Where’s the News in Your Newsletter?

My inbox is clogged with so-called newsletters from people who must have made a resolution to “communicate more” or “do more marketing” in 2010.

Most of them are, in a word, crap.

In two words, self serving.

In three words, not worth reading.

Win a lifetime gift certificate for my services

If you can find the “news” in this “newsletter” I’ll work for you for the rest of my life for free!

(Redacted) brings proven, practical solutions to business challenges with a clear focus on the bottom line. We represent (verbal diahrrea). Our Practice Areas include:

CONSULTING and TRAINING (8 bullets)

COACHING (4 bullets)

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a million.

CAREER TRANSITION (2 bullets)

SALES PERFORMANCE AND REVENUE GROWTH (5 bullets)

(Redacted) mission is to assist organizations in developing and sustaining inclusive environments where all employees can do their best work (blah blah blah).

We work with organizations (yada yada yada).

If you’ve read this far you’re one in a billion.

An advertisement lodged into a newsletter template

This is  best described as an awful ad or an internal document designed to remind the staff who they are and what they do. Releasing it to the public is a sure way to lose subscribers or gain a reputation with your service provider as a spammer.

Not sure what to write about?

Afraid you’ll run afoul of federal CAN-SPAM regs?

Anything I can do to help? 704-907-2811

Best advice: ask yourself, “Would I read this if it came from someone else?” The sender of this advertisement would surely have to answer “No.”

Six Shortcuts to a Knee Whack

We all love shortcuts, but sometimes they backfire.

I see professionals in financial services and the law taking shortcuts with their newsletters and  email marketing efforts all the time.  Nothing’s worse than a self-inflicted knee whack.

Be sure to scratch these six shortcuts off your list — they’ll definitely get you into trouble.

1. Add everyone from your Rolodex into your email subscriber list/ troll for email addresses online/ buy a list of email addresses

• To comply with CAN-SPAM guidelines, each person on the list must OPT IN, verbally or otherwise
• This shortcut violates the service terms of every internet service provider (ISP) think: Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc
• It really irritates recipients, making them likely to report you as a spammer
• ISPs and corporate email services are aggressively scrubbing unsolicited email from recipient mailboxes. The more services that block you today, the more services are likely to block you tomorrow

2. Send bulk email from your own outbox

For an average-sized email list you can send a monthly newsletter for $30-50. Here’s what you get in exchange  for your pittance:

• Handling subscribe and unsubscribe requests according to federal guidelines
• Automated management of  bounced emails and your email list
• Dealing with spam complaints made against you
• More of your messages hit the inbox instead of the spam filter.  Email services have  relationships with ISPs that you  don’t have and can’t afford to develop

3. Make it easier for readers to hit “spam” than to un-subscribe

If you’re emailing to the US, you must provide a mechanism for recipients to stop receiving your messages. Don’t hide or minimize the unsubscribe link in your email.

When someone hits “spam” or labels your email “junk” your reputation with the ISPs takes a hit (they’re watching). If you earn a reputation with one or more ISPs as a spammer, it’s almost impossible to get your messages delivered anywhere.  While results vary by the filter policy of each ISP,  the 2008 Lyris report says it’s the sender’s reputation driving 25% of messages to the SPAM folder.

Bottom line: you don’t want to talk to people who don’t want to hear from you.

4.  Load up your message with “spammy” words

With 15% of all reported spam last month was finance-oriented, ISPs are aggressively scrubbing emails with references or offers related to money, the stock market or other financial “opportunities” including investments, credit reports, real estate and loans. Here’s a partial list of words that typically trip the spam filters.

5.  Bombard your list

In a study by Merkle this year, the main reasons subscribers choose to opt out of email programs are perceived irrelevance (75%) and sending too frequently (73%).

Promotional emails were deemed the most intrusive. Solution? Make your newsletter informative, not promotional.

Merkle reported that 20% of those receiving e-newsletters thought they were worthy of reading,which means 80% thought what they received was crap. Further, people reported receiving on average,about eight newsletters each month. That’s a heap of competition for YOUR customers’ attention.

6. Send crap for the sake of sending something

I receive a monthly newsletter from an Infiniti car dealer. I look forward to it for the same reason some people watch horror flicks.One edition was devoted to movie trends and the price of popcorn while another included a series of profiles of famous explorers from the 15th  century.

Crap.

I’m not imaginative enough to tie movies and explorers to the latest model sports car; this dealer doesn’t even try!

The surest way to avoid sending crap is to devise an editorial calendar. Without one, you risk losing subscribers. Or you’ll only keep subscribers like me who want to mock you in their blogs.

For more information here’s a download of a CAN-SPAM guide and a PowerPoint with more details.

The Company you Keep

Mom’s advice still holds: you’re known by the company you keep. Since 15% of all reported spam  last month was finance-oriented, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are scrubbing emails with references or offers related to money, the stock market or other financial “opportunities” including investments, credit reports, real estate and loans.

What’s this mean for legitimate financial services emailers? You’ve got to fight harder to keep your own reputation intact. The good folks at Listrak give great advice including pruning your subscriber list and asking subscribers to re-opt-in from time to time.

Here’s the exciting news for legitimate emailers:  ISPs have added a new metric to the reputation measurement – level of subscriber interaction and engagement. ISPs can tell who opens and clicks on a message and who ignores or deletes it. More importantly, they monitor how many subscribers click “this is not spam” if the message is delivered to the junk mail folder instead of the inbox. Monitoring subscriber engagement lets the ISP know which senders are delivering relevant content that subscribers want and which ones, like spammers, are continuing to blast out message after message even if no previous action has been taken (emphasis added).

Takeaways:

• Keep email content brief. Link elsewhere for the full story
• Engage subscribers with surveys, downloads and linked graphics
• All email templates have a built-in forward feature, but it can only help to suggest specific possible recipients, for example:
  • A coworker whose spouse was recently laid off
  • A neighbor whose house has been languishing on the market
  • A relative whose adult children have moved back in

If your content isn’t engaging, it’s more likely to be trapped in a spam filter. Call me to develop a content strategy that keeps receivers engaged and sending you referrals.

SPAM Tweetup

Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to talk about SPAM in Charlotte Weds, November 11 at 11:30 :

• Who decides when spam is officially SPAM
• Making sure you’re not mistaken for a spammer
• Best practices for email marketing (including newsletters)
• How to handle spammers

By nature, a tweetup is informal, so drop in at Mama Ricotta’s and meet some great tweeple. Not tweeting yet? This group might convince you to give it a twhirl.

A Special Place for Spammers

I’ve been waiting for a good case study to illustrate what I’ve been saying about spam filtering over the last several months.

Last week a global provider of bulk email services had to deal with one of its rogue customers who’d gained a reputation as a spammer. While it did, a large-but-untold number of innocent and spam-compliant emailers couldn’t get their messages into customers’ inboxes.

Aha! The rubber hits the highway. Here’s how it went down:

Spamhaus Project, the international cyber crime fighting organization, placed the rogue emailer’s internet (IP) address on its blacklist of spammers. The rogue’s IP address belonged to the rogue’s email provider, which meant the millions of innocent commercial emailers also using that provider were painted with the same “spammer” brush. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who subscribe to Spamhaus’ blacklist wouldn’t deliver anyone’s email from that service until the matter was resolved.

Damage control overdrive with Hotmail, Yahoo! and others

The commercial email service provider had to go into damage control overdrive, suspending the rogue’s account, communicating with innocent emailer senders about the delay to their campaigns, and proving to Spamhaus that they’d taken the right precautionary and reactionary measures required. Until Spamhaus removed the address from its blacklist, ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo! and others wouldn’t deliver any of the provider’s clients’ email.

Ouch!

This is tough to convey in words, and I acknowledge using some jargon here, so I suggest you visit Spamhaus for flowcharts that illustrate how filtering works.

Follow commercial email rules

The upshot for commercial emailers: if your email service provider advises you to use a double-opt-in subscription process or to certify that you haven’t purchased an email list, or subscribed people without their permission, comply quickly and don’t complain about the extra steps. These procedures are necessary to convince Spamhaus and the ISPs that you’re a compliant emailer, even if someone else using your service isn’t.

This also points out the reason to use a bulk email service instead of sending email campaigns from your own email account. That way, if you are accused of spamming, you’ll have a knowledgeable and experienced company go to bat for you with the international cyber services. If I may be so bold to ask, please consider using my email service.

The Spamhaus Project is a great study for international cooperation. Be sure to hit the tags to the right for more of what I’ve written on SPAM and e-newsletters.

Spamhaus: Cyber Crime Fighter

In September I had the pleasure of being a Twitter panelist on how to avoid the spam filters when emailing.  This is the third time I’ve spoken formally on the subject (if you consider tweeting “formal”).  By this third presentation, it struck me that spam is like porn, everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but few can define it in their own words.*

Looking for the most succinct explanation, I turned to the  Spamhaus Project, an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for internet networks, to work with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

The word “spam” as applied to email means “unsolicited bulk email”

The two most important words there are UNSOLICITED and BULK.

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.

Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

Unsolicited email is normal email, for example first contact inquiries, job inquiries and sales inquiries.

Bulk email is normal email, for example, subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists.

Point of clarification: The CAN-SPAM Act goes beyond the technical definition of spam; it applies to commercial email sent to recipients in the US and originated in the States. Download this CAN-SPAM Quick Guide.

*Wow your friends with your command of factoids

I’m not the first to use the phrase ” everyone thinks they know it when they see it.”  The origin is in a US Supreme Court case that helped define the legal standards for determining obscenity. Here’s a bit about the case.

In 1964, movie theater manager Nico Jacobellis was convicted of exhibiting an obscene movie, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, “The Lovers.” The ads were hyperbolic.

“When all conventions explode . . . in the most daring love story ever filmed!”

“As close to authentic amour as is possible on the screen.”

“The frankest love scenes yet seen on film.” “Contains one of the longest and most sensuous love scenes to be seen in this country.”

In the words of the Supreme Court decision: “‘The Lovers’ involves a woman bored with her life and marriage who abandons her husband and family for a young archaeologist with whom she has suddenly fallen in love. There is an explicit love scene in the last reel of the film, and the State’s objections are based almost entirely upon that scene. The film was favorably reviewed in a number of national publications, although disparaged in others, and was rated by at least two critics of national stature among the best films of the year in which it was produced.”

Although the film was shown in some 100 U.S. cities, including Columbus and Toledo, Ohio, Jacobellis was prosecuted for showing it in Cleveland Heights, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court decided that Jacobellis had been wrongly convicted.

The most famous opinion in the case came from Justice Potter Stewart, who said that the only unprotected material in his opinion was “hard-core pornography.” Stewart expressed his concern that such material was impossible to define. “But I know it when I see it.”

Your Reputation as a Spammer

You think you’ve properly built a subscriber list of folks who OPTED IN to receive your e-newsletter.  Turns out, that’s not good enough.  Your email might still wind up in the SPAM file.

Lyris, Inc.’s 2008 analysis showed one out of every four permission-based email messages sent to U.S.-based Internet Service Providers (ISPs) lands in the junk mail folder.

What’s up?  While results vary by the filter policy of each ISP (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AIM, etc), the report says it’s the sender’s reputation driving 25% of messages to the SPAM folder.

How do you earn the right reputation?

• Craft a compelling message.
• Don’t bombard your list — send no more often than your recipients bargained for.
• Make it easy for people to find the “Unsubscribe” button.  If it’s easier to hit “SPAM” than “Unsubscribe” you’ll get a reputation as a spammer on ISPs’ scorecards.

Stefan Pollard, Lyris email marketing expert, points out that “The definition of spam has moved beyond the legal requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act to include any message that is unrecognized, unexpected or unwanted... This puts the onus on senders to make their messages recognized, expected and wanted.  Until they do, invited email will continue to be delivered to the bulk folder.”

Spam filter trigger words:

Act Now!                     Free!                               50% off!         While Supplies last

Click Here                  Call now!                       Earn $             Why pay more?

Discount!                   You’re a Winner!        Credit               Serious Cash

Weight                        Opportunity                 Compare         Double Your Income

Removes                   Collect                           Amazing           Work from Home

Offer                           As Seen On…                Click Here         “Stop” or “Stops”

Buy Direct                Loans                            Buy Direct         Satisfaction Guaranteed

Subscribe               All Natural                    Winner                Avoid Bankruptcy

Promise You         Cash                                Easy Terms       Special Promotion

Get Paid                 Great offer                     One time             Guarantee, Guaranteed

Join millions       No cost, No fees          Order Now         Online Marketing

Please Read        Don’t Delete                   Save up to          Time Limited

Problems with promotional email

In a study by Merkle, “View from the Inbox,” 2009, the main reasons subscribers choose to opt out of email programs, are perceived irrelevance (75%) and sending too frequently (73%).

Promotional emails were deemed the most  intrusive. Solution?  Make your newsletter informative, not promotional.

Merkle reported that 20% of those receiving e-newsletters thought they were worthy of reading, and received, on average,about eight newsletters each month.  That’s a heap of competition for YOUR customers’ attention.

Your reputation intact

If you can’t do the job in house, pay a good ghostwriter/copywriter.  You’ll offset by the fees with savings to your reputation with customers and ISPs.

When you decide to outsource, be sure you hire someone who not only can cut a phrase and punctuate, but also who knows your firm/industry.  That is, unless you really want to bring a writer up the learning curve(!)

Pardon my plug to consider my turnkey newsletter service. When you go to the trouble of communicating with customers, track results so you know what’s working and what’s not.  My service includes custom templates with analytics that can tell you details like who opened what link in what browser.

Speaking engagement

At the kind invitation of the Carolinas Professinal Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs, I’ll be speaking on CAN-SPAM and e-newsletters June 18.  Hope to see you there.

SPAM “Arms Race”

Confession:  I’m an NPR junkie.  I get a real return on my taxpayer dollar (for once).

Yesterday they ran All Tech Considered focused on SPAM, which is mushrooming across all media, including mobile phones.

In this segment, Omar Gallaga of the Austin American-Statesman said most email (in volume) is SPAM, but the American ISPs have gotten pretty good at scrubbing it before it hits our inboxes.

But the bad news is that the spammers have set up camps abroad, notably Ukraine, where risk of prosecution is about nil. Spammers constantly adapt to anti-spam efforts.  All Tech Considered ran a story-within-the-story interviewing a computer security expert who said “From my perspective, it seems … kind of like the arms race of the Cold War era. We built more bombs. They built more bombs. We built bigger bombs. They build bigger bombs.”

Why this matters to emailers like YOU

Corporate web servers are starting to use “reputation scoring,” which looks at sender, time it’s sent, whether it’s a trusted source aligned with a real person, and other indicators of wholesomeness.  This is why it’s so important to send e-newsletters and other digital media ONLY to people who signed up for it.

Mr Gallaga also discussed “Bacn” which is email that might be useful to you but that is not generated by a real person.

An e-newsletter or social network notification, like who’s following you on Twitter, are examples of Bacn.

The rise in Bacn led to the development of a service called “other inbox“  which separates Bacn from real-people email.  With other inbox  you can open that notice from your bank when it suits YOU, instead of having it glare from your inbox while you’re trying to do the work that generates the check that pays the overdraft.

I want to know who’s using other inbox, which is apparently included with gmail right now.  In your case, does it intuit the Bacn from the real-people-email? Tell me a funny story about what went into your other inbox.

Laryngitis, LinkedIn and Me

I spoke at a networking event last week on one of my favorite topics: email marketing and the scourge of  SPAM.

More correctly put, I whispered my way through it.  Laryngitis. It helped that people wanted to know about CAN-SPAM compliance — audience members shushed each other so they could hear me croak away.  Afterward, someone told me that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis  spoke in a whisper to make people pay attention.  Savvy, Jackie.

The topic was well received, so I went to LinkedIn and in-mailed it to selected contacts. Within three hours a friend asked if I would present it to his company at a Friday lunch-n-learn and another asked if she could link to it in her blog.

Later, I offered it to a LinkedIn group.  Within 24 hours I learned that it had been Tweeted around the world and one group member wanted to post my guide on her website and use my presentation for a Chamber of Commerce event!  This social networking thing is amazing, eh?

About 40% of my new web traffic comes from LinkedIn and newsletter efforts. My subscriptions include people from around the world.  Worthwhile CONTENT on your website can drive eyeballs.

If you want to see what the buzz is about visit http://tamelarich.com/food-for-thought/canspam-download/

CAN-SPAM compliance

Download my  handy, one-page  checklist for staying in compliance with the US federal law that governs all commercial email.

To download click on the link: CAN-SPAM Quick Guide

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