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

One of the single most impressive case studies we have published was the case study for Eldorado Resorts. Eldorado Resorts was significantly different from most other case studies, not just Zrinity case studies, but any others we have read from others in the email marketing industry as well. In this instance there was a combination of factors involved in selecting an on-premise email marketing system. First and foremost there would be a selection team of experts in a variety of fields from business managers to those who were informed about the email industry. For each of these in-house team members there were also dozens more industry experts consulted outside of the Resorts team prior to the research team making any determination regarding their on-premise email marketing system.

A grand total of over two dozen business and email experts after evaluating Zrinity and competitive systems made the determination that Zrinity was the superior choice and at a highly competitive price.

Zrinity’s email marketing systems are used by firms all over the world to fuel both email and Web management systems. In the case of Eldorado Resorts Zrinity and its competitors underwent extensive scrutiny prior to ultimately choosing Zrinity as the email provider. The research included word of mouth from other industry experts and an extensive due diligence at Eldorado.

Project Goals For Case Study:

• Complete in-house control of email systems
• Reduce the complexity and of email campaign builds
• Better and more flexible integration with in-house business systems
• Decrease cost associated with email campaigns
• Increase delivery and acceptability rates
• Begin to plan behavioral email marketing campaigns

More Email Marketing Resources: View the Full Case Study, Download Three Email Marketing Case Studies (Zip), On-Premise Email Marketing Server, View All Email Marketing Case Studies

More discussion from the Ultimate Email Design Guide:

{B2C ALERT}: Use inline CSS text‐decoration property to underline in the tag of
every link where you wish to have the link underlined.

• Some email recipients such do not underline hyperlinked text so the underlines must be forced in the code. I have also noticed this with some of the blogging systems where they do not automatically underline hypertext. I do not understand the logic since our observances indicate that underlined hypertext and any other aid that can be utilized to scream that the text, or image, is a link is highly successful. Images that say click here or even images in general tend to get more clicks than plain text or images with no “Click Here” type of call to action. No matter what the reason, you do need to tell the email recipients such MSN that hypertext is linked to someplace.

Use tables and nested tables for layout. Don’t use background images or spacer images.

• Images don’t do much when they are typically not there. Those who are already defined as somebody likely to click on your email will “Click to View Images” or better yet “Always Show Images From This Sender” but what if they might be on the edge? In this case you need your layout to be well defined. Don’t use tables to try to get too fancy, but the basic layout should remain in tact no matter who it is delivered too.

Always assign colors! Even if the text color you desire is black, always define it as black.

• It is better to over define your HTML. Always define colors since some default color settings can wreak havoc with your email campaigns.

More Resources: Ultimate Email Design Guide, Email Best Practices Case Studies, On-Premise Email Marketing

A seemingly new question being asked is in fact an age-old business question. And the answer has not changed. It is an age-old answer to a not really new question. Setting up an on-premise email marketing system is not nearly as difficult as it might seem and the plain old fact is that if you can afford to own, why rent? Isn’t that really the question? “Will we rent or own our email marketing system?” If you own it then you have more flexibility and you will pay less over time than if you rent your email marketing systems.

About ten years ago there was an article in an IT magazine that was about companies using in-house, or on-premise, IT experts and resources versus outsourcing. The simple answer was, If you can afford it you pay the bill to bring it on-premise rather than send critical business assets outside your business network! Actual IT people-power was on-premise and outsourced at a 50/50 ratio. If you have the basic on-premise infrastructure and qualified IT people, then it is a no-brainer. Train these people to manage the technology side and have the email marketing systems on-premise, while using outside email delivery experts to monitor, manage and train your existing personnel.

Leave the renting and shared IP’s to the smaller businesses that just can’t budget the higher licensing cost associated with bringing the email systems on-premise. That said, a well protected outsourced company who is careful to keeps spammers out of their systems will work fine for those businesses who can not budget, who do not have the staff or both, to accomplish their email marketing goals, but let’s face it, it is better to keep your data on-premise then to send it to a hosted provider who you haven’t conducted extensive due-diligence on.

Sources: On-premise Email Marketing Systems, Email Best Practices, Email Marketing Server