Thought I'd create one thread for us all to keep all questions/advice about email marketing.
To start, I'm wondering if anyone with more experience in sending out email marketing campaigns has any knowledge about Hotmail. Does Hotmail not bother to display some emails? I mean, not even put the emails in the spam folder, but just flat out not acknowledge it in any way? I'm sending out some tests, and it my Hotmail test account never receives any emails.
Is using lipsum filler text a no-no too? Am I going to be hitting spam filters by using dummy copy?
Never had a problem with Hotmail, and we've sent out quite a few quad-billion spams, er, I mean email marketing campaigns. Maybe try forwarding on an email ad you get from another company, or taking manually send an add to your Hotmail account. That should tell you if it's searching content or not.
You shouldn't have an issue with Hotmail. Yahoo on the other hand will refuse messages for 2 hours if you trigger the alarm bells which is why most mass mailers will support multiple passes. If you're going to be sending large volumes of mail to the webmail hosts take a look at domain keys. You also need to be careful of the feedback loop systems they've all implemented as anyone marking a sender as spam will have an impact your success rate.
Hotmail has been causing me no end of grief. I finally realised that when I looked in the 'blocked' list, the domain I was sending emails from was in there, along with a mass of other addresses that I'd never personally blocked. It seems Hotmail has automatically added a number of addresses to the accounts 'block list' and simply discards any emails from those accounts completely as if they never existed.
The problem now is that Hotmail denies any automated blocklist shenanigans exist, and claim that addresses added to a blocklist can only be done by a user, despite the fact there are loads of people on the web complaining that this plainly isn't the case.
In my blocklist were companies like Apple, and a number of personal contacts, that I never would have blocked, so I'm not really sure what I can do. It's obviously some sort of shitty bug with Hotmail's email system. The fact that it also effects a company like Apple, makes me think it's just one of those things I'm going to have to live with and move on.
Hotmail isnt straight forward at all and they can block emails from your server, not even sending it to the recipients junk.
Basically, you need to go to postmaster.live.com and sign up for their senderid, FBL and SNDS services.
Sender ID is to confirm that you have the correct SPF records set up for the server and 'from' domains.
FBL is their feedback loop program, whereby they send you an email everytime someone clicks the 'spam' button on MSN mail. These should be very very low (less than 1%) and you are then expected to remove these people from your list so you dont send repeat emails to them.
SNDS allows you access to see the top level stats on mail sent from your server. It will tell you how many thousands of emails you sent to hotmail, how many of them were flagged as spam, if any were sent to trap accounts and if any of your sending IPs are currently blocked.
We sometimes get an issue where hotmail will block us, partly because our mailings are sporadic so a bit like a hacked server sending spam (eg we might send nothing through the server for 4 days then send 400k emails at once).
To be fair though, the customer service at hotmail is very good. You can raise a ticket as a mail sender and they will unblock your server within a couple of days.
It depends, people like HMV are collecting details on music preference in order tbe able to target specific offers and releases to you without bombarding you with junk you don't want.
I think email marketing is getting smarter but as I say it depends on what it is you are sending out.
Are HMV presenting potential email subscribers with a long list to fill in about their musical preferences at the sign-up stage then?
I'm interested in whether there is a correlation between the amount of information requested from potential email subscribers and the number of people who actually sign up. My guess is that simply asking for an email address is more likely to get a better response than a form asking for name, address, etc in addition to email addresses.