Welcome to the ‘The Not for Everyone Club’!

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Rahul Sawant

Hi there.. just about a year back we thought of starting something grand and hence decided to have our own hoity-toity club – The Not for Everyone Club. Now you’d be wondering why would someone want to be a part of something like this – simple – because it is not for every Tom, Dick and Harry; it has a certain hedonic value; and it’s one of those limited member high-roller clubs.

As glamorous as this would sound, getting all the pieces together was an equally grand challenge. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

So we engaged all available marketing tools – creating buzz via Print (publications and newspapers) & Online Advertising and of course, Social Media. Additionally we also employed Email Marketing, Surveys and SMS Marketing to aid this initiative. As expected, the response was overwhelming. With such a huge pool of leads it was just quite clear that we needed to separate the men from the boys. We sent an initial greeting and advanced to qualifying our prospects to narrow down to a particular income group:

  1. Annual income above Rs. 10 million.
  2. A plush ride – the BMWs, the Mercedes’, the Audis and alike.

Eligible prospects would express interest and we would simply finish our qualification process using Interactive Voice Responses. And guess what! At the end of this rigorous exercise we managed to narrow down on our target audience. Now we exactly knew who to connect with and get on board.

After few weeks of arduous follow ups, we finally had the big and glamorous names on The Not for Everyone Club’s member list. But we knew that we were just halfway there. The next critical phase was keeping these members engaged; and we knew exactly how it could be done. We engaged them with focused periodic communication. So a welcome mailer the moment they were on board, mailers on upcoming events at the club, new activities being introduced at the club, special offers for privileged members, membership extensions, sign up offers for new members – were amongst few such engaging communications.

Today, we stand tall amongst the most prestigious and sought after clubs with annual profits running int millions!

Isn’t this an efficient and smarter way of entering the market! Identifying prospects and narrowing down on qualified prospects who eventually translate to business for you and keeping them engaged for ongoing business. This is exactly what MailDirect can do for you as shared by Sharad Popli, Founder Director, QuantumLink Communications (QLC) at TFM&A 2011 on the 4th and 5th of this November.
About QLC
About TFM&A

Sharad spoke about industry best practices on email marketing and how MailDirect can make a difference for businesses. He shared the dais with Sachin Bansal, Head – Strategy and Marketing, Welgrow Travels Pvt. Ltd., shared his experiences on how MailDirect helped in achieving steady business growth while also improving profitability.

Based out of Delhi, Welgrow Travels Pvt. Ltd. is an established name in the Travel and Hospitality industry. The problem Sachin faced was that business was growing and so were the costs. This had a direct impact on profitability. Of course, when you are in the Travel and Hospitality domain, that additional personal touch is what differentiates you from the herd. With MailDirect’s advanced features and flexible costing model Welgrow Travels Pvt. Ltd. was eventually able to minimize costs leading to increased profitability.

How many emails are you required to send per month? Are services capable of sending 100 million emails a month (that’s 3000 emails a second) good enough for you? If you have any doubts on this we have above 600 satisfied customers who vouch for our services. And if that’s still not enough, let us tell you that we have been bagging a customer a day for the past quarter causing email volumes across servers going up by 200% over the past quarter. Aren’t these some interesting eye popping facts? We sure think so, and so did the many people that flocked the MailDirect stall. The crowd was a blend of people from diverse domains including Marketing, Advertising and Technology. They had a few interesting questions, some of which would be common with you:

    1. What makes MailDirect different from the usual run-of-the-mill mailing solutions?
    2. What do you mean by personalised email marketing?
    3. What kind of analytic reports do you provide?
    4. How can you help us reduce our costs?

    What makes MailDirect’s the blue eyed lady amongst the lot is its ability to personalise an organization’s marketing, sales and CRM activities. With as many as 30 custom fields it enables you to establish a strong connection with your present and potential customers conveying that you are aware of their business and their specific requirements.

    And if blue eyes aren’t good enough for you, MailDirect has a host of sharp and attractive features that enable you to not only strike a conversation with your customers, but also keep them alive with timed communications. Experience some serious personalization, reduced bandwidth utilization and increased efficiency with features such as CustomAttach, Engagers, CleverLists and AutoAppend. And if you have a specific requirement, just let us know and we will be more than happy to develop it for you.

    Now coming to being able to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns, MailDirect makes it all possible by providing in-depth reports on mail bounces, invalid email ids, messages opened, geographically segregated responses, click-throughs, landing pages and much more. It also helps you gauge effectiveness of one of the most critical communication parameters – ‘Word of Mouth’. MailDirect allows for seamless integration of your marketing activities with your social media presence via features like AutoPublish and Forward-to-Friend.

    Not everything that’s gorgeous, smart and intelligent, is high on maintenance ;) . MailDirect comes to you as a SAAS offering, hence no additional costs on hardware and software upgrades. Pricing per email is passé – MailDirect deploys a data transfer based pricing model that ensures that you pay only as much as bandwidth you utilize. Organizations spend considerable amount of time and effort on how to optimize mailers. Wouldn’t you love to benefit from all the effort you put in to all that optimization? With MailDirect, the lighter your emails (size in terms of data transfer), the lesser you pay!!
    Click here to learn more about pricing..

    We guess, by now it’s easy to justify why MailDirect received an overwhelming response from people with varied requirements – from personalisation of emails to keeping customer interaction alive to measuring Word of Mouth to in-depth campaign analysis to bandwidth issues to pricing constraints – They now have a total digital marketing solution for their diverse problems and we are sure so do you..

    For more information on how to make your communications personal please log on to www.maildirect.in

    Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

    How to avoid getting your campaigns accidentally tagged as junk/spam

    Posted on October 21, 2011 by Rahul Sawant

    If you send email campaigns long enough, you will inevitably run into spam filter issues. You would find roughly 10-20% emails get lost in cyberspace mostly due to spam filters. You don’t even have to be a spammer to get your mails spam-filtered. Innocent email marketers who send permission-based emails to people who requested them also get spam-filtered all the time.

    Unfortunately, there is no quick fix. The only way to avoid spam filters is to understand how they work. The complicated part is that spam filters look at a long list of criteria to judge whether or not your email is junk. Commonly they look for popular spammy words like CLICK HERE or FREE or BUY NOW, etc. and assign points each time they see them. For instance, MailDirect uses Spam Assasin, one of the most popular filters, which will assign scores as follows:

    1. Message body has 70-80% blank lines – 1.668
    2. Subject is all capitals – 0.763

    If your campaign’s total spam score exceeds the threshold, your email will land into the  Junk/Spam folder; and to complicate the situation further, every server will have its own defined threshold.

    Common mistakes to avoid:

    These are the most common mistakes we see new email marketers make, which result in accidental spam filtering.

    Be compliant with CAN-SPAM Act

    If you are sending “any electronic mail message, the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” then you must comply with the following main requirements:

    • Don’t use false or misleading header information
    • Don’t use deceptive subject lines
    • Identify the message as an ad
    • Tell recipients where you’re located
    • Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from you
    • Honor opt-out requests promptly
    • Monitor what others are doing on your behalf

    If your email contains only transactional emails or relationship content, then you are exempt from these rules; however, you must still not include false or misleading routing information.

    Avoid Spam trigger words or Phishing phrases

    There is really no complete list of spam trigger word. However, I found a few on the following link http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/08/spam-trigger-words/.

    Apart from these, a few common rules of what not to do are:

    • Using spammy phrases, like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!”
    • Going crazy with exclamation points!!!!!!
    • USING ALL CAPS, WHICH IS LIKE YELLING IN EMAIL (especially in the subject)
    • Coloring their fonts bright red, or green
    • Coding sloppy HTML (usually from converting a Microsoft Word file to HTML)
    • Creating an HTML email that’s nothing but one big image, with little or no text (since spam filters can’t read images, they assume you’re a spammer that’s trying to trick them).
    • Using the word “Test” in the subject line (agencies run into this all the time, when sending drafts to clients for approval)
    • Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company (the company’s email firewall can only assume it’s a spam attack)
    • Designing HTML email in Microsoft Word, and exporting the code to HTML (this code is sloppy, and spam filters hate it)
    • Include a text version of your email if you are sending HTML emails.


    Use permission marketing techniques

    The well known digital marketer Seth Godin who coined the phase “Permission Marketing” has some good insights to share (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-mark.html). Please make sure you ask your customers for the permission to send them emails. Please send emails only to those whom you know. If executing through a third party, make sure this instruction is followed.


    Use Spam Checkers

    MailDirect uses Spam Assasin as a spam checking tool for emails.


    Maintain a good text to image ratio

    It is usually best to not include images at all; however, if you must include images, here are some tips:

    • Do not send emails comprising of images only
    • We suggest that for every graphic, include at least two lines of text
    • Optimize your images as best as you can
    • Use well-formed HTML for email


    Avoid Spam Traps

    Spam Traps are email addresses that are flagged by ISPs as being no longer used by a human, so it then stands to reason that there could have been no opt-in. To avoid including a Spam Trap email in your mailing list, use an opt-in process and do not buy lists from email brokers.


    Check your attachments

    In general, .jpg, .gif, .png and .pdf attachments are safe to send, provided you include some content in the email as well. However, executable attachments such as .exe, .zip, .swf, etc. should be avoided entirely. Generally, you should not send attachments to people on your list that are not expecting them.


    Make sure Make Sure Your DKIM, SPF, Sender-ID and Domain Keys Are Setup Properly

    You will want to make sure your email server supports these protocols (DKIM, SPF, Sender-ID and Domain Keys) and that they are properly implemented.

    This is by no means meant to be an definitive guide to ensuring that your campaigns land in the inbox – there are just way too many factors that services like Gmail and Yahoo use to determine whether a message is good or junk. And as the spammers figure these out, they go ahead and change all over again. So, in the final analysis, all that can be said is that if your message is genuine, and the recipient has opted for your messages, and if you’ve contacted her successfully before in the past, your next campaign will most likely hit her inbox and not the junk-mail folder.

    And in the mean time, we’ll keep sharing the good practices that we know to help you run successful campaigns to your opt-in lists, so stay in touch with this site.

    Happy marketing!

    Posted in Sending practices and limitations | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

    Permission Marketing

    Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

    Source – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-mark.html

    Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

    It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

    Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted.

    Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either.

    Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.

    I got a note from a Daily Candy reader the other day. He was upset because for three days in a row, his Daily Candy newsletter hadn’t come. That’s permission.

    Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.

    One of the key drivers of permission marketing, in addition to the scarcity of attention, is the extraordinarily low cost of dripping to people who want to hear from you. RSS and email and other techniques mean you don’t have to worry about stamps or network ad buys every time you have something to say. Home delivery is the milkman’s revenge… it’s the essence of permission.

    Permission doesn’t have to be formal but it has to be obvious. My friend has permission to call me if he needs to borrow five dollars, but the person you meet at a trade show has no such ability to pitch you his entire resume, even though he paid to get in.

    Subscriptions are an overt act of permission. That’s why home delivery newspaper readers are so valuable, and why magazine subscribers are worth more than newsstand ones.

    In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.

    Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. The internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format.

    When I launched my book that coined this phrase 9 years ago, I offered people a third of the book for free in exchange for an email address. And I never, ever did anything with those addresses again. That wasn’t part of the deal. No follow ups, no new products. A deal’s a deal.

    If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, you’re right. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

    Source – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-mark.html

    Posted in Sending practices and limitations | Leave a comment

    Warming up your IPs

    Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

    MailDirect classifies its customers into three broad categories:

    1) Client who have data transfer volumes less than 25GB per month (MailDirect Slab Based Pricing)

    2) Clients who have data transfer which are more than 25GB per month – we call them high volume customers.

    3) And finally, clients who have been with us for long and have build reputation with us – we call them trusted customers.

    For (2) and (3) above, we recommend dedicated setup. Whether you are new to the email game or an accomplished vet, you have probably run across the idea of warming up an IP (Internet Protocol) address to improve delivery performance.

    So, what does IP warming really mean? IP warming is a gradual process that happens over time, with the goal of establishing a reputation as a legitimate email sender in the eyes of ISPs (Internet Service Providers). When an ISP observes email suddenly coming from a new or “cold” (ie, recently dormant) IP address, they will take notice of it and immediately begin evaluating the traffic coming from that IP. Since volume is perhaps the most telling factor in the eyes of ISP SPAM filters, it is best to begin sending low to moderate volume (e.g., up to 1 million emails/month), eventually working your way up to larger volumes (e.g., over 1 million emails/month). This gives the “powers that be” a chance to closely observe your sending habits and the way your customers treat the emails they receive from you. IP warming does guarantee smooth sailing forever. It is still very important to follow best practices related to email delivery.

    Do clients having less data transfer (category 1 above) rather less count of emails, need IP warming ? In the case that your are sending a very low volume (e.g., < 10,000 emails/month) of email, you will likely stay off the ISPs’ radars for the most part. However, if you are exceeding this approximate threshold, you should make the warmup process a priority in order to start off on the right foot. One may even argue that a warmup period is useful regardless of volume. Also, don't forget, the history of your IP is also an important determinant of an ISPs initial evaluation. Here are a few tools you can use to check the reputation of any SenderScore.org.

    How do you go about the IP warming process? The calculation is very simple. Estimate your total monthly email volume and divide that number by 30 and then try to spread your sending evenly over the first 30 days, based on that calculation.
    Example: if you will send 90,000 emails/month, you should start off sending 3,000 per day over the first month.

    You might be thinking, “why haven’t I encountered this whole warmup issue at other ESPs?” The answer is simple: many of them, especially those focused on marketing email tools, do not offer dedicated IP addresses to their customers. Most often, ESPs simply place everyone on a shared cluster by default. While it may be less cost effective and more technically complicated, we think it is important to empower our users by allowing them to earn their own reputation on their own IP.

    Posted in Sending practices and limitations | Leave a comment

    Hotmail launches yet another major upgrade

    Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

    Source – http://www.returnpath.net/blog/intheknow/2011/10/hotmail-launches-another-major-upgrade-what-you-need-to-know/

    Hotmail recently pushed another major update to help their users deal with the high amount of email they signed up for, called graymail, that will be slowly rolled out through the end of the year. While these tools will a major time saver for most Hotmail users, it could spell deliverability problems for your own email program. Here is a breakdown of the changes and what you should start thinking about now.

    One-click Unsubscribe
    The unsubscribe feature is not entirely new. Hotmail has had a safe unsubscribe link in the user interface for some time now, but how they handle these requests are changing and not complying could result in your email being sent to the spam folder. This feature has relied on the list-unsubscribe header to work properly. Marketers can use either an unsubscribe URL or a MAILTO link in the header depending on their preference. If a subscriber clicks on the unsubscribe link in the Hotmail interface now, and either the list-unsubscribe header isn’t present or doesn’t work, email from that sender will be permanently delivered to the spam folder. It’s imperative that every sender has the list-unsubscribe header present now.

    Schedule Cleanup
    Hotmail users can now decide how long they want messages from a particular sender, or all senders, in their inbox before they are deleted permanently or moved to a specified folder. Some marketers report subscriber responses for weeks, and even months after an email is sent. This potentially could affect the long tail of your response rate. To prepare for this change, look at how long your Hotmail subscribers are opening your emails after you email them and use this as a benchmark to see how the changes may affect you in the future. Additionally, give your subscribers a choice to the frequency of emails they want to receive. On the bright side, this could also prove to be beneficial for marketers as subscribers may not mark old, unwanted email as spam which can adversely drive up spam complaints.

    Flagged Emails
    Hotmail will start placing emails flagged as important to the top of the inbox. This will probably have the least impact to marketers out of all the recent changes. However, marketers could test their messaging by asking or reminding subscribers to flag an important email so it remains at top, front and center.

    Custom Categories
    Hotmail has categories now, but they are limited to social, photos, office docs, and shipping updates. Hotmail users can now create their own categories and select which senders should be classified with their new criteria. For example, one could create a category called “shopping” and select all retail emails be classified as shopping for a quick glance of all retail emails.

    Folders
    With its last major update, Hotmail launched Sweep which “swept” the inbox of a particular sender and would move it to a specified folder. Now Hotmail is allowing nested folders and to create new folders inline. Again, there may not be a major impact to most senders, but the ease of use could make it easier for subscribers to banish your emails with one click.

    What do you foresee these Hotmail changes on your email program? Share them in the comments below!

    Source – http://www.returnpath.net/blog/intheknow/2011/10/hotmail-launches-another-major-upgrade-what-you-need-to-know/

    Posted in Articles | Leave a comment

    Email Marketing– your communication dream or nightmare?

    Posted on October 12, 2011 by Rahul Sawant

    How many potential clients have you lost in the past quarter / year? Do you feel this happened due to lack of customer engagement?

    “Why haven’t you met your targets?” – Is this still one of your nightmares?

    Do your emails get delayed frequently and the reason is “There’s a queue!”?

    How often have you heard terms like ‘Our IP is blacklisted’?

    We are sure these are few of the questions that have rung more than a bell.. And no, we aren’t trying to rub it in.

    Now that we have understood your pain points we also have the solution to them – Email Marketing.

    Email Marketing is the most effective mechanism for maintaining a dialogue with your prospects and customers. It allows you to device one-on-one conversations as opposed to meting out one-size-fits-all email blasts. This not only helps in generating effective leads but also in staying in touch with prospects, existing customers and even lapsed customers.

    The effectiveness email marketing is determined by its content and the target audience; the better the segmentation, the more personalized the message can become, which in turn delivers better results. After all, would you treat a new lead and a long-standing customer in the same way and with the same offer?

    Today, email marketing has become synonymous with spamming, leading to bandwidth congestion and choked up Inboxes. This is NOT email marketing. Huh? Say that again? No lead-generation through bought lists? That’s right – no spamming. Email marketing is not spamming; it’s a powerful means of engaging with your customers. Handled properly email marketing also prevents your IP from getting blacklisted.

    In Email Marketing you create focused emails. You then send these emails to your potential customers list, periodically and consistently. Email Marketing is the fastest way for disseminating success critical information – be it promotions, newsletters, marketing messages, advertisements or new feature updates – to a wider customer base in a shorter period of time.

    Now let’s get to the point that you can brag about in front of the budgeting committee. Email Marketing is really cost effective. Unlike any other marketing methods there are no production costs involved. You have the added advantage of responding to your clients immediately. Moreover, you are also able to generate reports to check your campaign effectiveness.

    We know for sure you’re asking for more – no worries, you’re just human – we understand.

    And on that note we present you MailDirect. Given that MailDirect provides you with all the basic features that every other Email Marketing solution can, here’s what will make you feel like you’re holding the ‘Royal Flush’ in a game of poker your life depends upon:

    1. You can personalize your email campaign so that you avoid getting treated as yet another spammer
    2. As a cascading effect of personalized emails, you get an added benefit of responding to each and every potential customer’s specific query and hence measure your email campaign’s effectiveness
    3. MailDirect comes in a ‘Software As A Service’ (SAAS) model. In addition to saving the costs incurred on hardware and software, it allows you to save more by freeing you from frequent upgrades, management and maintenance. It provides you with access to the latest version available at all times.
    4. MailDirect also enables you to perform market surveys and generate valuable business intelligence reports efficiently

    Given the advent of various social networking sites and e-commerce popularity, today almost everyone is on the web. There is a very high probability that you will find majority of your potential customers online. This makes it absolutely critical for an organization to equip itself with the best tools to harness this vast ocean of opportunities. So go ahead and achieve your goals with MailDirect.

    Posted in Introduction | 2 Comments