Six best practices for every mailer

People get into all sorts of details when talking about best practices. But so much of email depends on the type of email and the target market and the goals of the sender. It’s difficult to come up with universal best practices.
I’ve said in the past that I think that best practices are primarily technical. I don’t believe there is a best frequency or a best time to send mail or a best image to text ratio.
My top 6 best practices every marketer should be doing (and too few are).

  1. Send technically correct email. That means finding a developer who understands the various email related RFCs including 5321 and 5322 as well as the MIME standard, HTML standards and encoding standards. Don’t rely solely on your vendor to create a correct email for you.
  2. Stop sending mail to non-existent or abandoned email addresses. This means correctly handling addresses that bounce and implementing some sort of data hygiene that’s appropriate for your lists and market segments.
  3. Use VERP in your mail strings. VERP means each email is tagged with the subscriber, list, and even mailing. Having that data encoded in the headers allows troubleshooting, bounce processing and FBL processing much, much easier.
  4. Send only opt-in mail. I know a lot of people argue permission is passé but I don’t believe that is true. ISPs, receivers and filtering companies don’t like it when you send mail without permission.
  5. Be up front with recipients how you’re going to use their email address. Don’t hide the opt-in language in your privacy policy.
  6. Send a welcome message. Introduce yourself, introduce your program, get your message in front of your new subscriber as soon as possible after they subscribed. They’re interested in what you have to offer, get into their inbox ASAP to engage them before they move on.

How you implement these practices depends on your particular infrastructure, goals and recipient base. Mailers should, though, have appropriate implementations of practices.

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Six months or out

Mickey Chandler has a great post up about Triage vs. Planning. Where he talks about the decisions you make differ depending on the context.
It’s a good read, and I strongly encourage everyone to go give it a look.
But his post led me to a post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline where he claims that there is an industry rule of thumb that says 6 months is the rule of thumb to define an inactive.
Wait, What?
I know there’s a huge amount of controversy in the email space about whether or not you should purge inactive addresses. I know there are some very vocal people who think that removing inactive addresses is tantamount to marketing suicide. But where did 6 months come from? Who made it an industry standard?
If we don’t know where the standard came from, if we don’t know why we’re doing it then what kind of mickey mouse industry are we running here?
There is a lot about email marketing that is empirical. You poke the black box on one side and see what happens on the other. The problem with that is, that we can “discover” a lot of effects that aren’t real, but somehow turn into “you must do this!”
I have no doubt there are times when a 6 month expiry is a good idea. A number of my clients over the last few years use a much, much shorter time because that’s what works for them. I also know there are times when longer expiry times are a good idea, too.
It’s really important that when you’re making decisions about your email marketing program that you don’t mindlessly apply “standards” to what you’re doing. Think about the practical effects of your decisions and put them in context with your overall business plan.
To do otherwise is to kneecap your email marketing program.

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The whole article is a lesson in how to do email right. They are sending relevant and engaging mail to their subscribers. They kept the addresses of people who wanted the mail, but designed a new program from the ground up. All of the key points I, and others, keep talking about is present in their new program.

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It would be nice…

It’d be nice to have a tool to uncover the zombie email addys, but until then, read this from @wise_laura: http://bit.ly/jxjZ9M Kelly Lorenz

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