When sending invitational emails that are “peer initiated” you need to be very careful as you can quickly degrade you delivery due to either abuse by your users or getting carried away with trying to grow your audience.
Since CAN-SPAM essentially says peer initiated are OK (albeit this was before web mail address books were being scraped as a daily basis), we’ve asked our clients to follow our best practices and we ask that if you are doing them yourselves that you do as well. It will improve your chances of delivery into the inbox, and you won’t be alienating people and degrading your domain!
Peer initiated emails should adhere to the following requirements:
- Emails must clearly declare in the pre-header and footer that they are a peer initiated and show the address they were initiated by along with easy access to the global unsubscribe link
- Subject lines must be clear about the purpose of the email
- Emails should contain mailing address, and links to the privacy policy and terms of use
- The privacy policy must clearly state that you will not use email addresses from your user’s address book other to send the requested peer initiated email
- Within the site UI where the user provides details to log into their web addressbook, their must be a notice that you will not be storing usernames, passwords or email addresses other than for the imminent use along with a link to the pricacy policy
- The From address must be that of the customer service address for the website (the reply-to can be that of the requester)
- The interaction with the user on the site must clearly indicate that emails are being sent on their behalf.
- Sensible limits should be imposed so that people are not sending to their entire gmail address book which could be 2000+
We provide GetConnect as a service to grow communities and websites, but we are very strict at maintaining good standards.
When was the last time you looked at your site and evaluated when and what you were sending?
Do you send an authentication email AND a welcome email or are they one and the same?
Do you send an email to a new user that hasn’t signed in again for a month?
Does your reset password email just contain a single link? Your touchpoints with your users are the best chance to tell them about your twitter account, or a new promotion. Just because it’s a reset password email doesn’t mean it can’t have extra information. Just make sure the purpose of the email is the main call to action. (And I hope you have a reset password email, not a “here’s your password” email – ALL passwords should be encrypted on ALL sites – lots of people still use the same passwords for all accounts and if you are not encrypting then you are a security flaw for the unfortunate).
I suggest you do a periodic review of your emails, make sure they contain good content, timely content, are easy to read, and engage your users. Think about it from your users point of view, would you like to receive these emails? Finally look at your bounce rates from your emails, you want to aim to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a high bounce rate from traffic generated by email means something is not right.
If you are not technically savvy it’s hard to figure out if an email from paypal or chase is really from who it says it is. If in doubt just make sure that you type the address in yourself. You should be able to remember most of your banking urls, and just open your browser and go there. Don’t follow that lovely link that may save you 1 click or may cost you $10,000. Sometimes its hard for me to spot a fake they are so good, and the biggest issue is if you click the link you may have already exposed yourself.
In the mean time we will keep trying to make the email business a better place so that spammers and phishers can do no harm!
Today I had the opportunity to speak to a client who we were setting up with a transactional email template. She had a web form on her site tied to a transactional email that was set to fire upon completion of the form. I helped her set up the template and check for spam compliance. She wanted to test it, so she completed the form while I waited on the phone. As soon as she clicked the submit button she was immediately in her email client.
“There’s no email”, she said. In preparation I had her send report open. “It should be there…now!” as the status changed to delivered on the report. “Ping” went her email client, the email arrived within seconds.
“Ooh, how’d you know when I was going to get it, that was quick” she said.
I showed the client the back end admin for our real time delivery reports and how she could tell what emails were delivered and when. Tomorrow when Google updates her Analytics data she’ll be able to tell what links were clicked on too!
We have real time delivery reports with built in Google Analytics. I’m sorry but when clients see it in action for the first time… well, that stuff just never gets old.
Now that Black Friday has passed and Cyber Monday looms I wonder how many companies are sending out mass e-mail campaigns luring us all with tempting offers of great deals. The economy is hurting and so are retail companies with inventory to shift before the end of the year.
I’ve received a number of well designed email campaigns in the last few weeks from (mainly retail) web sites. What I haven’t received yet is any marketing messages in transactional emails from sites I engage with. Just the other day I reset my password for my account on a large retail store website. I don’t shop there much but I know I have an account which makes ordering easier. The email came through with clear instructions on how to reset my password and gain access to the site. What they missed was an opportunity to provide an additional marketing message about products on sale for the christmas season. In fact they missed an opportunity after I reset my password too! I still ordered something, but I may have ordered more if I had been tempted – and fallen for the upsale. Everyone loves a deal.
Transactional email is underestimated as a tool to deliver your message. It doesn’t mean you need to send a full marketing campaign with each password reset, or with a notification that someone has posted on your wall. It is however a great opportunity to tell your users about new features, new products or simply something about your company that makes them know that they are valuable to you.
Transactional emails have an almost perfect open rate. When compared to mass emails a simple notification in a transactional email might put you one step ahead of your competitors who are ending up in the junk folder.
Are you missing an opportunity? We think you might be.
Find out more at Sailthru.com
Poor Hotmail gets a lot of flack for poor SPAM filtering, while GMail gets all the compliments (although less so recently). Google must have some fancy algorithm for finding SPAM – or do they?
Well, it’s actually the fact that GMail has a big edge, a huge edge even. Up until very recently GMail was used primarily by techies, techies that unsubscribe from email they subscribed to and flag real SPAM as SPAM. See the subtle difference?
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Last week I attended two conferences on email, all very exciting stuff! It still amazes me that everyone is still focused on marketing emails and not transactional email marketing.
Seriously, come on people!
How many of you spend more than two hours writing and designing your monthly newsletter? A newsletter that will get an open rate of under 20%.
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One of the more simple and unused features of google analtyics is the utm_source and utm_medium GET parameters. If you use Google analytics on your site then these are available to you know with NO changes of any code.
Let’s say you send out an email to your friends about your new blog, if you send them to your site with a link that has the above paremeters you can easily look up what effect your email had!
It’s as simple as www.example.com/?utm_source=neil&utm_medium=email and then you can see all the traffic you sent under the traffic sources report.
If you are not doing it, then start NOW. Use the Google url builder.
It’s very important that your authentication and welcome emails get in the inbox and in front of the user. What are the stats you use to define the growth of your site? I’m sure that registered users is often one of those stats. What if your authentication email never made it to your brand new user?
It’s vitally important to realize that if you are just sending email from your server and expecting that it goes in the inbox you are wrong.
Make sure you have an SPF record at the bare minimum, also that you are allowing people easy access to unsubscribe. Also test out your emails, and make sure that you aren’t going in the spam box in the major webmail providers.
Once you have got in the inbox, make sure you are engaging the user. If you are just sending a simple email why should your brand new, eager user authenticate? Are you tracking the click through to your website? How many people signed up and didn’t authenticate?
To make intergrating us a simple as possible we’ve added libraries to work with our API.
Current approved libraries include:
We also have the following in beta release (send us an email to get a hold of them):
We’d love a PERL version too so if you want free service for a month please provide the PERL library!