While in the act of preparing an email newsletter, have you ever set it to send to the wrong list? I unfortunately have, and to anyone reading this post that has recently received an email from me after unsubscribing from the Daily, I’d like to apologize.

How to fix this mistake

After a few moments of hitting your head against the proverbial wall (or the real wall next to your desk) you begin to wonder how to fix your mistake and make everything better in the world of email deliverability. It’s well known that sending emails to people who have unsubscribed to your list can result in spam complaints, which can in turn negatively impact your email reputation.

The first piece of advice is to be proactive. Be prepared to own up to your mistake and apologize to the extent that’s needed. Chances are those who directly make a complaint to you will understand after you’re honest with them and assure that it won’t happen again.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path is an expert in the field of email deliverability. Below are some helpful recommendations she has for anyone who ever encounters this predicament.

Five Recommendations

1. Do not send any additional messages. This includes a specifically designed apology email. Even though it may seem like a good idea at the time to send an apology, another email going out to unsubscribed recipients may make things worse.

2. Make sure you and your staff are ready to apologize to everyone who directly complains.

3. Depending on the severity of the mistake, you could post an apology on your blog.

4. Meter your other emails. High complaints will hurt all of your mailings for the next 30 days, so be sure to send only what is necessary, even to subscribers who have given permission. Your sender reputation will be negatively impacted from this, but it will gradually ease back if you don’t receive a high number of complaints again.

5. Monitor senderscore.org to see if you got placed on any blacklists. Hope that you do not, because blacklists are a bad place to be. If you do end up on one, you will need to follow the guidelines for each to be removed. According to Stephanie, it can be an unpleasant situation.

Additionally, Stephanie recommends you speak with your ESP and/or an email deliverability consultant to see if they have any additional suggestions to proactively combat this situation.

Hopefully none of you will ever have to deal with this. However, from what I’ve been told, it isn’t horribly uncommon. So if you ever do find yourself in this position, you now have some firsthand, inside information to assist you.

If you’re an email newsletter publisher or marketer then you won’t want to miss our upcoming December 15th webinar on Solving Email Delivery Problems.

Criteria needed for profitable and deliverable email campaigns is constantly evolving. Do you know the necessary steps to ensure your email is received by the correct recipients?

Our expert panelists Jeanne Jennings, Len Shneyder from Pivotal Veracity and Stephanie Miller from Return Path will tackle all the issues you’ll need to be aware of. Our 90-minute webinar will include information on:

-Three Steps to Email Credibility

-Email Authentication

-Email Reputation

-Email Accreditation

-Case Studies

-Helpful Resources

Why is email credibility important? Simply put, good email credibility is the difference between getting your email to the desired inbox and having it land in a junk folder. Or, having it swept up by a spam filter so there is no delivery at all.

Our Solving Email Delivery Problems webinar will teach you how to avoid the junk/spam delivery frustrations and show you ways to increase your open or click-through rates.

This webinar will not only provide strategies for improving your email credibility and reputation, but will also discuss the actual infrastructure behind successful email systems.

REGISTER NOW

Don’t allow your valuable emails to spend anymore time in spam filters and junk folders. Sign up for our webinar now!

Everyone wants to have a good name and hold a positive place within public regard. This overall quality seen and judged by others is often referred to as a personal reputation. In the publishing world, a positive email reputation is similar to a personal reputation and equally as important. The better your email reputation, the better your chances of making it to the inbox, the better your chances of reaching your customer and potentially generating revenue.

Email reputation is a record of your email actions, which is used to predict your future efforts. For instance, if you consistently send out a newsletter on the same days and at the same times, your dedicated email recipients will most likely take note of this. To these recipients, a positive attribute of your reputation will be consistency.

So what are the necessary elements for positive email reputation? There are several main components that make up your reputation. We are sharing 2 of them with you, help you better facilitate your email marketing programs:

-Volume of Email Sent. This first component directly links to the previously mentioned anecdote. The more consistency you send from month to month, the better your reputation will be. However, there are a few mistakes that can be made pertaining to volume that will send red flags to your recipients.

A spike in sending your emails is one thing to avoid. An increase of up to 10% from one month to the next is acceptable, but that is the highest you should strive for. Going beyond the 10% point will look suspicious and make it easier for your email to be deemed as spam.

Furthermore, very light sending is also an issue to avoid. Sharing an IP address, where multiple publishers are sending from the same IP, might appear to be an enticing benefit for small mailers to increase their volume, but it can still pose as a problem. Your email marketing programs should remain balanced in terms of amount mailed, to be most beneficial.

-Bounce Rates. When you receive a bounce, it means the email you are trying to send is not deliverable. Often time this means the email address you are trying to reach does not exist. Take note of the bounces you receive. Ideally, you should remove undeliverable addresses on a regular basis so your bounce rate stays low.

The lower your bounce rate is, the better your email reputation will be. Chances are, in any mailing you make, there will be some bounces. It’s a fairly hard thing to avoid since you are not ultimately in control of whether or not an address is legitimate.

A single digit bounce rate is not be a problem but if your bounce rate is 30% or more, your email reputation will become damaged. Being proactive with your email strategy will keep your numbers low and reduce the chances of being considered a spammer.

Consistency is a good word to remember while considering these two components of having a positive email reputation.

Maintaining a set schedule for your dissemination of emails will engage readers. They will expect to hear from you on these specific days. Don’t disappoint them as they may be relying on the information you are sharing with them through your email marketing programs.

Paying close attention to your bounce rate and removing undeliverable email addresses on a regular basis will keep your rate low.

Addressing these two components will help in maintaining a positive email reputation.

Join us for the Solving Email Delivery Problems webinar on December 15th with email marketing consultant Jeanne Jennings. You will learn more about email reputation and additional ways to get your emails delivered.

It’s no surprise that content helps sell content. The more information you have to disseminate, the more chances you have to grow your audience base. The more relevant or valuable the content, the better chance you have of retaining the audience you’ve generated.

You may already know this. If so, you have one part of the process finished. Next, there is the need to disaggregate your content through email newsletters.

If you are like us, then you have a lot of informative content at your disposal. But how can you turn that content into consistently produced parts that will facilitate the whole of your business?

The answer is quite simple if you follow the six pieces of advice from our Online Content Management Webinar listed here:

Tip 1 – Make your email newsletter a daily part of the week. Each day should bring a relevant tip or current event to your audience. The information should live in the area of your staff expertise so that credibility can be assured to the consumer.

Tip 2 – Each daily newsletter should be 400 – 800 words in length. This amount is enough to get your information across without losing the intended audience.

Tip 3 – Each day’s newsletter should be on a single topic. Again, this brings a focus to the piece and explains to the reader what will be covered.

Tip 4 – The daily newsletter should have a single sponsor. This sponsor can be a paid advertisement or an offering from your own company. If you have a membership service, or a special product, use it as a sponsor.

Those tips may seem simple, but it’s surprising how many publishers forget to follow them. The two rules of disaggregation for email newsletters are also quite easy.

Rule 1 – Every email newsletter becomes a post. This allows for more visibility and growth for your company, while keeping content management very manageable.

Rule 2 – Due to technical requirements, posts should always precede emails. The top of every email newsletter should contain a link that would allow the user to view the content as a landing page, in case the content cannot be viewed in the newsletter itself.

The above information will allow you to reach your audience in a manner they will appreciate. Focused and precise content will strike a chord with readers and let them know you respect their valuable time. Plus, a strong email newsletter can ultimately help drive transactions of your products.

A working email newsletter strategy is only part of having control over online content management. To get all the remaining information, subscribe to Mequoda Pro and get our Online Content Management webinar, plus 14 other educational webinars, on demand.

“The average email user on a global basis now gets 48 emails per day and several of those are email newsletters that they  have opted themselves into. Email newsletters are becoming many people’s source of news. Most people don’t have a need to read a physical newspaper anymore”, said Don Nicholas when he opened our Email Newsletter Marketing session today.

One of the four principles of Mequoda is being email centric. Nicholas explained that over time, it’s really about being subscriber-centric rather than just being defined by email. He explained that where he gets his news is email, but the younger generation subscribes to RSS feeds or Twitter to get the same information.

Nicholas noted that email newsletter calendars that reinforce an editorial by promoting a related product the next day, have a much higher email revenue per thousand emails sent (RPM).

A good way to do this is by leading with “Yesterday, we talked about…” and reminding the user what you were talking about the day before and encouraging online dialog.

Here is an example of a hypothetical email calendar for a gardening publisher that follows this method:

“Segmentation is something we do carefully and avoid when possible”, Nicholas told publishers. He explained that when you are a health publisher that has very unrelated topics, or a flower publisher like you see above, it may make sense to offer separate email lists, but in most cases you want to keep your subscribers together on the same list.

The linguistic structure of a question requires the reader to pause and respond.

In other words, questions force us to think and answer. Question subject lines generally pull well because they entice the reader to find out the answer.

In many cases, the reader already thinks they know the answer, and your headline is merely feeding their need for affirmation.

Examples:

• Would Self-Hypnosis Help You Achieve Your Goals?
• Will You Have Enough Money to Retire at 65?
• Tired of Making Your Boss Rich?
• Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Rhetorical questions are intended to provoke thought rather than prompt a specific answer.

• Are You An Over-Educated Under-Achiever?
• Is the Life of a Child Worth $15 to You?
• Does Uncle Sam Owe You “Forgotten Money”?

According to Brian Clark of Copyblogger, starting a headline with the question of “Who Else Wants…” is “a classic social proof strategy that implies an already existing consensus desire.” Example subject lines given by Clark include:

• Who Else Wants a Great Blog Template Design?
• Who Else Wants a Higher Paying Job?
• Who Else Wants More Fun and Less Stress When on Vacation?

For more great subject line templates, download our free white paper: The 13 Best Email Subject Lines: Using the 12 Mequoda Email Subject Line Archetypes to Improve Your Average Email Open Rates.

While success or failure of an email newsletter should be directly tied to bottom line goals (like sales, revenue, etc.), there are some things that can help—or hurt—a newsletter’s chances of achieving those goals.

On Monday we posted our first 8 Best Practices for Email Newsletter Publishers. Here are the final eight best practices.

9. Send your emails at the same time every day.

If your content is valuable, you can create anticipation. Plus, users tend to reward consistency with higher open rates.

10. Send an equal number of content-rich email newsletters and straight product promotions.

If you send out an equal number of (1) content-rich email newsletters and (2) straight product promotions versus sending only promotions, the length of time you’ll retain an active email name will almost double.

The average term of an email newsletter subscriber is 2.7 years when the ratio of valuable free content and promotional messages is 50/50, versus an average lifetime of 1.6 years for email names who were sent only promotional messages.

11. Align your editorial content with your promotional messages.

Never try to sell Angus beef steaks to vegetarians.

Congruity and alignment augur well for product sales. If your email newsletter’s topic today is about how to prune rose bushes, then your ideal text ad today would be for a book or other paid product about growing roses.

12. Segment your email newsletter subscriber lists and include an unsubscribe link in every email.

Never make it hard for a user to unsubscribe or you’ll risk annoying the user and the Internet Service Provider. But if you segment your email subscriber lists, you can allow a user to unsubscribe from one list — e.g., your product promotions — and remain a subscriber to another list — e.g., your content-rich tips and news.

13. Optimize your email conversion architecture.

Knitting Daily is the best practice example here.

If you enter an email address for a free download, but fail to follow through, the Knitting Daily site remembers you. If you subsequently return and enter your email address a second time, you’ll get the following message:

“One More Step — Our records indicate that you have started the Knitting Daily membership process in the past, but have not yet confirmed your membership. Please click the button below to have the confirmation email sent again.”

The next screen provides further instruction and helps get the new subscriber’s email address “double opted in” and whitelisted:

“Confirmation resent — In order to receive your free download: Knitting Lace: Knitting Daily Presents… 7 Free Knitted Lace Patterns and begin your Knitting Daily membership, you must now confirm your email address.

Check your email inbox. Find our Knitting Daily welcome email. Click on the confirmation link at the top of the email.

If you do not see the email in your inbox, look in your bulk or spam folder.

We ask new members to confirm their email address in order to prevent spam and to ensure that you requested Knitting Daily yourself.

Thank you for joining us and welcome to Knitting Daily!”

From the floater, to the order form, through the registration flow, the email conversion architecture leaves nothing to chance. It both encourages users to complete the registration process, and results in a cleaner list of email newsletter subscribers.

14. Create a whitelisting instructions page.

Make sure you provide ample instructions for your subscribers to whitelist you.

Create a how-to page on your website or point users to this site’s email whitelist instructions, which explains how to add an email address to an address book in several email clients. Remind users that if they don’t whitelist your site, they might not get your email newsletter.

15. Make it easy for subscribers to change their email address.

Sending emails to a dead email address won’t do you any delivery favors, especially if it’s bouncing back. Provide a link at the bottom of every email newsletter with a hypertext link that shouts, “Change your email address” or “Update your email preferences.”

16. Create a sense of community and continuity.

If your email newsletter isn’t lively, informative and fun, your readers will unsubscribe.

But if you create an online community where subscribers feel safe and comfortable — where they can enjoy the quality of information, instruction, encouragement or other nurturing that your email newsletter provides — your popularity will soar. And so will your sales.

When writing a series of emails, it’s more personable to say to your readers that the email is part of a larger structure.

You could remind them that, “In the email we sent on Monday, we talked about XXXXX…now I want to talk about how XXXXX works with XXXXX.”

By building an ongoing series of email newsletter messages, you’re likely to increase open rates on past emails, as well as build a more intimate relationship with your readers.

This week we have a boatload of best practices for email newsletter publishers that we’ve compiled based on our research. While there’s a total of sixteen, we’re going to take it easy and start with just the first eight. Stay tuned for the final eight which we’ll be posting on Wednesday.

1. Research and define the needs of your online audience.

Assumptions are only helpful as a starting point. You must know with certainty what your users are doing online and tailor the content of your email newsletter to address audience interests.

2. Align your email newsletter strategy with the goals of your online publishing business.

You should be able to clearly justify and defend the business purpose behind every email newsletter you send and every item in these emails.

A great example is The Wall Street Journal website, whose business goals are very clear: to sell subscriptions.

The WSJ email newsletter gives readers a taste of their content. It doesn’t take long before you find yourself wanting more — and willing to pay for it.

3. Integrate email sign-up with site registration.

There should be a different user experience depending on whether you are a known user or an unknown user.

A lot of websites have email signups independent from website logins. But on the Johns Hopkins Health Alerts site, registration occurs within the content management system, which is then mirrored to the email system. The website then knows to stop asking if you want to sign up for their email newsletter because you’ve already subscribed.

4. Require double opt-in.

Research indicates that the email subscribers who double opt-in have a 17 percent greater lifetime value simply because they double opt-in. The act of getting them to open their email client to look for the confirming email and respond — before they can download your free report — causes those who double opt-in to be worth 17 percent more in customer lifetime value.

Additionally, by using the double opt-in process, you’ve managed to get many of them to whitelist you with their email provider — another good outcome.

Of 100 people who sign up for your free email newsletter, about 75 percent will double opt-in.

5. Send a welcome email.

Remind your new subscribers that they signed up for your email newsletter. Thank them for signing up, remind them how often they’ll receive emails from you, and make it personal.

The welcome letter should use the subscriber’s name and might point to helpful sections of your site. If you have a segmented list, and your user chose “rose gardening”, you might want to point towards “rose gardening” tips, videos etc.

6. Upsell to a paid product in your welcome email

While you have your new email subscriber’s attention, don’t waste the opportunity. Within your welcome email letter, in the right navigation or at the bottom, provide a text ad or small display advertisement for a related, best-selling, paid product.

The point of this email is not to sell a product, so it shouldn’t be the topic of your welcome letter. A casual mention should suffice. Remember, this is the new subscriber’s first interaction with you, so make a good impression.

7. Add your email newsletter name to the subject line.

For maximum deliverability and high open rates, consistently start your email subject line with the name of your email newsletter and follow it with the topic, e.g. “Mequoda Daily: Secret Source of Email Subject Lines Revealed.”

The evidence is undeniable that adding your name to an email newsletter adds credibility. Forrester Research says that adding a company name to the subject line can increase open rates by up 60 percent over a subject line without branding. Subject lines that inform subscribers of what’s in the email are clearly the winners.

8. Keep off of spam filter lists and conform to standard whitelist guidelines.

Software programs like Spam Assassin, an open-source project of the Apache Software Foundation, run each email message through hundreds of tests that analyze headers, text, and HTML coding, and check domains and IP addresses against block lists and filtering databases.

For maximum deliverability and high open rates, observe that Spam Assassin punished the following:

• The subject line is all capital letters.
• The message date is 12 to 24 hours before the receive date.
• The domain in the sender line doesn’t match the domain in the “received” line in the headers.
• The subject contains “As Seen.”
• The subject starts with “Free.”
• The message has bad MIME encoding in the header.
• The message is 90 percent to 100 percent HTML.
• The HTML font size is large.
• The message mentions Oprah Winfrey with an exclamation mark.
• “Remove” appears in a URL.

Want to learn the remaining eight best practices for Email Newsletter Publishers? Check back on Wednesday when we cover the best times to send emails, promotion vs. editorial ratios, white-listing and more.

Maximize revenue by using email newsletter templates to help focus on a single topic.

We’ve discovered a Mequoda Best Practice that maximizes email newsletter revenue by design.

When we start an issue of Mequoda Daily (our own email newsletter), we decide what product we’re featuring and promoting before we write a single word.

At this time of year, that means calling attention to the Mequoda Summit, which is our top-of-the-media-pyramid, twice-a-year, live event.

At the Mequoda Summit Boston, we’ll have an instructional session on email marketing best practices, and so that’s the topic of this email newsletter, as well a specific feature of the Mequoda Summit that we’ll dive into.

For instance, we’ve discovered that the best performing email newsletters — those with the highest value, as measured by producing the highest revenue per thousand — reflect a total alignment between the subject line, headline, subhead, body copy, embedded text ads, display ads, and the featured product.

This is true whether the newsletter is sponsored by an advertiser who buys your leader board, or whether the newsletter promotes your own products. Most Mequoda System Publishers use their free email newsletters to promote their own paid products.

Hybrid newsletter template: sponsor + product in top right navigation

We believe in single-topic email newsletters in which every component is aligned around the same theme.

When reading an email newsletter, the reader responds most favorably to both text ads and displays ads when there is contextual alignment with the topic under discussion.

A best practice email is wholly contextual. There is agreement between the subject line, headline, subhead, body copy, and the featured product ads. All the core elements are aligned around the same topic.

This congruency is comforting and harmonizing. It appears to have a subliminal effect on readers.

The curiosity that was stimulated by the email subject line, which prompted the user to open your email newsletter, should be amplified by the inside headline and sub-headline, then satisfied by the text. The contextual text ads provide an opportunity for the reader to take the next step by visiting your website and buying your product.

All these elements augur well for a satisfying, information-laden transaction that seamlessly guides the user up your product pyramid to a paid product or service.

Our testing indicates that Mequoda Daily generates maximum revenue when it is a dead-on broadside. Your email newsletter should perform this effectively, as well.

By using a best practice email newsletter template, you’ll be prompted to use all the vital email newsletter elements:

• subject line
• main headline
• secondary or sub-headline
• five or more paragraphs of text
• two embedded text ads
• and two display ads.

Ideally, the text ads and display ads all promote the same product. Each has hypertext links to either a sales letter landing page or an order form.

The headline, sub-heads, and buttons on the sales letter landing page also should be contextually aligned to create a congruent, front-to-back user experience. It begins when the user reads the subject line of the email newsletter, and ends when she clicks the ”Submit Payment” button at the end of the order flow.

This is a complex, online transaction, which requires careful attention to detail in order to succeed. From subject line to payment, there can be as many as 25 individual steps for the user to follow to complete the process. That also means there are as many as 25 places where the user can exit the process with buying.

But with a well-crafted email newsletter that’s modeled on the Mequoda Best Practice Email Newsletter Template, you can expect more users to complete the process, resulting in maximum revenue. To learn more about this template, read 10 Email Newsletter Design Best Practices.

Also, be sure to attend the Mequoda Summit Boston for additional details on this and dozens of other Mequoda Best Practices.

Your email newsletter is likely only one of a dozen email newsletters your readers get every day. That’s why first impressions count every time you send an email newsletter.

Most importantly, the first items your reader will notice are:

The from line: Who is this email from?
The subject line: What is the content of this email about?
The preview pane: Does the newsletter represent exactly what you’ve described above?

Here are three checklists for these three most important “first impression” features of your email newsletter.

From Line:

• The email newsletter from line clearly identifies the sender.
• The email newsletter from line is instantly recognizable to subscribers.
• The email newsletter contains both a display and an actual from address.
• The email newsletter from addresses are consistent from send to send.

Subject Line:

• The email newsletter subject line is engaging and benefit-oriented.
• The email newsletter subject line features something unique in the current issue.
• The email newsletter subject line places the most important information first, so that it’s not missed by readers
• The email newsletter subject line doesn’t sound “spammy.”

Preview Pane:

• The email newsletter preview pane includes a recognizable logo (or in the case of a text newsletter, a brand or company name) in a prominent position.
• The email newsletter preview pane includes a strong, benefit-oriented headline or title to help pull readers in.
• The email newsletter preview pane includes a link to view the email online.
• The email newsletter preview pane would engage the reader and pull them in even if the images were blocked.

Does your email newsletter follow all of the above rules?

If you’re a product-driven online publisher, you know there are numerous strategies for making money with email. The fun (and higher profits) comes with testing, tweaking and fine-tuning.

You can test the email sponsorship model versus the pay-per-click advertising model. Which is more profitable?

You can carry multiple advertisers who pay different amounts based on the position of their ads. Which produces more revenue per thousand subscribers?

Or you can test basic template design. Where should the featured product be introduced? Does an in-line text ad beat a banner ad? Or does a product review generate greater response?

Should you link into the sales letter landing page, or straight into the data collection page? Should you offer the reader an opportunity to “Read more” or “Buy now”?

Any experienced direct marketer, working with an online newsletter editor, can think of 10 variations of the email newsletter template to test. And because we’re all so new at this, typically five or seven out of 10 changes will produce an improvement!

The key to incremental improvement is having a formal test plan and using the right tools to track and measure your results.

We recently re-recorded the Mequoda Pro Online Training Program entitled, “Email Newsletter Marketing — Testing to Maximize Email Revenue and Profit.”

This Mequoda Pro Online Seminar along with our Mequoda Email Performance Report, Email Circulation Calculator, and Email Lifetime Calculator are four of the many benefits of Mequoda Pro membership.

For one all-inclusive price, you can get instant-access to our Email Newsletter Marketing online training program, the Mequoda Email Performance Report, Email Circulation Calculator, Email Lifetime Calculator, ten more business-building sessions, and an ever-growing collection of reports and spreadsheet tools you can use to manage your own business.

Join Mequoda Pro today!