Marlon Sanders' latest article:
Email Delivery Issues For Intermediate & Advanced Marketers
Let's talk about the latest changes in email delivery.
I've been monitoring my email delivery and noticed a few changes in the past two months.
Let me FIRST say you should NOT buy into those who use email delivery issues as a reason to not send email.
Please.
My emails still rock. And Daegan started just 2 years ago and is now doing 100 g's a month off of email. I could site others. (Daegan's interview is in Promo Dashboard if you were lucky enough to snag it.)
NONE of the below stops people from shaking down 100 g's a month or more or less.
What this does mean is you have to focus on email delivery, once you have a list to monitor. If you don't have a list, then fire up a Squeeze page, place some ezine ads and ppc ads and get with the program.
This ezine issue is for INTERMEDIATE to ADVANCED marketers. If you're a newbie, do NOT worry about this stuff.
It's not a huge issue. These are nuances and things you learn as you grow in this business. Frankly, I never even bothered to pay attention to many of these things until this year.
Change 1: Monitoring your email with Delivery Monitor.
I noticed this huge drop in my email delivery as reported by a monitoring service I use called Delivery Monitor, which is owned by Aweber.
I asked Aweber about it and they told me Brightmail and some other services that help ISP's screen their email had tightened up their filters to only sporadically deliver emails to single confirms.
This is what a supervisor at Aweber told me.
The seed emails used by Delivery Monitor to check for delivery are single confirms. So this means the service itself is apparently now inaccurate.
I'm sure the Aweber team is working hard to do whatever they can to remedy this. Or maybe they can't do anything.
Personally, I kinda doubt this explanation. I tend to think it's because I sent out ONE email endorsing a product for a friend.
And I found out that email was on the blackhole list. I can't say the word here. But anyway, the issue on delivery is that Brightmail works by email reputation.
They score your emails for reputation. Which means that just that one email probably caused my account to take a hit on reputation, which does heal over time.
The other factor is I sent some html emails that were mostly graphics. That could have caused my reputation to take a hit. And I emailed 2X a day for 3 days in a row.
That could have done it.
Or maybe it was a confluence. Or maybe my delivery was just FINE! If what the supervisor at Aweber told me is true, I have no way of knowing if those little bar charts showing that my delivery sucked are really accurate.
SOLUTION: Here's my solution:
I'm going to monitor my link clicks and open rate more closely. You pretty much know you didn't get delivered if your links didn't get clicked in normal percentages.
Change 2: It's now important that you monitor your bounces
Here's one I'm checking into but I'm not sure about.
When emails can't be delivered, they bounce or come back. If that happens 3X or so, they get removed by your email service.
A soft bounce is when the email couldn't be delivered because the person's email account is full or their service is down.
If you email daily, you take a bigger chance on getting your soft bounces removed because the person hasn't had time yet to clean out their email box.
A hard bounce is when the email isn't good anymore.
I THINK that when my emails bounce (don't get delivered) they go to the email address I send 'em from.
If that's true, I can check that pop email account and run what's called a bounce processor to see the hard and soft bounces.
Newbies, don't worry about this. It's an advanced strategy. I'm not sure this will work but I'm gonna try it.
http://www.automateyourwebsite.com/ has hard and soft bounce managment built into it. I like that.
Change 3: Automateyourwebsite.com now has a 100% email trust rating.
I used an independent service given to me by one of the owners of a big 3 autoresponder service to monitor what is called Sender Score. This is the trust rating of the email provider
with ISP's.
What I found out is that http://www.automateyourwebsite.com/ (my 1 shopping cart private label) now uses the Strongmail service and has a 100% sender trust score.
So don't believe the junk you read on the forums. They totally have their act together on email deliverability from what I see. In fact, it's becoming a strong point with them.
Change 4: I noticed that my LONG emails seem to have a higher bounce rate.
An email can also bounce because the receiver marks it as unwanted. Or complains.
So Aweber participates in an initiative that some ISP's are going to where they put a link at the top of your email where people can even more easily remove.
Alright. But to be fair, if the ISP's are gonna do that, why don't they ALSO put a link up there that lets people subscribe to MORE of your lists?
I mean, let's be fair. A lot of people WANT your emails. Apparently this fact escapes the attention of ISPs.
Anyway, I'm going to continue to monitor the bounce rate of my long vs. short vs. text vs. html emails. High bounce rates can take a big dent out of your list fast.
But this has to be weighed against sales.
The ultimate solution is to be very aggressive in your lead generation. And also watch your list closely.
Change 5: I noticed a very low click rate sending people to my blog to read what I'd normally put in an email.
I'm going to test this more.
COMMENTS? Post to my blog.
http://www.marlonsnews.com/
But if you post an uninformed opinion there trashing email,
I won't publish it.
NONE of the above stops people I personally know from snagging 100 G's a month primarily from email.
These are things, though, intermediate and advanced marketers should know about and watch.
Marlon Sanders
Marlon Sanders is the author of "The Info Product Dashboard." If you want to create your own info products, go to: http://www.productdashboard.com/.
Marlon's Marketing Minute
*IMNewswatch would like to thank Marlon Sanders for granting permission to reprint the latest article.
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