A few years ago, many email marketers left the commerce to explore social media avenues. Some made money, but most did not. Lately, we have been seeing a trend in old clients coming back to start email marketing again. Unfortunately, most of them are running into major issues because email marketing has once again changed. So how does one get back into email marketing?
Snowshoe email marketing (using random single IP’s with arbitrary throwaway domains) is becoming easier to block and/or blacklist because of the IPv5 deficit and new spam fighter techniques. Huge block/ranges of IP’s are the only ones not being triggered by snowshoe antispam programs, so it’s imperative to invest in large numbers of IP’s and not single ones. But, unfortunately, it’s just a quick fix unless you whitelist them. You will be blacklisted eventually if you’re using your old PMTA and no feedback loops.
So what are the steps to get back into email marketing? You will first need to clean your old lists through validation and then verification. Validation will help get rid of spamtraps, litigators, misspellings, syntax/unicode errors, complainers, departments and incorrect mx emails. Verification will remove bounces (hard, transient or soft), vacation emails, challenge responses, replies from list servers, feedback reports, mail block relay, forwarders and false positives.
Now that you have cleaned your list, you will need to test the waters with your current email server. If you’re snowshoeing, you will not be able to get any deliverability worth making money on, so you will need to split up your lists and slowly upload them into the popular ESP’s. Most of them will shut you down quickly if you have a high threshold of complaints so be careful with uploading. Even though list hygiene companies removed a lot of complainers, if you’re mailing to a list that is unfamiliar with you or forgot about you, you will definitely attract abuse.
If loading the lists slowly into the ESP’s doesn’t work, then you will need to contact them directly. If your list is yours and you generated it by your own efforts, you should not have any trouble contacting the large ESP’s and negotiating a good price to get your mail through. These ESP’s have whitelisted IP’s and your open rate will skyrocket if you’re using them, but you can’t use just one. You must use many if not all of them. The perfect setup would be 50,000 – 100,000 opens and clicks inside each ESP. But achieving that setup isn’t easy. If you’re dealing with a salesperson at the ESP, you have to go over their head and meet with the VP.
Get ready to board a plane and meet with the executives face to face and describe your situation. It doesn’t hurt to look the part of a wealthy mailer either. ESP’s won’t blink unless you start at $10,000 a month so your campaigns must be high converters. It’s either this way or have your mail continue to be blocked, or worse, blacklisted by snowshoeing. Gather a list of all the top email service providers and their competitors. Be honest with them. Build a relationship with all of them. The future of email marketing will be in their hands.
James Carner
Founder
eHygienics.com
888-462-2718
