Zrinity Email Marketing Blog

Your online reputation is as important as your brand name is in the age of the Internet. When you fail to protect your lists and your email reputation, which, by the way, is being judged by email recipient servers, such as YAHOO, and other email integrity entities, you damage your brand name. Who are these email judges you ask. They are YAHOO, AOL, HotMail, GMAIL and hundreds of other email providers who cumulatively can do more damage to your email reputation than any other failure to protect your brand might do.

Don’t Trick Prospects Onto Your List
It is a very common procedure, and even legal, for the general Web population, to have signed up for a legitimate email notice, but also to have agreed to receive emails for all fifty businesses in a network of businesses. Even though you only intended to receive emails from company A, they are tricking onto a series of lists from those in their “network” inadvertently. It is almost the same as getting free software and if you fail to read the agreements, then you might not be aware that you agreed to get ads from the software firms network. Most of these relationships have some type of safeguard for these relationships, but far too many times they end up insulting their audience and turning people off to these purported freebees. Truly opted into lists are much more valuable than TRICKED TO OPTIN lists.

Use Double Optin Procedures
The fear that a new person on the email list will remove themselves from your list is a key factor in the fact that so many list managers will not employ double optin techniques. That is to say that when somebody signs up to receive your emails, they get an email immediately to verify that they were not signed up by another party, AND, to drive the point home that they just signed up for your email. The fact is if they do not remember signing up to get your emails just a few moments ago, they are almost certain to report your email as spam when they get the special offer in three weeks from today. It is truly better not to have these recipients on your list. It waters down your list effectiveness and damages your online brand name. A double opted in list is much more valuable and predictable as a marketing tool.

Email Past, Present & Future
Email was built as a type of file sharing system for the highly technical people on the Web, typically at a place of scientific research or a government entity. In the early days it was common for a person, or business, to piggy-back onto the Internet through some government backbone. Email servers were intended to send one message at a time from your sending email server to the recipient email server for delivery to the intended recipient.

Think of sending email server as a sending fax machine and the recipient email server as the receiving fax machine. Both ends need to work effectively for the fax to be delivered to the intended recipient. The problem is that sometimes both fax machines will report and error, such as a loss of signal or line, and it is not clear if either machine had some error, or if the signal was lost or cut off. Well, with email servers the same can be true but to a much higher degree. Email recipient machines will sometimes report to the sending email machine that an error occurred when in fact what happened was that the server encountered an error, or just believes the sending email machine is a spammer or robot of some type.

The best way for the recipient to believe that your machine is not a spammer, or other malicious code delivery, is for the recipient server to know who you are and who’s is sending the email. Your email reputation is critical to the delivery of your message to the intended recipient.

More Resources: Email Marketing Strategy, Email Marketing Best Practices, Inhouse Email Marketing Case Study