Who put a Spam Trap in My Permission Based Email List?

Is your legitimate email being blacklisted because you picked up a spam trap address in your subscriber base? What is a Spam Trap and what can you do about it. Where did it originate from and how can you stop them?

What is a Spam Trap?

Spam traps are secret, non-published email addresses that catch some list owners by surprise. A Spam-Trap is a valid email address, used specifically to trap unsolicited email or spammers; hence the name Spam Trap The Spam Trap premise is based on the belief that if the owner or former owner of an inactive email address has not checked email for a quite a while, why are you still sending email to this address?

Spam traps are used by many different organizations and can be created or designed as needed, usually from an inactive email account or an inactive domain. To be effective, the address in question must be inactive for a considerable amount of time.

Frequent spam trap sources are those old email addresses that may have been used long ago, to post to Usenet or those addresses used as a function email addresses such at webmast@ and president@. In other instances, addresses with a period of invalidity can be recycled as spam traps as well as email addresses that have never been used by a live person.

Who Uses Spam Traps?

Many organizations use spam traps, such as large ISP’s like AOL, companies that offer spam filters and organizations that specialize in email reputation. Void of rules or regulations, organizations interpret spam trap information with charts, formulas and WAGs to block incoming emails based on their own understanding and methodology.

Spam Traps – The Blacklist Guaranty

The Blacklist guaranty – send a newsletter with a spam trap and you will be blocked or blacklisted in no time. This block may take the form of a permanent block on your sending IP Address; your future messages will not be delivered until you remove the spam trap address. With your tarnished reputation and spammer label, no doubt you will become familiar with Blacklist reporting agencies like SpamCop and the Passive Spam Block List who will continue to keep you on their Blacklist until you resolve the spam trap issue.

Who put a Spam Trap in My Permission Based Email List?

A spam trap can be added to your list unknowingly by:

Not using confirmed opted-in and other permission based maintenance
Harvesting addresses
Purchasing email addresses
Renting email addresses
Using an email Append service
Deliberately added to your list
Using an old list

How to Remove Spam Traps

Avoid spam traps. Spam traps are near to impossible to remove and the reporting ISP, SPAMCop for example, will unlikely tell you which address to remove to get yourself off their Blacklist.

You could reconfirm your list of subscribers and once again require them to confirm their subscription to your email newsletter. You will lose subscribers because of the process and an a required action they have to take.

If reconfirming all your subscribers seems a little daunting, you may be able to identify a clean, free from spam trap address segment, from part of the offending list (i.e. join date for example) that you can eliminate from the reconfirm process, thereby narrowing your losses from those who will not reconfirm.

In summary, removing a spam trap is a difficult task, and you may not be successful unless you reconfirm your list. The better solution: make sure these offending address stay off your mailing lists altogether by following Safe Mailing Practices and not following the Worse Email Practices for List Management.

Who put a Spam Trap in My Permission Based Email List? Read More »

A 10 Step Guide for Improved Nonprofit Email Newsletters

Non Profit and Personal Hosting / Pat

A 10 Step Guide for Improved Nonprofit Email Newsletters

1. Write to your mission statement. Are you a veteran’s organizations reporting local current events, which require a steady update of information or are you a worldwide organization that only has new information every few months? Is your content relevant to your readers? When you identify specific interests, are you using triggered mailings? Remember that triggered mailings cater to the immediate interests and needs of your email recipient; your email responses become more effective because they are timely and more relevant to the receiver.

2. Write to your audience. Your newsletter content should be relevant to your reader, if not; it will probably be deleted and forgotten. When addressing your audience consider their point of view, their importance to your organization as supporters and contributors and their time.

3. Email your subscribers on a schedule. If you have content that cannot wait until the next scheduled mailing, send a special edition or announcement. Your readers will appreciate pertinent targeted mailings, therefore emailing more newsletters than planned, filled with good content is entirely appropriate.

4. Use advanced email-marketing tools. Address each newsletter to your specific donor; send them content specific items that capture their interests. Email a survey and ask them what issues concern them, what type of content they enjoy reading, how often they would like to hear from you and so on. Include refer a friend link as part of your mailings; your readers will know other people interested in your organizations work.

5. Position your mailings to encourage your readers to take some action that your organization needs. Ask your reader to take the next step in a simple concise way: ask for a donation, needed volunteers, time, their support or their expertise.

6. Use the same “from address” in all your mailings and pay attention to the subject line. Compose your Subject Line with a goal in mind, to have your subscriber’s open your email message and take some action.
• Tell them something significant, valuable, or timely, so your subscriber feels your email is something they do not want to delete or skip.
• Do not underestimate the competition. Set your email apart from the other newsletters and junk mail your subscriber may be receiving by composing a subject that will prompt them to open your email immediately.
• Do not mislead your subscribers. People signed up for your newsletter because they want to hear what you have to say, you do not have to exaggerate or over promise. They know who you are. Compose content with the individual reader in mind. No matter how many subscribers you have remember your newsletters are being distributed to individual mailboxes, take advantage of this intimacy and write to the person not the group.

7. To reach your maximum reading audience with messages delivered in their desired readable format, HTML or plain text, send Multi-Part Mime Messages in a single email Limit images, including image size and the number of images used.

8. Check your content, test your content for spammy phrases, logic flow, spelling and grammar.

9. To facilitate collaboration between hosting services, web applications and interaction between members take advantage of Social Networking opportunities. Use Micro blogs on popular Social Media sites to maintain a presence on multiple social networks at the same time. Include easy-to-share-this- content by including social network links in each email newsletter. Update your twitter account automatically to include a link to your latest email newsletters by incorporating your email newsletters in your current blog.

10. Administer your email newsletter as an expert. Using a professional Email Service Provider, like Dundee Internet Services, manage your newsletter members, content and deliverability. Have at your fingertips the most current, advanced email list technology available with results you can count on.

For more information about a cost effective way to create and distribute your non-profit email messages, contact Dundee Internet Services, Inc.

A 10 Step Guide for Improved Nonprofit Email Newsletters Read More »

Is Email Deliverability Management possible?

Email Marketing / Pat

Is Email Deliverability Management possible?

How do you Evaluate your Email Deliverability?

Email marketing is a proven, cost effective, easy to use, powerful marketing tool. Marketing email newsletters are more popular than ever as they can be created quickly with colorful pictures, embedded with audio and videos, and with little effort can be shared among friends within social network circles: all this and more backed by real time results.

For those emails not shared, or read, can you verify they actually reached their intended destination? Are your emails blocked from reaching your recipients in-box, never to be delivered. On the other hand, are they lying helpless in a Junk Mailbox, trapped by a SPAM filter waiting their turn for the deletion queue?

Does your ESP (Email Service Provider) work on your behalf to ensure your email is delivered to the intended recipient by offering tracking and evaluation tools to assess your email deliverability?

How do you Avoid Email Deliverability Problems?

Statistics show that there is a growing trend to block or discard permission-based opt-in email, typically without warning to you or your recipients. Legitimate emails may produce false- positive results, where a false positive is a legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam. Steps to take to alleviate the false-positive situation –

The sender can minimize false positives by adhering to all the ‘best practices’ for sending email:

1.     Confirmed Opt-In
2.     Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
3.     Domain Keys
4.     Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)
5.     Don’t send ‘spammy’ content
6.     Remove old addresses that are not engaged (no opens, no clickthroughs, etc)
7.     Participate in feedback loops (FBL) and remove complainers
8.     Etc, etc…

False-positives are only one issue facing the Email Marketer. The bigger task include how to avoid and correct email deliverability problems where you are confident that the messages you send will actually arrive in the inbox and display as designed.

Is Email Deliverability Management possible?

‘Good’ email management tools provide some insight about your email delivery.

‘Great’ email management tools will:

1.     Show you the percentage of your email marketing pieces delivered to the inbox versus the junk folder, and the percentage of those messages that are not arriving at all to anyone’s folder.
2.     Reveal which ISPs are blocking your email.
3.     Inform you if your email format is all wrong because of Bad Email Design. You should have the capability to view your formatted email in at least 50 email clients. I.e. AOL, Outlook, Yahoo and those in-between.
4.     Alert you if your content looks ‘spammy’ to anti-spam filters by testing your messages against several types of SPAM filters.
5.     Warn you if your sending domain is listed on one of more of the hundreds of realtime blacklists lists (RBLs).
6. Highlight delivery issues at specific ISPs, such as technical difficulties with a receiving email server.
7.     Help you establish tangible benchmarks that resolve sending issue so you can achieve your email marketing goals.

With the right set of ‘great’ email marketing tools, you can uncover and fix problems, avoid mistakes, find and analyze issues you weren’t even aware of.

Dundee Internet Services offers advanced email list marketing tools, compatible with any list hosting service, to your improve email deliverability allowing more messages to reach their intended destination–your recipient’s in-box. Using our advanced email marketing tools, the best deliverability features are considered during the message creation process–fixing deliverability issues before your marketing campaigns go out.

Is Email Deliverability Management possible? Read More »

Subscriber Re-engagement

Email Marketing / Pat

Subscriber Re-engagement

All email marketing lists contain a fair amount of inactive list subscribers to the point where inactive subscribers can make up the majority of an email marketing list. Inactive subscribers are ones who seemly lost interest in your messages; taking no action on your emails as they have filtered your messages out of their virtual life. As you know messages when ignored or deleted without being open triggers nothing, so there is no feedback as to why they are inactive. With some planning, inactive addresses can be rejuvenated and re-engaged to active subscribers again.

To begin the process of subscriber re-engagement you first must identify your inactive recipients. You can define an inactive email address as one that:

Neglects to respond
Appears to be dormant: email address that are never opened or clicked on
Was active but continues to be unresponsive for a long while

All inactive email addresses are not equal. The causes can be attributed to:

Spam filters
List fatigue
Your new subscriber only signed up to get your free offer.
Your email newsletter/announcement is not what they expected.
They only use a mobile device to read email without images or urls to click on
They like what they are receiving and waiting for the right moment to respond or the right subject line to peek their interest.
Your product or service is something your subscriber seldom needs, like ordering flowers for a special occasion or updating a program.
They receive your email which prompts them to action by phoning in an order or going to a brick and mortar store instead of clicking on your offer.
They are no longer interested in your emails and are too lazy to unsubscribe.
The email address once active is still valid but rarely used by the subscriber.
Your messages are being stopped at the receiving ISP level.
The receiving ISP or your recipient’s email client is employing image filters that typically disable images from being loaded while displaying a warning about inappropriate images. Many recipients delete the message rather than enabling images and opening the message.

Are you the cause of inactivity?

Are you mailing to often
You’re not mailing often enough
Are you offering information on one subject but emailing information on a different subject?
Did your recipient opted-in to your list?

With all the available reports facts and figures, including advance reporting tools as offered with Dundee Internet List Hosting services, analyzing when an email address becomes inactive can be nothing more than a swag. In most cases the cause of inactivity may never be known, therefore classifying an email address as an inactive one becomes an exercise in intuitive science rather than factual science. This classification is based on assorted variables such as how many email campaigns your organization implements, the structure of each subject lines, how many images in the message and so forth. And if you consider using the typical industry standard of six months of inactivity to classify an email address as inactive consider your mailing habits: for example if you only mail twice a year the 6 month rule wouldn’t work for you. Most industries aren’t typical, so you should create your own formula based on your mailing habits. Once you decide how to indentify your viable inactive email address follow-up with an re-engagement campaign.

A re-engagement campaign should be simple and clear-cut with the purpose of regaining your recipient’s interest in your email messages. You do not need to spruce up your email message with fancy fonts and pictures, be direct and to the point. Keep in mind your goal, asking your subscribers if they would like to continue receiving email from you. Consider offering a sale, coupon or other enticement if you think it would help.

A re-engagement campaign should be timed to reach your inactive subscribers early on. When tracking your recipients, those who recently became inactive (based on your formula) are the easiest ones to recapture, by peeking their interests again. Plan your re-engagement campaign to mail to half or a third of your inactive list at a time, over the course of a few weeks. Monitor the response rates and activity in each mailing: you’ll be able to update your membership accordingly. Email a final message emphasizing the value of re joining (re-opting into) your mailing list, with the caveat that they will be removed from future mailings unless they take action now.

After your re-engagement campaign, maintain a good engagement record by identifying those addresses you could not re-engage and remove them from your active mailing lists.

Subscriber Re-engagement Read More »

Email and Engagement – Is your email engaged?

Email Marketing / Pat

Email and Engagement – Is your email engaged?

Is your email engaged?

The definition of email engagement has been debated for the past several years. Simply put, anytime an email is touched it is engaged. This includes Clicks, Opens and the movement of an email out of the Spam Folder. Engagement is used by some major ISP’s to measure positive feedback that is based on the engaged action an email recipient performs on email they receive, for example from your email campaign . How engagement feedback is perceived by an ISP may become an internal benchmark that affects your email deliverability to that ISP.

Deliverability is affected by many factors, some controllable, some out of your control. You may think email engagement is one of those factors out of your control, but is it? By definition, when an email is engaged there is a positive action taken on it by the recipient. It is believed that some ISP’s utilize the user engagement stats to determine if your sent email messages are actually wanted by your subscribers, compared to those messages that aren’t wanted or acted upon (engaged). With this information in hand the ISP may take adverse action on your mailings, which may include slowing down your email delivery to blocking your email altogether. Logically, then, the less engaged your email recipients are the more undesirable effect on your reputation.

If you think about it, an inactive subscriber can not engage your email messages. If you have a habit of keeping and mailing to inactive subscriber addresses, your engagement score will be low and consequentially a lower sender reputation will follow. Maintain a good engagement record by identifying inactive addresses and remove them from your active mailing lists.

Inactive addresses are bad for business! Consider the following:

1. Most ESP’s charge by the messages emailed. You will never benefit mailing to an inactive address, only the ESP will.

2. Many savvy advertisers, considering the bottom line, now regard and value list activity, not list size. A smaller list with high engagement will always outshine a bigger member list with little activity.

3. When your inactive addresses have received enough email from you they may report you as a Spammer; or several reports later you’ll find you’re blacklisted.

4. The receiver ISP may label all your email as SPAM, so nothing gets delivered.

As email list marketing advances in technology and strategy, engagement will play a major role in assessing the position of your email. Inactive addresses, which commonly comprise the bulk of most email marketing lists, will remain an issue. As part of your mailing campaign strategy employ a re-engagement campaign, which will be covered in my next Blog. If you have questions on Engagement or other email issues please drop us an email at info@dundee.net

Email and Engagement – Is your email engaged? Read More »

Triggered Mailings for Success

Email Marketing / Pat

Triggered Mailings for Success

As an email marketer, how can you increase your bottom line and strengthen customer relationships without costing too much time and money? Automated email programs like trigger mailings can be the solution that you may be looking for. Studies show that triggered mailings are responsible for an increase in consumer interest and response (buying), as these automated messages allow you to reach the right customers with the right messages at the right time. .

Demographic triggers and actions, such as an event (i.e. a certain date) or behavior (clicking on a link) can be set to automatically prompt an email response to your customer. These email responses; after the event is “triggered” by the recipient can contain changeable content or static content, sent to the recipient immediately or over a period of weeks. Once configured and automated, your email campaigns are executed without effort.

Triggered mailings cater to the immediate interests and needs of your email recipient; as your email responses become more effective because they are timely and more relevant to the receiver. You can match your knowledge of customer behavior with this triggered based technology, at a low cost and little effort. Dundee Internet Services, Inc has been offering triggered mailing technology for quite sometime and our customers have discovered their triggered mailings complement newsletters and special offers campaigns with significant results.

What to consider for triggered email.

1. Strategic planning is essential; define what will be sent, to whom, how often and when.
2. Set realistic goals for you and your customer.
3. Consider your audience and the timing and relevancy of your mailings.
4. Review your customer demographics for personalized content; verify you have the correct information to set up usable trigges, such as a birthdate.
5. Define behavioral triggers, such as shopping cart abandonment for retail purchases or a PDF download for a service.
6. Create an email flow chart so you can visualize the response path your recipient need to follow before a trigger is set.
7. Test your trigger email programs to fine tune and eliminate non-responses.
8. Regularly audit your triggered emails for outdated links or information.

Select a vigorous email platform that allows you to configure trigger email using high level personalization so you can craft emails that are individualized and relevant to your recipient. With a technology rich email system you can include behavioral tracking across numerous fields such as subscriber preference or purchase frequency. Send with success using triggered mailings.

Triggered Mailings for Success Read More »

Social Networking – Real Opportunities

Email Marketing / Pat

Social Networking – Real Opportunities

Social Networking in its simplest terms is a group of people with common interests coming together online to discuss and share their ideas and thoughts. Social Networking is part of the Web 2.0 movement which facilitates collaboration on the World Wide Web with hosted services, web applications, video sharing, blogs, folksonomy and marshups. A Web 2.0 site such as Facebook, allows interaction between its members; they can change and add content to the website, blog about issues and share videos and pictures with other members of the same Social Network.

Social Networking is versatile, available world wide, open 24/7 with open membership. Just as there are no time zone restrictions, there are no special tests, or requirements to be a member of the Social Network movement. Communication within a Social Network is easy and because of the ease of use, groups and even some members develop a following of their own, regardless of location, State or Country. Businesses who harness the versatility of Social Networking by creating their own Social Network identity are definitely one step ahead of the competition.

Current marketing strategies for a typical on line business, in addition to their own company web site, may now include Social Network pages on different Social Network communities. These pages may be developed for specific purposes such as generating feedback on user experience to strengthen brand loyalty within a member group. Social Networks can and do increase your company exposure in the marketplace, and should be considered as an additional marketing tool along with your email marketing campaigns.

Aside from a company Social Network page, your customers and prospects most likely have their own Social Network channels where they read and blog their opinions and suggestions to others in their interest groups – ideally wouldn’t it be great if they were sharing positive comments about your products and services? You can take advantage of the power of Social Network media by integrating Social Network Links into your email marketing campaigns. By leveraging these two powerful channels, email marketing and Social Networks, you can create a cohesive bond between your marketing communications for both your list recipients and future list subscribers.

Social Network Links integrated in your email campaigns can simply allow your list recipients to share your newsletters and brand with their friends and social network contacts, which in turn can be shared again. With the right set of email tools, these Social Network links can identify new prospects and markets with click-though tracking, allowing you to discover what offers and brands motivated your email recipients to share this information with their Social Network associations.

Using the duality of Social Networking and email lists you can discover and reinforce new markets that you may not have identified in the past. With Dundee Internet Services, and the power of ListMangerTM , realize new market opportunities, increase sales potential and your bottom line. New opportunities in turn allow you to re-market your goods and services to a new group of prospects and grow your existing list of newsletter subscribers, reinforcing brand loyalty among your readers.

Social Networking – Real Opportunities Read More »

Newsletter Strategies for the Non-Profit Organization

Non Profit and Personal Hosting / Pat

Newsletter Strategies for the Non-Profit Organization

Your organization as an entire entity should consider their marketing strategy to maintain credibility and audience interest. The bigger the organization, the more need there is to create a consistent email marketing plan throughout the entire organization. Larger organizations generally consist of many different departments, targeting different groups of people. Consider the example of a Hospital, generally comprised of several different departments with different marketing strategies that are developed to reach particular groups such as supporters, patients, local interest groups and staff; or the University with several different marketing strategies to reach current students, alumni, donors, and prospective students; different marketing plans all within a larger organization.

The email marketing goal of each department whether operating in a University, Hospital or other non profit body is to reach their particular target audience, while the goal of the entire entity should be to advance their organizational identity. Therefore you can conclude it should be an important part of the email marketing initiative to send a similar message theme from all departments when sending email newsletters. If your alumni department is using a low cost email solution, another is using their Outlook contact list and yet another department is using a high end service, the messages being sent from each department will not be cohesive and the entire organization will appear unorganized. This can be corrected if all the email marketing is managed by using one email solution for the entire organization.

We recommend that one organization should be evident in all your email messages. Use one Email Service Provider (ESP) like Dundee Internet Services, Inc to manage individual departmental newsletters that will allow you to:

* Create a friendly environment for web visitors to subscribe to receive newsletters from your various departments from one location.
* Keep the same voice for all your newsletters for all the subscribers. You’ll find by being consistent with overall marketing strategies you will maintain your organizational credibility with your audience across the board.
* Keep the audience interested and keep your organization organized, eliminate multiple emails to the same person sent on the same day especially newsletters with different “From addresses” sent from the same entity.
* Save money and time using advanced email tools, accessible by all departments on an individual basis.

Questions or comments? Please email info@dundee.net

Newsletter Strategies for the Non-Profit Organization Read More »

The Perfect Subject Line does not exist

Email Marketing / Pat

The Perfect Subject Line does not exist

The Perfect Subject Line does not exist.There is no special formatting involved and no magical formula for the most single important line in your entire newsletter. Your newsletter may never be opened and read if the Subject line doesn’t grab the interest of email recipient: even though they subscribe to your newsletter.

How do you write an inviting Subject Line, one where your reader wants to open and read your email every time you send them a message? Some emails “experts” recommend using a personalized Subject Line to grab the reader’s attention. The other “experts” suggest personalization, such as using your reader’s first name in the Subject line is a Spammer’s tactic. So who is right and who is wrong?

Unfortunately there are no guarantees your email will be read regardless of which “expert” advice you follow. However you should know most experts do agree there are things to avoid when composing your Subject Line:

1. Do not use a one word Subject Line: Hi! Or Hello Pat”
2. Do not be over wordy: “Open this for the best time in your life totally guaranteed only today.”
3. Do not use a “come on” such as the email you been waiting for
4. Do not be vague or general: The information you requested
5. Do not write your Subject Line like an ad.
6. Do not be misleading.

What you can do is compose your Subject Line with these goals and guidelines.

1. Include the point of your email: Healthy breakfast in 5 minutes
2. Summarize the message – why and what you are writing – instead of describing it.
3. Be specific: Include detail to promptly and clearly identify what you are talking about
4. If the email requires action: Say action is required
5. Leave out redundant words: Be direct and to the point.
6. Manage expectations: Don’t promise the Moon if you only have a piece of cheese.
7. Manage your Progress: As you send out more newsletters gather information on what campaigns
elicit responses. Always take note of your campaign success or failure and what the Subject Line read.
8. Content matching: Make sure your newsletter content fits the Subject Line.
9. Avoid Industry Specific words and abbreviations: You may know what an ESP is, doesn’t everyone?
10. Review Subject Lines in your own inbox: What do you consider to be SPAM, why? Run your copy through a SPAM checker or content checker to pinpoint spammy phrases.
11. Test Your Subject Line: Mail to a small number of recipients, same content different Subject Line.
Who opened it, who didn’t.
12. Put your organization’s name in the Subject Line when possible.
13. Review examples such as Newspaper headlines.
14. Check your spelling.

Remember some of your readers may only have time to read your Subject Line when the receive your newsletter and may set it aside to read later: an explicit Subject Line makes it easy to locate in an in box. And here is a little tool that may help you with your next campaign. https://www.localnews.biz/

The Perfect Subject Line does not exist Read More »

Subject Line Science

Email Marketing / Pat

Subject Line Science

There is an abundance of research on the Internet discussing the importance of Subject Line etiquette, covering a cornucopia of what you must do to what you shouldn’t do when composing your newsletter Subject Line. You can find studies on Subject Line structure, the use of capital letters, character set utilization, informal or formal wording, long or short Subject Lines and whatever else is deemed to have an impact on the open rate statistics. With all this time and emphasis placed on Subject Line Science, you can only conclude it is important enough to write it correctly; after all you probably based your email reading decisions on it too.

Your decision to open email when it’s delivered to you is based on the Subject Line. Let’s say you receive an email with the Subject You Won the Russian Lottery; you may think, more SPAM, and in the trash it goes. Or you may have a SPAM filter that automatically tosses any email in the trash with the word Lottery in the Subject Line, so you never see the message. On the other hand if you had subscribed to a Russian Lottery newsletter, it might not be SPAM, in fact you were probably expecting such an email so the subject causes you to open the email instead of deleting it. You can then conclude from your own experience, one factor leading to reading or deleting email is the Subject Line.

There’s more to the Subject Line than most people imagine and crafting the perfect one takes time, and thought, and testing. Subject Lines are a major part of your delivery rates, opens and click-throughs. A good Subject Line should be an integral part of your email campaign strategy driving your subscriber to take action whether your goal is to distribute coupons or share a written article. The bottom line, a Subject Line should describe the subject of the newsletter or promotion, nothing different from the expectations you set by your Welcome or Hello letter when your subscribers first opted-in. Consider these points regardless of your campaign intent:

Compose your Subject Line with a goal in mind: you want your subscribers to open your email message and take some action.

Tell them something significant, or valuable, or timely, so your subscriber feels your email is something they don’t want to delete or skip.

Don’t underestimate the competition. Set your email apart from the other newsletters and junk mail your subscriber may be receiving by composing a subject that will prompt them to open your email immediately.

Do not mislead your subscribers. People signed up for your newsletter because they want to hear what you have to say, you don’t have to exaggerate or over promise. They know who you are, and being honest builds your brand loyalty.

Compose with the individual reader in mind. No matter how many subscribers you have remember your newsletter is distributed to individual mailboxes, take advantage of this intimacy and write to the person not the group.

Use the trust you have with your subscribers. Your subscribers should know the From Address of your company or organization. Use this recognition, together with a consistent themed Subject Line so subscribers will quickly identify the source of the newsletter as being someone they want to hear from.

Writing a terrific Subject Line, every time you mail out a campaign can be fun. It may require a bit of creativity and experimentation to get it right each time, but its well worth the time and energy. Easy tips to overcome any Subject Line challenged writer will be the subject of my next Blog.

Thanks for reading!

Subject Line Science Read More »