Bulk/Blast Email Sends Q&A, Best Practices

Bulk/Blast Email Sends ? Q&A, Best Practices

By, Ziggi Landsman, VP, Web Strategy & Assistive Technology, United Spinal Association

Q. What is the most important element in communicating by email? A. Deliverability, the ability for your message to reach its destination. A pitch is only as good as its ability to reach the eyes of readers.

Q. What can keep a message from being delivered to the inbox? A. The most common message delivery issue is messages being marked as spam and bad email addresses. 82% of all emails never reach the recipient. They are removed by email filters prior to being delivered. If your messages are frequently filtered as spam, recipient email servers may blacklist you from their system and/or report your company to services that will share the blacklisting with other servers.

Q. What is Spam? A. Early on, spam was considered to be emails that carried advertising, pornographic content, unsolicited messaging and chronic email bombardment. Today spam is almost anything that the recipient email system owners/managers don't want in their system. This includes emails that qualify by the old standard and personal emails, newsletters from organizations that employees belong, etc. Most companies now have a "no personal emails" policy in place and they do intend to enforce that by filtering emails.

Q. Who determines what is spam? A. Email system owners/managers set up their email filter profiles according to what they want blocked. It's all technology, no humans are involved. If the email reaches its destination, the recipient then has an opportunity to mark it as "junk" or even "block" the sender if they desire. In either event, future emails from that sender will then be either sent to the junk box or blocked completely. There is no industry standard for these settings, so senders must always plan for the worst or most stringent filtering scenario.

Q. What can I do to improve deliverability of my bulk emails? A. Keep your email looking less like an advertisement and more like a business letter:

1. Keep images to a minimum by having them take up no more than 25% of the content space. Intentionally making emails longer to allow for more image space doesn't work well since short emails are much more likely to get read than long ones. Next time you get a long email, see how much of it you read.

2. Keep spammy words and phrases out, especially in the subject. Some examples are: Free, discount, sale, special offer, buy now and save, save, act now, limited time offer, sexy. You know them. You've seen plenty of them in your inbox. Remember, the first stop your email makes will have technology not a human doing the reading.

3. Use very little html markup, i.e., bolding, large lettering, colored lettering, colored backgrounds, and a large number of links. This just yells "I'm an advertisement" to the email filters, even if it is not.

4. Remember to use alternate tags with your images. Many business email systems do not load images by default. That is done by specific request of the recipient ("Load images" button). If images do not have alt tags they will show as empty spaces. Will recipients always load images? Some will take the time, and some will not. The alt tag substitutes text for the image until a

"load images" is requested. If there are no alt tags the email will have large empty spaces anywhere an image was supposed to be. 5. Do not embed images in your email and do not attach PDF's. They are instantly suspect as virus and malware carriers. A better strategy would be to link to elements such as a PDF. 6. Try to offer a business like letter with a link to a webpage (landing page) with more information. You can do and say almost anything you deem necessary on your webpage without penalty.

Q. So your email made it through! How do you get recipients to open and read it? A. Try some of these best practices:

1. Start with a short and very direct subject line. Short so that the email browser does not truncate the subject and it can be read quickly. Direct so that the recipient does not have to think much. Mysterious or seductive subjects have little room in the business environment. Business people won't play guessing games with your email. Remember, this is the first thing your recipient will see. Raising a question mark early in the encounter does not lead to curious browsing of the email. It more likely will lead to email abandonment. A good rule for subject length is no more than 60 characters.

2. Keep the opening paragraph short and very much to the point. Your first paragraph sets the table for the rest of the email content and it is the place where most recipients and your email part company. Long opening paragraphs also tend to make readers think that the email is going to be long and tedious. Try working with a maximum of 120 characters in the opening paragraph.

3. Send shorter messages. Do be clear about why you're writing. Your email message should clearly state who you are, why you are writing and what you're requesting from the reader. Use the first paragraph to introduce yourself, the second for your request, and the third to thank the reader for his or her consideration. In general, if you're lucky enough to engage your recipient you will have their attention for only a few minutes. So short works in your favor.

4. Name names, but in the right place. If possible always include the recipient's name in the salutation. Always drop your name in the signature block. Personal touches work well.

5. Spell check everything. Misspellings tend to make you and your company look bad. They also infer that the recipient was not important enough for you to spend some extra time on the content.

6. End your letter with a short respectful closing. Good examples are: Sincerely, Regards, Yours truly, and Yours sincerely. Avoid closings such as cheers, love, XOXO, and never use emoticons (smiley faces, hearts, stars) in a business letter.

Q. What day is a good day to send a bulk business email? A. It can vary depending on the business, but some good rules are as follows:

1. Not on Friday since people browse their emails much faster and even bulk close them in an effort to clean out their inbox before the weekend.

2. Not on weekends since many business people do not check emails at all or infrequently. Your email will languish in the inbox until Monday and get covered up by a large amount of other emails by then. The Monday morning rush readings/trashings may cause your email to head for the trash because the recipient is doing a rush email check.

3. Not before a holiday and not until two days after a major or travel holiday. People take time off around then. Your email can languish in the inbox for days or even weeks and get covered by dozens or even hundreds of newer emails. Oh yes, on return to work the recipient will be doing hard and fast view and deletes from their mailbox.

Q. What time of day works best for a send. A. Right around open of business which for many companies is 8am to 9am. One of the first things many business people do when they first come to work is check their emails. You want to be there and near the top. Right after lunch is another good time (watch your time zones). Many business people clear out their first round of emails by lunch and then start over with the new ones right after lunch. Sending right after lunch time on the east coast may mean that your west coast recipients are gone for the day when their emails arrive. Check with your sending provider and see if your sending technology can be set to deliver your message at the same time in each time zone without doing separate sends. Many systems now have that ability.

Q. What is segmenting recipients? A. Segmenting is separating companies/recipients on your master list by using some sort of logic. The assumption is that not all recipients are interested in the same offerings. Segmenting allows you to group individuals with certain interests or in certain businesses with other similar recipients. A tailored send can then be sent to each group segment that contains offers that may have higher interest. It avoids the pitfalls inherent in a shotgun approach.

Q. How can I tell what appeals to my recipients? A. Test and test and test some more. Your email broadcasting technology may have the ability to do split tests (also known as A/B tests), wherein you can send emails with different subject lines or different content in order to test openings and clicks. If your technology does not have this capability, it may be time to look around for a new service provider. Keep track of what interests them. What have recipients been clicking on and what is getting little or no play in your emails. Adjust your future sends based on this information.

Q. How can I tell how well my emails are doing? A. Most often this is judged by a combination of email openings, clicks on links, contacts by recipients with few unsubscribes and few complaints, as well as few bounces (emails that did not make it through for any reason- bad email address, filtered out as spam, etc). You should see the good numbers going up and the bad numbers going down over time. Granted, sometimes this is a slow process, but you should see improvement over time. To keep things in proper perspective ? Generally, non-profit emails open at a rate of 17% and click on links at 4%. Don't get disappointed or frustrated if large numbers of recipients do not open or click. It is the rule rather than the exception.

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