One
of the smartest ways to maintain regular communications with
your customers online, is to set up a permission based e-mail
marketing campaign. The way it works is that you invite you
Web visitors to sign up to receive regular monthly newsletters
which they can subscribe to or unsubscribe anytime they wish.
Newsletters that offer tips, free articles, tutorials, product
discounts and Web updates offer the customer an incentive to
come back to your Web site over and over again.
How
does one go about setting up a newsletter? There are plenty of
services like Aweber.com
which is a fully featured sequential auto responder, which is
completely browser based. Newsletters can be personalized and
customized and sent out to your readers on a regular basis
easy as 1, 2, 3.
However,
these days it can be difficult to determine how many of your
newsletters or customer communications are actually making it
through the various Spam filters. Do you sometimes get the
impression that perhaps not all of your e-mails are being
delivered? Suppose that only 60% of your e-mail is actually
making through to your subscribers or that some ISPs may have
incorrect information about your domain. Could it be that you
are being labeled a "Spammer" even though you are
meticulously following a completely permission based Opt-in
policy.
Here's
one solution called Deliverymonitor.com
which actually monitors the success ratio of each of your
e-mail campaigns.
Here's
a quick overview of how it works:
Now you can know at a glance
where your email is successfully delivered without asking your
subscribers if your Newsletter arrived. How is this
accomplished?
In this graph
above, we see the results of several campaigns. Green
signifies successful deliveries and the thin red line
indicates areas where e-mail was not delivered successfully.
Statistics are
calculated showing the percentage of email arriving in a users
inbox, bulk box, or go entirely missing. This is accomplished
by the mailing list owner seeding their existing subscriber
list with email addresses located at top ISP's. When a
newsletter is sent, the seed addresses are also sent a copy of
the issue.
You'll want to
watch the delivery of several newsletters or other opt-in
content you've sent to your subscriber base. You do this to
determine if all of your email to that ISP is being blocked or
if only some of the email is being blocked. If only some of it
is being blocked, you are likely to be hitting a content
filter. If all of it is being blocked, you are most likely
hitting an IP blacklist.
Other things you
can gauge are things like the duration of how long your
delivery took to be distributed.
With
this information in hand you can use the DeliveryMonitor.com
ISP Information center to learn more about the ISP or domain
you are having delivery issues with. Stop guessing at whether
some of your newsletters and reports are going missing and
find out for sure how your newsletters are being delivered.
You
can try Delivery
Monitor's 30 Day Risk Free Trial here.
About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with partner
Robin Nobles as well as online search engine marketing courses
through Online Web
Training. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and co-author of
the Totally Non-Technical
Guide for A Successful Web Site.
