aren’t able to get through this procedure because they only know how to “sign up” much like spam bots that scour the Internet looking for email address to harvest are only able to send messages.

Another way to prevent automated signups is to require a CAPTCHA code on your signup box.

Proper email practices

Here’s a list of articles from the website BestPrac.org; a site that offers tips on how to help prevent spam worldwide.

  • Squeeze page scammers
  • Avoiding spam bots
  • Email netiquette
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List Building – Demographic Info

· Brandon Hann

Have you ever watched tv at certain times during a day and wondered why the commercials you see are so different than what you see at night? Or how about a magazine about cars–why are all the ads related to car parts? Of course the second example is more obvious, but the point is that every media outlet has demographic requirements that it must follow.

Your website is no exception. There’s no sense in promoting your products and services to people who have no interest in using them. Learning your demographics for your niche or market will help you find people in particular age groups, cultural societies and various interests groups that fit your ideal customer. Knowing this information will help you better serve your customers and allow you to market specific segments of your business. The hard (and expensive) part is finding out who your customers really are.

As a small business or even smaller website/blog owner, you will likely not be able to afford a big budget market research campaign, so what options are you left with in discovering who your customers are? I found an interesting blog post on Sean Jordan’s website that discusses just this question. I’ve outlined and summarized a few of the important points here.

Finding your demographic

  • Competitors – A perfect way to start out with any area of your new business is to look at what your competitors are doing. It might sting a little to see other businesses doing what you plan to do, but the best part is that you can learn from their mistakes or take the high road and do things better/differently. In terms of demographics, you can sometimes find this information in media press kits or by searching online.
  • Census Bureau – To find your own demographics, it might help to view the demographics of the country, or your local area. This will tell you who lives around your business and can point you in the right direction to finding out who you’ll be marketing to.
  • The Internet – Searching online can yield tons of information about loca demographics. A lot of real estate websites offer basic information to inform potential home buyers. There’s a website called Claritas that allows you to search your own zip code to discover what kind of demographics there are in your neighborhood.
  • Small Business Administration – This website is not just for locating demographic information, but also for starting a new business or growing an existing one. There is a TON of free resources on this site and it should be explored from top to bottom.
  • Existing reports – Most likely, you’re operating in an industry or field that already has some extensive market research reports already created, so why not use them? This will save you so much time and possibly even money in the long term although these reports can cost quite a bit up front.
  • Hire someone – Undoubtedly this is the most expensive approach to market research. You hire a large firm that specializes in such areas and allow them to do the footwork for you. This option is probably not the best approach for a small business because even once you have the results, you may not have the financial requirements to properly manage your marketing campaigns.

Why is this information important?

As an example, your business sells computer games. If you found out that the majority of people buying computer games are between the ages of 13-26, but your local demographics show you that the majority of people in your area are between the ages of 35-55, would you go door to door offering to sell computer games? No. Had you not known this information, you would have exhausted precious time and resources to gain no additional customers.

Running a business online is a little different because you have the whole world at your fingertips, but it would still be beneficial to know how to market your website to get better response to your products.

This has been an extremely concise article about locating demographics, but my purpose was to emphasize how important it is to know your customers. If you’re faced with this issue right now in your business, I’d strongly suggest you begin a search online to explore these topics in depth.

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List Building – Delivery Rates

· Brandon Hann

Here’s a little underestimated topic–the deliverability of your email campaign. It’s a wonder that some people pay little attention or no attention to this at all. Maybe it’s one of those “out of sight, out of mind” things, but it really shouldn’t be. Imagine if you sent out a message or newsletter to 100 email address and it only reached 75% of them? You now have 25 people not getting your message.

So what keeps 25 valid email addresses from receiving your message? SPAM filters are the number one reason. Another would be IP address blacklisting. It could even be whether you’re sending attachments with your email. Of course, if you have a list with some invalid email addresses, that’s a whole other issue! Let’s breakdown some of these email issues:

Invalid email addresses

List pruning is an important task and should be done periodically to ensure that you’re not sending emails to people who don’t want it, making sure that you’re not using excessive system resources and also to keep an updated count of your active list.

Better yet, let the users prune themselves! If you’re users signed up one month, but lost interest the next, they would be happy to know that you don’t have them jumping through hoops to try and get their email address off your list. This is one less thing to worry about if you’re using an email provider such as Aweber because they follow anti-spam laws to a “T”, therefore all of your messages will provide instructions on how users can unsubscribe.

SPAM filters

A lot of people have spam filters, but some may not even know they’re there and some might not have control over what comes in. The point here is not to force your users to try and find out ways to sneak your emails past the guards, but to ensure your emails are designed properly so they can get to the inbox without trouble. Have you ever been to a website that tells you how to subscribe to their newsletter and then somewhere on the same page, they tell you that before you can get anything, you need to make sure such-and-such email address in on your whitelist?

How often do you continue with that subscription and do you even remember to add the right email address? Don’t put this type of stuff in your user’s hands. They want access to your information and they want it fast and easy. The moment you let this fact out of your head is the moment you lose readers.

IP address blacklisting

If you’re not using an email service provider, you’re likely sending emails from your own system(s). Be careful as some ISPs and webhosts don’t allow the sending of mass emails over their networks. This can cause your IP address to be banned on certain ports or worse, you can be placed on worldwide spam lists. To check your IP address, you can visit some (or all) of these blacklists:

More information on how to remove an IP from these lists can be found on each page.

Attachments

Don’t send people attachments if you can help it! Even if they’ve purchased or requested something downloadable, don’t attach it. Make it accessible to download from your server and then link to it in your email. Attachments don’t always make it on the other site. Some users have automatic attachment removals, some send all emails with attachments to the trash and sometimes attachments can get corrupted.

So, unless you’re communicating with someone one-on-one, try not to attach any files.

Frequency

One sure way to increase delivery rates is to let your readers know when to expect your email(s). This way they can look for it and if it did happen to end up in the spam folder, they can make adjustments on their own to ensure that won’t happen again.

Also, by telling a user when they should expect your mailings, they can get a better idea of the “value” in signing up for your mailing list.

Following the tips above will guarantee that your messages are delivered on-time and to the right people.

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