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One of the most important aspects of a quality email marketing campaign rest in the LIST!  If you have an email list that was generated as the result of targeted efforts, your response rate is dramatically improved.  Why would anyone want to spend the energy and money on an email campaign and only produce a 1% – 5% click rate, when you can get 15% – 25% using a more targeted approach?

This targeted approach at list building is exactly what the program below is designed to do.  Aweber is the premier email marketing software that will help you build the best possible email list with minimal effort.  Media317 has partnered with Aweber to offer our clients and friends a test drive of the Aweber software.  Submit your information below and Aweber will give you access to their premier email marketing tool.

Media317 has located a few stories that we think would be helpful to our readers and clients. These blog post give tips and pointers on using email as an effective marketing tool. Media317 encourages you to review them for ways to improve your marketing efforts.

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM

Compliance The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

* http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
* http://www.bondedsender.com
* http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Media317 has spent the past few months upgrading our systems and services to provide our clients with greater service and support.  We are happy to announce that effective immediately, you hosting account has been upgraded to our latest hosting service, UNLIMITED Hosting.  Below are some of the additions and features that Media317 has added to your hosting account.

1. UNLIMITED DISK SPACE*:  You now have access to unlimited disk space for you website.  Add all the video, audio, images and content you need to best serve your audience and/or clients.
2. UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH*:  Your monthly bandwidth limits have been removed and you can use all the bandwidth you need to grow your business.  Drive traffic to your site and be confident that you will have all the bandwidth you need.
3. RV SITEBUILDER:  We are excited about this new application we are making available to all Media317 customers.  You now have access to a simple method of building a professional website or blog without the need to know code.  Check out RVSitebuilder in your cPanel.
4. SUPPORT:  We are excited about a NEW knowledge base and support ticket system that will allow you to gain quick and effective support on all your hosting needs.
5. NEW LOWER PRICE:  We have been able to do all this and lower our rates.  We now offer our UNLIMITED Hosting plan for $6.95 per month (paid annually).

We are excited about these new upgrades and hope you find them exciting as well.  If you have any questions please check out our knowledgebase.  If you have any issues, feel free to submit a support ticket and Media317 will address your issue immediately.