Email Marketing Blog

Definitely yes. Before explaining detailed, let me explain what invalid email address is.

Invalid email address means any kind of “passive” email addresses in your lists such as;

• incorrect email addresses (typos such as user@hotmai.com)
• out-of-date email addresses (subscriptions processed several years ago)
• invalid email address domains / invalid mail servers

addition to these listed ones above, following two email address owner profiles are risky for you;

• spam complaints
• unsubscriptions
• unresponsive email addresses (not opening, not clicking, deleting right away)

Whenever you send an email campaigns, number of invalid email addreses in your lists or number of those “risky” subscribers will affect your delivery reputation.

Do not forget. In today’s world, email services and spam filters decide to place an incoming email in inbox or spam folder based on your delivery reputation. So, increase on these invalid email addresses or risky subscribers will decrease your delivery reputation.

Some suggestions;

• Keep your lists clean. Never send an email campaign to invalid email addresses (Sendloop monitors and filters these invalid email addresses for you)
• Never send an email campaign to unsubscribed or spam complaint filed email addresses (Sendloop keeps these subscribers away from your campaigns)
• Always use the same from email address and name for each recognition
• Spend huge time on your email subject and email teaser to increase open rates
• Protect the balance between texts and images in your HTML content
• Always include “sender information” in your email content. Sender company name, physical address, phone number, contact email address and website address must be included in your email content
• Always make the unsubscription noticeable in your email header and footer parts
• Set a working and monitored reply-to email address to let your recipients contact you quickly
• Include a notice in the email footer explaining how the recipient has been added to your list

Your #1 objective must be to encourage your recipients open your email and click links inside. In this way, depending on the “recipient engagement” rate you achieve, you will have higher or lower delivery reputation.

In these days, emails are mostly open on mobile devices, mainly on iPhone. Recipients decide to keep your email in inbox or remove it by taking look at three email parameters:

• From (who sent me this email?)
• Subject (what’s the topic of the message?)
• Teaser (what’s telling me this email?)

In order to increase your open rates, you need to optimize these three parameters. It’s easy to set “from” and “subject” of your email but what about the teaser? iOS Mail application displays the partial content of your email as teaser. According to our tests, we found that it’s the first paragraph in your HTML code. Therefore, right after the body tag, you can add a paragraph and set your teaser for iOS devices.

Here’s an example code:

<p style="display:none;font-size:0;">This is the teaser you want to display on iOS devices</p>

Keep the teaser short and clear. Give some tips about your email content to your recipients. Make A/B tests to find the best from, subject and teaser for your recipients.

Here’s an example screen shot displaying same email with custom set teaser line and the one not set by the sender:

Have you ever thought about how effective your welcome email? Or do you even have a welcome email?

Does it thank to your new subscribers for joining your newsletter?

Does it have a link to the informational resources such as a downloadable file, an article or blog posts?

Does it displays your products or gives some more information about your service, benefits, features or offers a website tour?

Does it have an address that displays how your subscribers contact with you?

Does it encourage the engagement, conversation or interest to your subscribers?

What is the welcome email?

When the visitor subscribes to your email list, they will receive your welcome email automatically and immediately.

What should include in the welcome email ?

Send your welcome email immediately

The welcome email should be sent to your subscribers immediately after signing up and conforming their registration. Because your subscribers may not remember they opt in to get emails from you. They may forget your brand.

Remind your subscribers why they receive an email from you

Remind them that they signed-up to your website through your site or other sites such as Facebook and/or requested receiving emails form you.

Thank to your subscribers

Your company’s first impression on your new subscribers is very important. Thank to your subscribers for joining your site and/or to get newsletters from you.

Show them the important aspects of your business

Show them some samples of your products or give information about your service, list some of the features and benefits you offer.

Set email expectations

It should set expectations that stresses what the subscriber can expect from your future emails. Tell them how frequently they get emails from you.

Keep your welcome email short and relevant

Keep your content short, creative and straight to the point.

Drive traffic and engagement

Link back to your website for your subscribers to get more information about your service or product.

Ask your subscriber’s feedback

Ask them what they are interested in seeing in your emails. Show them how you value your reader’s opinion and how it is important to you.

Reward your subscribers 

You can offer them helpful resources such as an article, downloadable document, white paper, discount or coupon and if you have a copy of you most recent newsletter, include it in your message.

Include opt-out information

Provide opt-out information, just in case the sign up was a mistake for your subscriber.

With Sendloop, you can create and activate your welcome email for each subscriber list. To do this, simply click “List Settings” link on the subscriber list overview page and scroll down to “Welcome Email” section.

These tips will help you to reorganize your welcome email and add more value in it to drive conversion and engagement with your new subscribers. When you do that, you can guarantee the inbox placement and more inbox delivery for your business.

Most marketers prefer sending HTML emails to their recipients. Here are some tips that can help your HTML messages to be seen fully to your recipients.

“Small is beautiful” E.F. Schumacher.

You need to create things like emails as small as possible. You should limit your HTML maximum 102KB.

What happens if you exceed 102KB in your HTML emails?

If you send an email more than 102KB, Gmail will only show the first 102KB and

• Cut off the remaining part for the mobile version of Gmail for Android and iPad. It doesn’t offer any link for viewing the entire message.

• Clip off the remaining part for the web version of Gmail and mobile version of Gmail for iPhone. It offers a link for viewing the entire message. Below is an example of how Gmail offers a link to view the entire message.

Web version

iphone version

Because Gmail clips the email that exceeds 102K, your subscribers will not see the unsubscription link, if you add it at the bottom of your email. This will cause false spam complaints from subscribers and if you have more complaints, you can get blacklisted.

What are the solutions?

• Remove all unnecessary spaces such as tab spaces and double spaces. You can replace double spaces with singe spaces
• Remove text line breaks from the code
• Compress the image. Save the file size as a .jpg

If you have any other advice on this, we would love to hear it!

Hotmail has started replacing some symbol characters into images that are 19×19 pixel ‘emoji’ GIF images in size. Variety of symbol characters that are being converted such as © ®,™,(♥),(♠),(♣),(♥) and(♦).

Even if you use them in your subject line or in the content of your email, they will appear as an image. This situation will occur in all browsers like Internet explorer, Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Below shows how Copyright symbol appears in Hotmail and Outlook.

Copy Right Image

How it affects your emails?

With the Hotmail new change, recipients will see these symbols bigger, in different colors and it will distract readers when they open up the message.

On the other hand, this new feature will disturb designers or email creators as well. They will be seen mostly in marketers’ footers and pre-headers.

How to Prevent Hotmail from replacing your special characters?

Here are our suggestions;

• Segment your list for your hotmail user database and to convert the special characters into question.
• Instead of using symbols, you can use images in your emails.
• Use the word  Trademark or (TM) and “copyright” or (c) instead of the symbols.

Until Hotmail fixes this issue, we found some useful articles to get you some quick solutions for your email marketing.

Email Design Review reported the Hotmail’s new feature problem on the emails and gave us a quick solutions for how to stop Hotmail replacing your special characters. I hope our information will help you to get through this situation.

If you have any comments or further information about this new feature, let us know in the comments.

What is Phishing?

It is a form of an online identity theft. Criminals use fake websites that spoof a legitimate company and send out email messages to the targeted recipients. What they are trying to do is, victimize you by getting your personal information such as passwords or account information illegally. Phishers usually use fake “From” address or spoof email titles to catch the innocent people’s information.

Email Service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail filter those spam messages and send them all to junk folder or delete them, however sometimes some of them can go through your inbox. That is why many people are affected by phishing each year. Almost everyday we are getting emails pretending to be from a trustworthy company and encourage you to click on a link they send to.

Email marketers have a big concern about their emails may look like a phishing email both for large ISPs and their clients. In order to fully understand how phishing effects on your campaigns and what you should do to avoid your legitimate emails being flagged for a phishing, let’s continue reading more.

What is the effect of looking like a Phisher?

Your brand can lose trust and your customer relationship may effect badly as a result of phishing. Some of the victims may stop doing online transactions from your company.

Don’t let your email marketing campaigns look like phishing emails to the major ISP’s and your clients. To ensure that your email marketing messages never look like phishing emails, here are our suggestions;

How do I avoid looking like a Phisher?

Avoid mismatching problem

You enter the clickable URL address as the hyperlinks in your email. When link tracking is turned on and the recipients click the URL address, they will be directed to a different address where the original URL address is replaced by the provider’s redirect link.

Because both of your URLs are different and mismatch, your email may be seen as phishing email from major email services. As a result your emails will go to the junk box.

If you don’t want to look like a phisher, avoid using a URL as a display text for a link in any of your HTML emails. You need to use a word or a phrase that explains the link itself. Below are examples of those links. You need to enter your links based on the second example.

There are two types of links that can appear in the email messages you send out to your recipients

1) Clickable URL addresses such as http://www.sendloop.com/resources/blog

2) Contextual hyperlinks such as

Click here to learn more about email marketing

Personalize your email

Communicate with your customers and try to get their name and last name. When you communicate them via email, you need to personalize your communication with your customers, because phishers generally don’t use recipient’s names while trying to catch information via fake emails.

Check your grammar and vocabulary

Phishing emails generally have poor grammar or misspellings. Before you send out your messages to your recipients check out the content.

Set-up an email authentication

If you want to improve your deliverability rate, you need to set-up an email authentication. It is a technique that proves you definitely send the email to your recipients. It both helps recipients and major email services identify your email marketing messages as a legitimate and not one of the phishing emails they receive.

Hopefully these suggestions will help you to reorganize your email campaigns, so that your email campaigns are not flagged for a phishing.

We’re on Pinterest. What about you?

You’re already using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Google+ for your business and recently you heard Pinterest and want to learn more about it. So let’s talk about Pinterest and how it will help you to market your business.

Sendloop's Pinterest Board

What is Pinterest?

It allows you to share things you like on the web on your Pinterest board and it also lets you promote your own products and services, and share them with everyone. Pinterest is a new marketing and social community service, so why not get a benefit from it.

Pin what you really love about your business or put out products on this social pin board. Pinterest could be a really valuable marketing tool for your marketing campaign. You will build followers who are really interested in seeing your products or checking out your service.

How to use Pinterest?

Create your own pinboards and pin anything you find interesting, pin things you love on the internet or photos of your products or services. It lets you create and organize your own board on your page. The traffic coming from Pinterest has more possibilities of converting potential visitors into buyers.

Want to get some inspiration for your email campaigns, then we’r waiting you on our Pinterest page. Begin to promote your product or service via Pinterest. If someone likes what you display, they will pin it to their own board and their followers see it.  They may like it, repin it or buy it. You will build up your followers and get revenue via Pinterest.

After creating Pinterest page for your business, share it on the social platforms and of course send email to your subscribers and let them know you’re on Pinterest.

In my next blog post, I will explain how you can get an advantage from Pinterest for your all email marketing affords. So stay tuned!

In the past, it was easy to increase your open rates. You would select one of the popular email marketing services and get benefit of their infrastructure. It was simple and easy to reach your high open rates and inbox delivery on your emails. A well maintained and a well setup infrastructure would mean high open rates and high email inbox rate. However, things have changed since last year.

All major email services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo pay a big attention to the relationship between you and your recipients. The email marketing service infrastructure still plays an important role, however the relationship between you and your recipients plays a bigger role on your email marketing success.

Priority Inbox

Email services monitor every single activity your recipients do. For instance, do users open your email newsletters, do they click any link inside your email newsletters, do they archive without opening, do they delete, do they report as spam, do they unsubscribe and more. Based on a recipient behavior, email services start to classify your emails as “priority”, “normal”, “junk” or “spam”. This classification is done for each recipient you are sending to. Therefore, your email may be delivered into “inbox” for recipient A, on the other hand; it may be in “junk” folder for recipient B.

Email services call this technology as “Priority Inbox” (Gmail), “Smarter Inbox” (Yahoo). Recipients can “sweep” emails in Hotmail and then Hotmail will not be displaying emails from the same sender on the inbox any more.

Focus on your Recipients

Therefore, it’s time to change your email marketing strategy and focus on relationship with your recipients. You need to optimize your email subject to give a better idea about what’s in it for your recipients. You must always use the same “from” name and email address in your email campaigns. You must make your email content “recipient friendly” which means lightweight, targeted and personalized. You must make the unsubscription visible and easy-to-notice. Stay away from emails with unsubscription links at the bottom that means scrolling down. You must include sender information, which means detailed contact information of the sender and why this email has been sent to the recipient.

Image only Emails and Subject Lines

Stay away from “image-only” HTML email newsletters. Stay away from long email subjects, which means nothing. Try to write an effective email subject line instead. Try different email subjects and email content layouts to maximize your open rates. Keep your emails short, relevant, personalized and easy to opt-out. Keep your email subjects short and personalized. Make your emails mobile-device friendly.

Email Frequency

Never send email campaigns frequently or rarely. Find the right balance in between. Sending email campaigns frequently may cause higher spam complaints and unsubscriptions which means bad delivery reputation for you. Sending email campaigns rarely may cause your branding to be forgotten which will cause higher spam complaints and unsubscriptions again.

Starting from your next email campaign, and change your strategy. Focus on your recipients’ needs and think like you’re one of them.  Put yourself in customers’ shoes. Build a better email campaign content and always measure the performance of your campaign.

Because viral content spreads and boosts backlinks so fast, online marketers began to create viral content. Backlinks drive traffic directly to your website, increase your website traffic, help to get higher rankings and improve your search engine results in a very short time. Everyone wants their content to be read and shared by many people. Your content goes viral means that it turns out to be popular in a short period of time among visitors.

Below are my five advices to you that could help your content to spread fast in the online world.

Provide valuable content. The content should be unique, creative, exciting, informative and engaging to the people. If people will see the value of your content and enjoy reading or viewing, they will want to share it with their friends. It could be a text, a video or a picture. It should be compelled to share it with everyone.

Don’t be a pushy seller. Try to entertain your visitors instead of pushing. No body wants to share aggressively selling content. Instead you can tell an interesting story in your content. You can grab their attention with your humorous content and your viewers will share it quickly if they are entertained what they read.

Create an interaction. Make your content interesting first and after you are done with your content, ask interactive questions to you visitors or simply tell them to share your content. Create an energetic atmosphere that people want to give their comments or involve in discussions around your content

Always follow the trends. It will attract many visitors. People are eager to learn what’s happening in the world right now. It will attract many readers’ attention. You can use Google Trends service to know the latest trends and most searched topics among people.

Use a graph, chart or infographic. If you use a graph, chart or infographic for your content, it will make a visual effect for people. People prefer to learn looking at an image than reading long text articles without any image.

Go beyond your competitors content. If your competitor gives top 5 tips for the same topic that you also want to share, try to increase your content to top 10 tips. Your titles should stand out from the other articles. Use catchy headlines in your content to grab their attention in seconds.

As a part of your marketing strategy, these ideas will help your content to go viral and create brand awareness among people. If you have any suggestions about how to make a content goes viral, please share it in the comments below.

Spring finally came, while you’re on your way to go to work, stop and smell flowers, begin to think new activities or hobbies you enjoy doing. Make some spring cleaning around your house, change your clothes, and arrange your wardrobe. While you’re thinking about adding new activities in your life, I want to show you some tips about how you also get benefit form your spring campaigns. Yes, it’s also time to refresh with a spring changing and cleaning in your email campaigns. I’m already inspired by spring!

Look over your business

Check out your site, blog and emails. Clean out of date or incorrect information, grammer and vocabulary mistakes.

Change your design

Try to find a new layout for your email newsletters. Add new graphics or images in your emails. Change your image placement for your next email newsletter. You can get your subscribers attention with some minor changes in your email design.

Add new subscribers

• Find some new and seasonal products or service to attract new subscribers. Everyone loves new and unique products. Why not displaying some and catch people’s eyes.
• Make a spring campaign stand out from others. Give your customers or the potential ones some new deal or discount for a service or a product. Let them know your business, remember it and forward it to their contacts.
• Test your previous campaign results. Check out your sending schedule and open rates. If you think that you did not achieve your sales or business goals, change your sending time and date.

Find and move your inactive subscribers

First try to activate your past subscribers again.

• Email them and ask if they need anything. If you create a new product, service or application share with them in the email.
• Create a spring campaign and send it to your inactive subscribers, wait for their responses until the campaign finishes.

If they still do not respond your afford, move those names from your active subscribers list to the past subscribers list.

Show your appreciation to your loyal customers

Provide one time special product or a service for free to your long-time customers. You can also make a discount for them. Send them a gift or a personal note even using your hand writing. Use social sites such as Facebook or twitter and thank to them on these sites. If you show your appreciation to them, create an atmosphere that they feel valuable for your business, you will create even stronger connections with your customers.

I hope your email marketing campaigns bring as much positive impact as the spring brings in our lives.