Postman’s Motto Doesn’t Apply to Email

This is my 50th post to this blog. I love little landmarks like that – road signs on the road to success. Well, on to #50:

Email @ symbol“Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night will stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” So says the motto carved into the granite of the old post office at 33rd Street in Manhattan.

Weather may not have stopped the mail, but rising costs sure slowed it down. from twice a day, to once and now maybe five days a week instead of six. I guess the real question is when will the last letter be delivered?

It’s OK though because we can use email. The younger and more tech-savvy among us text and tweet and post to Facebook anyway – they are much more immediate. And business email is still an effective medium and will be for years to come.

Marketing gurus are always telling you to build your email list and some of you have even listened. Many local businesses have emailing lists of several thousand.

But how do you know those emails you send are getting through?

One test (if you are sending HTML emails) is to use the “open rate” tracking function of many email applications. Trouble is, they are notoriously inaccurate. I’ve had “open rate” trackers tell me that 140% of my emails were opened. I didn’t know I had sent the mail to 140% of my list.

And what does “open rate” mean anyway? Many email applications embed a transparent 1-pixel image in your HTML emails. When the 1-pixel loads, that’s a “read.” It doesn’t mean the recipient actually read it -it just means they clicked on it causing the 1-pixel image to load.

Other applications use a hidden URL that hits a script telling the app that the email was “read.” Same problem, though. The script is activated when the recipient clicks on the email, not necessarily reading it.

What all this means is don’t get too excited about “open rate.” There is a far bigger fish to fry if you want to be successful at email marketing.

The real question is “are your emails getting to the recipients at all?” If they aren’t getting them, it doesn’t matter what percentage are reading them – 100% of nothing is nothing.

There are many things that can keep emails from getting through and the first of those are emailing limits put in place, both on the sending end and the receiving end.

Stop signIf you have a mailing list of as little as 250, you could be exceeding the email limits of your ISP. We’re going to have a look today at the limitations placed on your emailing and the consequences of ignoring them. We’ll then tell you about two types of solutions you can use to be sure the maximum number of your emails arrive.

Many business people just starting an email list might think that just creating a group in Outlook or another email program on their computer is the solution. Aside from making it way too easy to be in violation of the CAN-SPAM act, this is about the worst way to get your email messages through. Some will make it, but many others can just disappear into cyberspace.

Groups in your email program work really well until the number of recipients exceeds your ISP’s email quotas – and they all have them in some shape or form.

For instance, Verizon allows you to have up to 100 recipients per email and a maximum of 500 total email recipients per hour. That is fairly liberal, but if you hit the limit, you can’t send emails for 24 hours.

With Comcast and RoadRunner, the limit is 1000 recipients per day.

BellSouth makes decisions on a case-by-case basis – that simply means they do what they want and it is possible that the policy is not applied equally to all customers.

Some ISPs even have monetary penalties in place for those who, intentionally or unintentionally violate their terms of service by sending what is in their definition, unsolicited commercial email (UCE).

I have several mailing lists that exceed those limits and you will, too if you put any effort into your email marketing campaign. So living with these limits is unacceptable in the long run.

Another plan might be to use the mail server that is included with your web hosting service. But there again are limits. For instance a Shared Hosting solution on HostGator limits you to 250 emails per hour – that means a 5,000 subscriber email would have to be sent over a period of twenty hours. Other Shared Hosting solutions allow up to 1250 per hour reducing sending time to five hours. Better, but what if your list keeps growing as it should?

If you’re building your list from scratch, do it right from the beginning and build a double opt-in list using a service provider like AWeber or Constant Contact. They own their own servers and have no sending limits. They are the ideal solution. But they may require that you re-confirm your subscribers. We’ve had lists re-confirm and usually we have a 40%-60% attrition rate.

An argument can be made that those who don’t re-confirm weren’t good leads anymore, but I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt – especially in a retail situation.

If you already have a large single opt-in list, it may be better to use email software on your own server, but be sure you have a hardware/software solution that is robust enough and scalable so it can continue to do the job for you as your list grows.

There are some very important decisions you need to make when setting up or upgrading you email marketing campaign. If you need help getting yours set up, give me a call at 859-544-9005 or drop me a note using the contact form on this website.