Is Your Email Getting Through?
by Rich Whittle and Tim Kerber Email marketing and contact with customers is still one of the most cost effective and efficient things any web site owner can use.
Unfortunately the ever increasing annoyance towards spam is costing you in a way you might not realize. It doesn't matter if you:
- Send out an email newsletter
- Confirm purchases or subscriptions by email
- Deliver digital content via email
- Handle customer support or sales questions with email?
These are just a few of the ways your web business uses email to conduct business. Ever wondered how many of those emails actually get through? You might be surprised.
The Email Experiment
Fred Langa, a writer for InformationWeek magazine, and longtime web guru recently conducted an email test. This is what was involved:
- he gathered together 10,979 volunteers
- they were each sent them a plain text, attachment-free email
- the emails contained no deliberate or obvious spam or virus filter triggers
The results of the test?
40 PERCENT of the emails never made it to their destination! Four out of every 10 emails were lost. That is rather disturbing. Although Langa's test was just one example, you have to realize that due to spam, some email is getting lost in the shuffle. What can you do to insure your emails get through? Langa suggests two fixes. First use Bayesian spam filters and keep them up to date. You can read about my favorite Bayesian spam filter program in this article I wrote recently. The only problem with that? You don't have control over what spam filters your customers and visitors are using. Unfortunately many of them are relying on oversensitive filters which frequently err on the side of caution.
The Hybrid Newsletter His second suggestion is one which is becoming more popular lately. That is sending a very brief email with a link to a Web page that contains the real message. Or, in the initial contact, keep your message very brief and as un-spamlike as possible and include information such as the domain or IP address from which all your business email will be sent to assist your recipients in setting their filters to let your mail in. You may have seen this yourself when you get an email that announces that "the next newsletter is now online" with a link to it. It is a tactic you are advised to consider using yourself if you send out newsletters. I have started to resort to this on my site and it does in fact improve things quite a bit.
The one thing you CANNOT do is treat email the same way you did a year ago. The world of email has changed.
For a complete description of Langa's tests and results, go to: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17300016
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