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We've compiled a list of answers to some of the questions we are asked most frequently in regards to email marketing. Hopefully we can make some sense of the subject though in most cases, as e-news express is a full-service product, we will take care of most of these issues for you and you no longer have to worry about them. If you have further or more in depth questions, please contact us, we're more than happy to help.

• What do the terms in the Campaign Snapshot like bounced, opened, etc actually mean?
• Does e-news express track everyone who opened my campaign?
• Why do I have such a high number of bounces in my campaign?
• How do I reduce the number of emails that bounce?
• What are some good methods for avoiding spam filters?
• Maximum width for HTML emails
• What's the best time and day of the week to send my campaign?
• Can I use flash in my email newsletters?

The Campaign Snapshot contains a number of important terms which explain the most recent results for each campaign you send. Below is a quick explanation about what these figures actually mean.

Total Opened

The total number of times your campaign was viewed by your recipients. This means that if you send a campaign to 2 recipients and one reads your email twice while the other reads it once, the total opened will be 3.

Unique Opened

The unique opened does not take repeat opens into account, meaning the figure represents the total number of recipients that actually opened your campaign.

Clicks

The Clicks data provides a number of important figures about the links in your campaign. As an example, "2,481 (14.28%) recipients clicked 7 links" tells us the following:

* A total of 2,481 recipients clicked at least one link.
* This resulted in a click-through rate of 14.28%.
* All up, 7 different links in the campaign were clicked.

Unsubscribed

The unsubscribed data tells you the total number of recipients that clicked the unsubscribe link in the campaign and also provides you with the percentage of recipients that unsubscribed.

Bounced

The bounce data tells you the total number of recipients that bounced and also provides you with the percentage of recipients that bounced.

Delivered

The delivered count tells you the total number of emails that were successfully delivered to your recipients. It is equal to the total number of messages sent minus the total number that bounced back. The delivered percentage tells us the total percentage of messages that were successfully delivered.

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Unfortunately, we cannot track every subscriber who opens your email. While we do provide information about who opened, the data is not complete. Your open rate is likely higher than what is reported because text emails cannot be tracked and because not all email readers report open tracking.

By not displaying images by default, some email readers do not allow for open tracking and others allow the recipient to choose to allow or disallow open tracking as a setting.

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This typically happens on your first campaign and is common when you're using older established client lists. Let's say you have a mailing list that's slowly grown over the years but hasn't been contacted in 12 months or so. Hell, 12 months doesn't sound that long.

Things start to get ugly

The campaign's sent. 40% of your list hard bounce right from the word go. Another 25% unsubscribe immediately.

30% is a big number

Here's a scary fact. Email address churn averages about 30% every year. This means that each year almost a third of your subscriber list will have moved on to a new email address. If you haven't sent to your subscriber list in a while, you can see how quickly they can become out of date.

Typo's are common errors

Believe it or not, a number of bounces will result from simple data entry errors - missing underscores, upper or lower case, missing full stops, names spelt incorrectly etc etc.

Will we have a chance to repair the list?

Of course. Having given the campaign a week or so to run, we'll send you a list of bounced subscribers. Using this, you can check that the email addresses are correct and if they are, perhaps contact your subscriber to check the email address or obtain their new email address - the most likely scenario is that they simply changed their email address or ISP.

What else can we do?

If your list hasn't been contacted for at least 12 months, you should consider a permission confirmation campaign. This is a simple email that includes:

• An explanation of how, when and where they subscribed to your list.
• A compelling list of the benefits of continuing their subscription and a preview of what you'll be contacting them about in the future. If you can't say anything compelling then you shouldn't be contacting them in the first place.
• A confirmation link the user must click to confirm their subscription. The best approach is to link to a subscribe form for a brand new list.

Any subsequent campaigns should only be sent to the new list. Many will argue that this method will lose you a lot of subscribers. I say that if a recipient can't be bothered to confirm their subscription, they are unlikely to be opening, reading and responding to your campaigns anyway.

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Managing the way you handle bounces for your Subscriber Lists has never been more important. Keeping a close eye on your bounces can reduce your email delivery costs, therefore having a direct impact on the ROI of your campaigns.

Firstly, some definitions:

A soft bounce is an email message that gets as far as the recipient's mail server (it recognizes the address) but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the intended recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient's mailbox is full, the server is down or swamped with messages, the message is too large or the user has abandoned the mailbox. Most email service providers will attempt to deliver the email regularly for a few days. If it is still undelivered, it becomes a hard bounce.

A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender and is permanently undeliverable. Causes include invalid addresses (domain name doesn't exist, typos, changed address, etc.) or the email recipient's mail server has blocked your server. Servers will also interpret bounces differently, meaning a soft bounce on one server may be classified as a hard bounce on another.

E-news Express automatically moves subscribers that hard bounce into a "Bounced Subscribers" category, so they don't receive future campaigns. You can also customize precisely how soft bounces are handled for each subscriber list.

Here are some quick tips on ways you can reduce bounces even further:

1. Keep your subscriber lists clean
   E-news Express automatically removes invalid email addresses as you add them, but when new subscribers sign up via a subscribe form, they may enter an invalid address. Check each list for incorrectly formatted addresses, invalid domains and typos.
2. Use double opt-in:
   When creating a subscriber list, set it as double opt-in, allowing each address to be validated by the subscriber before it can be added to your list.
3. Monitor Delivery Rates By Domain:
   Track your open and bounces rates by major domain, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink and others. If one is significantly different than the others, or your experience a sudden change, your campaign may be getting caught by spam filters.
4. Understand and Monitor Spam Filters:
   Get to know the more common things that most spam filters look for and make sure you avoid them in each campaign you send.
5. Test Your Emails:
   Prior to sending your campaign to your entire list, send a test to yourself and others. Make sure you try and include all the major types of email clients used by members of your list when testing.

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Even when you're sending an email campaign to subscribers who opted-in, your email can still be flagged as spam by overzealous spam filters which seem to be getting more and more aggressive with their spam flagging analyses. Simply using the word “free” in an email message can often land you in the spam heap.

Listed below are a number of simple tips and techniques you should consider when writing and designing your campaigns:

1. Keep sender addresses as short as possible.
2. Avoid continuous sending of messages to full or invalid mailboxes. You can do this by tweaking your bounce handling settings for each subscriber list.
3. Minimize the use of these words and phrases in the subject line, message body, sender address, and reply-to address:
   • Use of the word Free (although "free" tends to have more leeway than most other trigger words), $$, XXX, sex or !!! (any excessive punctuation)
   • Subject contains "Double Your", "?", "For Only" or "Free Instant".
   • TOO MANY CAPS IN THE SUBJECT LINE
   • Email contains at least 70 percent blank lines
   • The from field appears to not contain a real name, ends in numbers or contains the word friend.
   • The reply to field is empty
   • The email claims not to be spam
   • The email contains excessive images without much text
4. Monitor new subscribers in your lists. Set suspicious "spamflag" addresses such as "abuse@" or "marketerspam@" as Inactive subscribers.

Ultimately, the most important thing you can do is adhere to best practices for email marketing. Gain permission, compose relevant content, and deliver messages according to the customer's needs, wants, and preferences.

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You've probably noticed that the majority of email newsletters you receive these days are designed with a fixed width as opposed to a fluid layout.

This is because the majority of email clients and web-based email providers don't use the full width of your screen to display an email message. Whether it's ads on Gmail, a menu in Hotmail or your Inbox in Outlook, a chunk of screen real estate is often already being used.

Remember, your recipients are busy and impatient, so horizontal scroll bars are even more of a no-no in email than a web page.

Because of this, it is a good idea to keep your emails to a fixed width of no more than 550-600 pixels. This should ensure that in most cases, your subscribers can view your email as you intended.

What about height?

Obviously the height of each email you send will vary depending on the amount of content. At the same time, it's good to keep in mind that a lot of your recipients may scan your email in a preview pane before they decide to read the entire thing.

The average preview pane is around 300-500 pixels high, so make sure you include any important bits of your email in this area. First impressions count.

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A question we often get asked by our customers is "What's the best day and time to send our clients' newsletters?".

Firstly, let's look at what some of the more popular research out there is telling us. Just keep in mind that this research is conducted across a range of markets, so it might not always be right for you or your recipients.

In July 2004, delivery consultancy Return Path analysed over 3.4 million email messages and found that email sent on Monday is more likely to get opened, and anytime between 6am and 10am is the best time of the day to send. These findings were later confirmed by media company Marketing Sherpa.

Today however, it was revealed that this might no longer be the case and that emails sent from Wednesday to Friday maximized open rates.

So which one's right for you?

The truth is, the optimal delivery time will depend on what you're sending and who you're sending to.

Luckily, one of email's strengths is it's just so testable (is that a word?). You should use the time of day and day of week as variables in your tests. Try splitting your subscribers into 2 separate subscriber lists and sending to one half at one day and time and one half at another. Run a comparison of your results in the Reporting section and learn from what you see.

Running tests like this over the course of a few campaigns is the only way to really know when you should and shouldn't be sending.

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You're putting together a newsletter and want to jazz it up by adding some flash to the email? You might be left wondering, is that going to work?

Well the short answer is, probably not. By default, AOL, Outlook 02/03, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora will not display flash movies in a HTML email because the security settings prohibit controls like flash from running. On the other hand, Mac Mail has no problem displaying flash.

What about web-based email clients such as Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail? They load emails in your browser, which we know can display flash, so surely they work? Unfortunately, the answer is no again, as these providers automatically strip out any flash content in your campaign.

So what’s the solution? Unless you know exactly what your recipients are using to read their email, and you're positive it can display flash, the answer is pretty obvious, don't include it in your emails. If the flash is important to the campaign, you can always create a link to it from your email and users will be able to view the flash from their browser.

Update: We ran a series of tests across the most common email environments to test flash support. Our verdict: Nothing's changed, stay away from flash.

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