Inbox previews provided by Litmus is a great way to ensure your message looks perfect every time and now, with our paid plans, you get more inbox previews each billing period! Preview the top nine email clients including Apple iPhone, Gmail, Apple iPad, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Google Android, Outlook.com, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live (Hotmail) mail, and AOL Mail. Make sure your message looks good on desktop as well as mobile.

Litmus charges a minimum of $99 a month to utilize this service, having it included with your ReachMail marketing account can give you an advantage and save you money. These increases are offered on all paid accounts and include the option to share your Litmus reports. See below for the outline increases per plan.

If you have any additional questions or want to know how you can upgrade your account today please email us at support@reachmail.com or call us at 888-947-3224.

A great way to build your audience is by connecting with your social media accounts.
ReachMail is pleased to announce you can now post your campaigns on LinkedIn in addition to our existing integrations with Facebook and Twitter.

With social media posting you can easily connect your campaigns with the top used social media accounts with just a couple clicks.

To read more on how to access social media posting, click here. Have more questions? Call us at 888-947-3224 or email us at support@reachmail.com.

Wildcard suppression lists are now supported inside of ReachMail. Along with the usual purpose of a suppression list, a wildcard suppression allows you to suppress addresses on a variety of wildcard factors. For example, if you have an email going out to recipients and you want to suppress anyone with a Yahoo email address; you can type @yahoo* as a address in your suppression list. This not only would prevent any from receiving it at yahoo.com but will also suppress anyone using yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.fr, yahoo.co.in, etc.

Here’s a list of possible formats that can be used in a suppression list:
*@yahoo.com – will omit all yahoo.com addresses.
*@yahoo* – will omit all yahoo domains (yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.com, yahoo.co.in, etc).
noreply@* – will omit all noreply addresses.

Moving forward, customers can now add domains and addresses to a single suppression list into a wildcard suppression list and will be able to simply apply the suppression list without first having to select how it should be applied. You can read more on the wildcard suppression here or read on how to convert your current list to this new format here.

On May 25, 2018 the European Union’s new privacy law, General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, goes into effect. Even if you’re a US based marketer – you’re still required to comply if you have any European Union based subscribers on your list. The intent is for all parties who handle personal data – not just you, but partners like ReachMail, need to affirmatively respect and manage the privacy of consumers. Here’s how ReachMail complies with GDPR.

The permission requirements are generally more strict than may come to expect. According to Litmus - the five most important criteria to decide if the subscribers permission is valid is:

1. No “pre-checked” opt-in box. The subscriber actually has to tick the box in order for their opt-in to be considered permission.
2. Keep consent requests separate from “Terms and Conditions”. In other words – don’t lump in the opt-in process along with the signup process where the customer has to agree to opt-in along with your terms. It must be a separate process. So a customer can do business with you and not opt-in to your list.
3. Make it easy to withdraw consent. If you use ReachMail then you can be assured we include an opt-out link on every email. Litmus also mentions that you can’t make people log-in or visit more than one page.
4. Keep evidence of consent. If you use ReachMail we automatically track the IP address and Country Code when someone signs up using your sign up form.
5. Check your consent practices and existing consents. Here Litmus recommends that if you don’t have permission that is compliant with GDPR then you need to do a re-engagement campaign.

However, we don’t recommend using a re-engagement campaign as a means to get affirmative permission. In our experience sending an email out requesting permission typically generates extremely low permissions (on the order of 1-2%) and extremely high spam complaints. Instead – review your subscriber list and analyze the permission status of each subscriber. Divide it into two parts – part 1 would be subscribers where you can document some sort of permission from the recipient. Part 2 is for all others. Based on your experience – if you have significant doubts about the permission status of part 2 we recommend to no longer market to that list. Why not send a re-permission request to those subscribers? I’ll give you an example of the numbers. If you had 1,000 subscribers in part 2 – a re-permission would yield probably 10 affirmatives. Your future deliverability would also be jeopardized because of the spam complaints. In the end the risk outweighs any possible reward.

To help make this processes easier we have included a country code field that populates off the geolocation of the IP address whenever someone clicks or opens one of your messages or if they sign up using a ReachMail sign up form. Using this field we have added two segments when you schedule and send messages by default called With European Country Code and Without European Country Code. Using these predefined segments in ReachMail will be able to better assist you in getting your list GDPR compliant today.

Fortunately, ReachMail has a tool designed to make sure your message looks good when opened on any popular mobile device. It’s called “Inbox Preview.” Here’s how to use it: go to your Mailings tab and click on the three dots on the far right. Highlight “Generate Inbox Preview” to start the process:

You’ll next get a chance to confirm your choice. You’ll see the nine most popular devices that the preview will run. For more details on how to use Inbox Preview check out our help document here.

Five simple tips to make your email design mobile friendly

Single Column Template: Using a single column helps prevent formatting problems that can cover up important parts of your email. This layout is simpler than many of the more popular templates designed for desktop viewing, but when you consider that someone will be scrolling through your email on a small screen, this makes more sense. In all of this, simplicity is key. Too many fancy features and sections can get very confusing on a phone screen, and you want to make engaging with your email as easy as possible.

Put most important content up-front: Similarly, you’ll want to think about laying out your email, so it flows vertically. That means everything you want them to see right away very close to the top and a logical progression as they scroll through. Like any marketing email, you’ll want something interesting to hook attention early on.

Keep font to less than 13 pixels: On a desktop, this is on the smaller side of font display, but for a phone it’s perfect. Bigger fonts will get cut off and may not display correctly. Plus, if they do, it will just look obnoxious to have words that take up the whole screen and require a lot of scrolling.

Use one call to action button with a minimum size of 44×44 pixels: This is arguably the most important part of any marketing email. This is where you get your recipients to take action, and it’s important that this button be easy to find eye-catching, and clear. If you provide more than one button, it can look spammy, or even be confusing for readers. Even if the buttons all go to the same place, putting in more than one can trigger choice paralysis for readers which is exactly what you want to avoid.

Use very few images: Keeping in line with the theme of simplicity, having only a few images keeps your email from being cluttered and reduces the likelihood of something going wrong and not loading correctly. A single powerful image is much more effective than many less-compelling ones anyway, so stick to as few as you can.

A first start is to compare your metrics vs the competition. Our friends at ReturnPath have just published a study comparing seventeen different industries and how each industry performed according to selected metrics. Here’s the chart:

How to interpret the data?
You’ll notice right away that ReturnPath has some different metric names than ReachMail. For example:

Read Rate – is similar to open rate but it’s not exactly the same. In fact it’s always going to be higher than your ReachMail open rate. Why? ReachMail measures opens by placing a tiny invisible pixel linked to a web link open counter on your email that measures each time that link is opened. This pixel is technically an “image”. What happens if someones email settings are “images off” and they open your email. In ReachMail we won’t count it. ReturnPath actually monitors real inboxes and can tell who “read” the email even with images off.

Complaint Rate – your ReachMail Spam Complaint rate is calculated the same as ReturnPath’s – the rate at which your messages are marked as spam.

Space Placement Rate – this can be only determined if you can see into the actual inbox of individual subscribers. ReturnPath has a system to do just that. This information is not available in ReachMail – however you can use open rates as a proxy for spam placement rate.

Delete before Reading rate – means that the subscriber didn’t just ignore you – they deleted. This is not available in ReachMail however it’s an interesting metric by industry

Forward Rate – generally this metric is extremely small for almost all industries but it does indicate interest. At ReachMail – we do see this substantially higher for business-to-business marketers indicating recipients share your offer to colleagues.

There are two ways to access this report.
From the dashboard – look at RECENT CAMPAIGNS, then click on the chart icon 

Or Click on the Reports tab, Campaign Reports then highlight the campaign you want to see a heatmap for.

Keep in mind that the heatmap focuses not on open rates but arguably a more valued action – clicks. The heatmap shows the hottest links to be the link that made up the highest percentage of clicks.

While you’re at the reporting page makes sure to compare your open rate to the click rates and always monitor your opt-outs and spam reports for any significant changes.

Questions? Email support@reachmail.com.

Updated January 11th, 2021

One of the advantages of living in this technological age is having the benefit of email control and management. If you’re engaged in or any kind of personal or business activity that involves bulk email sending, you need to understand how to control your emails for maximum deliverability. For the most part, that entails keeping your emails from going straight to the spam/junk folder on your recipients’ end. The first step in avoiding this is to understand why emails go to the spam folder.

Why Do My Emails Go to Spam?
There are many factors that play into whether your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes, or whether it gets automatically sent to the spam or junk folder.

1. Your subscriber isn’t actually a subscriber. In this scenario, your recipient never agreed to receive your emails. The individual didn’t subscribe, or he or she may not have even provided you with his or her email address. Maybe you got the address from a bad mailing list you purchased, or curated it yourself. Either way, you aren’t getting your intended result from your email campaign. Purchased lists are never a good idea, they contain spam traps that will sabotage your delivery.
2. Your subscriber data is getting stale. You don't have to purchase a list to collect spam traps. It's common for people to lose interest or change their minds after signing up. Sometimes people abandon accounts when they are getting too much spam. Networks recycle abandoned email accounts into spam traps and measure the interest of active accounts to gauge whether to place your messages in the inbox or junk folders. List Cleanings can help remove old stale data that has already become a threat to deliverability. Segments and Tags help you tailor targeted messages to make sure you stay in the inbox.
3. Your subscriber hasn’t added you to his or her “safe senders” list. Most email platforms today (Outlook, Gmail, etc.) allow users to create a safe senders list. This is a list of all the email senders that have been pre-approved to send emails to that user. If a valid subscriber has rules in place to prevent spam or junk mail, but hasn’t added you/your company to his or her safe senders list, your email could be circumvented to that person’s spam/junk folder (even though he or she wanted to read your email).
4. You’re email content/offer is not compelling to your subscribers – Check your metrics. If you’re open rate is trending downward re-think your content. Better yet – test new content with A/B Testing tools to see what does resonate with your subscribers.
   
5. Your email contains bad links or a blacklisted domain. These days, ISPs provide lots of built-in protection for their customers — including blocking emails that potentially contain viruses and/or spam. If your email contains suspicious links or blacklisted domains, your email could go straight to the spam/junk folder without your subscriber ever being aware that you attempted to email him or her. Use a spam checker tool to find bad links.

Stop Emails Going to Junk
You can prevent emails going to spam by instigating opt-in practices, asking subscribers to add you to their safe senders list, and vetting embedded links and domains. You can further increase your deliverability rates by eliminating addresses with expired domains, implementing re-activation campaigns and partitioning/categorizing your email lists for better management. These are all active steps you can take to stop emails from going to junk. What’s more, they can all be provided by ReachMail, helping to grow your business as well as your email success rates.

Solutions for Improving Delivery

1. List Cleanings. A List Cleaning can remove dangerous threats to your delivery and conversion results. Sending to spam traps, bots, recycled bounces, and invalid addresses is a direct path to the spam folder. Most delivery threats do not bounce, and spam traps can and do open and click on messages.
2. Segmentation: Use List Segments to prioritize delivery to hot (engaged) recipients first. ISPs like Google and Outlook grade your delivery opens. Sending to engaged recipients first or more frequently leads to better inbox placement. Continuing to send to cold (disinterested) recipients shows you aren't paying attention. You can use the built-in Segments, or create your own. Segments are easy to apply and enhance inbox placement with a few clicks.
3. Use Tags for targeted delivery. Tags can be added to recipients as a way to track specific actions. Have a special item for sale that always sells out? Tag the people that keep asking about it, so you can alert them first when new supplies are available. Tags are used with Preference Centers, Zapier (API) integrations, List Cleanings, List Imports, and many other features.
4. Run a Re-Engagement Drip Campaign with Auto Messages. By using Auto Messages to build a drip campaign, you can automate the process of re-engaging subscribers. Recipients that have stopped showing interest can be treated to special offers designed to make them engage with the message. It doesn’t have to be a revenue driving campaign, either. Send a survey or open ended question asking to recipients to reply with feedback. Once a recipient has stopped responding, getting them to engage again now will help them see future revenue driving offers in their inbox.
5. Use The Engagement Scanner to set aside unresponsive recipients. The Engagement Scanner was built specifically to target unresponsive recipients so that senders can prioritize efforts where the impact is greatest. With the Engagement Scanner, you can adjust the date range filter for your own needs, and remove or re-engage only the recipients who have never opened or clicked on any recent emails. A good general rule is that if a recipient has not opened or clicked on any of the last 10-15 emails, re-engagement efforts should be implemented.

There are lots of other reasons why your emails might go straight to spam/junk. One of the most powerful steps you can take to avoid this is to enlist the help of a qualified bulk email service provider, ReachMail. ReachMail has integrated practices in place to help you reach high deliverability rates to prevent email from going to spam. Contact Us today to learn more.

At ReachMail we deal with the A to Z of email marketing everyday – everything from Autoresponders to Zapier but we realized that we needed a comprehensive guide to email marketing terms – so we created this helpful dictionary of important terms for you to know.. We will be updating this post as email evolves and new terms come to the fore. Feel free to bookmark and enjoy!

Sign up for a free email marketing account here.

A

A/B testing
This is a testing methodology for making a comparison between two versions of an email to gather information about which yields the better performance. Also called “split testing” and “bucket testing.” Typical comparisons include differing subject lines, length of content, colors, images, and so forth.

Example: Your email list contains 30,000 addresses. Rather than blasting an email to everyone, you might A/B test two different versions sent simultaneously to two groups of 5,000 users. After 24 hours, you can analyze the results and statistics to see which version performed best. You can then send the successful email to the remaining 20,000 users. (Learn how to do A/B email testing here)

Acceptance rate
The percentage of emails not rejected/bounced by a recipient’s mail servers. Note: server acceptance of an email does not guarantee it will actually arrive in a user’s inbox, merely that the server did not reject it outright.

Adknowledge
An advertising network using advanced behavioral analysis technology to more accurately target users in social advertising and marketing over email and on search engines. Adknowldege uses an online marketplace to allow advertisers to place bids for traffic; for those who wish to gather quality clicks from outside the Google or Yahoo! ecosystems, Adknowledge is the singular choice.

Affiliate marketers can use Adknowledge to create additional income based on their customer list. When you load a list into Reachmail, Adknowledge can match each subscriber with a tailored special offer based on their known interests.

ALT tags
An “alternate” text description of an image’s contents displayed in a web browser or email client when the file fails to load or does not appear.

API
“Application programming interface” — a special set of rules and features used by software to communicate and interact with other programs. APIs allow you to connect one app to another for information sharing, data collection, and more. (Send email via an API here)

Authentication
An important digital tool to fight spam and spoofing (obfuscating the true origin of an email and impersonating another user). Authentication is the process for verifying a user’s identity in a target system or environment. This process can identify if an email originated with the domain and sender it claims it did.

Autoresponder
Autoresponders automatically generate and send an email (or a series of emails) based on a given event, such as a new user sign-up or an opt-in request. Example: A new user receives a friendly “Welcome” email automatically followed by a series of informational emails. Autoresponders can issue just one or an infinite number of emails in a series.

B

Behavioral email
Any email that is based on the actions that your customer takes when interacting with your business. A classic example is a “Shopping Cart Abandonment” email, triggered when you fill your online shopping cart yet don’t complete the purchase. You may receive a “Come back!” email encouraging you to finish buying an item. Behavioral emails are used for data driven marketing as way to customize which email messages a subscriber gets based on how they have behaved in the past.

Blacklist
A common term used in email marketing to denote a protocol used to identify and block spammers based on the IPs and domains from which they send emails. This is a literal “list” used by email servers to identify and block fraudulent email. This is an effective and independent tool that is essential in the automated maintenance of emails. However, it is not perfect and may mistakenly mark good senders as bad.

Block
A block occurs when a user specifies that they want to ignore all messages from a specific sender. This automatically sends those messages to the spam folder.

Bounce
The rejection of an email by a recipient’s email server. All emails that are undeliverable are called bounces and break down into temporary and permanent problem categories. See also: soft bounce, hard bounce.

Bounce back
An automatically generated message returned to the sender to report that their message could not be delivered. This message includes the reason for the bounce and allows the sender to know something disrupted the delivery of this email. The included code can be used to understand what happened.

Bounce rate
The bounce rate represents the percentage of sent messages that were not delivered to an inbox. This can be due to “soft” or “hard” bounces. To calculate the bounce rate, the number of bounced messages is divided by the number of delivered messages and expressed as a percentage. Bounce rates can help judge the health of a campaign. (See bounce rates and other key metrics in detailed reporting)

Broadcast
The process of sending the same email message to many email recipients. Examples include an email newsletter sent to subscribers or sales promotions sent to the ecommerce customer of a retailer.

Bulk folder
Also commonly called the “junk folder,” this is where all questionable emails go in an inbox. The bulk mail folder contains spam or incoming messages that are addressed to many recipients.

C

Call to Action (CTA)
A CTA is a common technique for motivating subscribers to do something, like click on a link. A CTA is an engaging or persuasive button or link that customers feel compelled to click. CTAs are used in email and web marketing and use common phrases such as “Click now,” “Respond today,” “Claim your free gift,” and so on.

Campaign
Also referred to as an “email blast,” a campaign is the process of creating and sending one refined marketing message to many subscribers at once.

CAN-SPAM Act
The 2003 United States law that regulates email marketing, “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.” It requires: a way to opt out of future messages; the display of your full company name and postal address; and that your email not contain blatantly fraudulent or pornographic content

CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law)
The CASL is an act that outlines new requirements and rules for how commercial electronic messages (CEM) are sent. Its key feature requires Canadian and global organizations to receive consent from recipients before sending CEMs within, from, or to Canada. It is Canada’s version of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Cinemagraph
A cinemagraph is a still photograph created to contain a small moving element while the rest of the image remains perfectly frozen. It is a unique way of emphasizing particular details.

Click
The action of an email recipient clicking on a link – a URL i.e. www.companyname.com/discountoffer

Click Through Rate (CTR)
The ratio of users who click on a specific link in your email to the total number of total users who received your email. It is used as one of the main marketing metrics that show the engagement level of your audience.

Click-to-Open Rate
A statistic used to compare the number of people that opened an email to the number that actually clicked a link inside the email. The number indicates the effectiveness of the email message. If it creates enough interest, more recipients click through to learn more; a higher CTOR signals a better campaign.

Complaint Rate
The total number of times that users report a messages spam, divided by the total number of emails that were sent. Some Email Service Providers add in the number of people who opted out and gave the reason as spam. Any complaint rate that is greater than 1 in a thousand tends to hurt email deliverability.

Confidence Level
The likelihood that your email campaign will generate the appropriate response you’re looking for, especially as expressed after an A/B test. A 95% confidence levels means that 95 out of every 100 emails will receive the desired result. The higher the number of samples used to create your confidence level, the higher it will be.

Confirmed Opt-in
Confirmed opt in refers to when a user has subscribed to a newsletter or other email marketing message by explicitly requesting it and then confirming the email address to be their own.

Content and Assets
The “Content and Assets” section in ReachMail refers to the folder that you can use to store images, PDFs, and Word documents. Content refers to any material you use on the web that is of potential value to your customers. This can include marketing emails, blog posts, how-to videos etc. Assets can be any element that can be used to in your content.

Content Library
The content library is a group of materials and messages that can be shared with users again and again. It is a bank of stored content that a user can access after registering their email address.

Cost per thousand (CPM)
A marketing term to measure the price of every 1,000 emails sent. It may also be used to mean the cost of every 1,000 advertising impressions on a page. To calculate: multiply your cost by the number of total impressions, then divide that number by 1,000. Also referred to as “CPM,” using the Latin term for thousand (mille).

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets, a web-design process for combining several style sheets and resolving any conflicts between them. It can enable the separation of a document’s content from the way it is presented, and is a more advanced way to create HTML emails.

Custom Template
An email template that is specifically designed for your marketing efforts by including include your logo, colors, font, and all associated branding. It should echo the look and feel of your website and complements all your other online marketing efforts. (ReachMail provides a free custom template for paid accounts)

D

Dedicated server
A dedicated server is a single computer in a network reserved for a single customer or purpose. With email, it refers to a server set up exclusively to send your company’s email messages — no other company or organization has access to its resources.

Deliverability
Also referred to as “inbox placement,” deliverability is a measure of how often emails make it to an inbox. Good deliverability means your emails reach their intended recipients with very few exceptions; poor deliverability can signify a big problem. It primarily depends upon whether the recipient wants to receive your email, but other factors come into play too: authentication configurations, the quality of the content’s code and formatting, and the reputation of the sender’s IP addresses and domains.

Delivered
This is the number of emails successfully reaching the subscribers inbox. They usually are defined as total volume of mail sent minus any bounced content.

Delivery rate
The percentage of emails delivered successfully to inboxes, calculated by subtracting both hard and soft bounces from the total number of emails sent. The resulting number is then divided by the gross total, yielding the delivery rate. This is one of the most important metrics for success in email marketing, and you will have to determine what rate you hope to achieve.

Disengaged
Disengaged email addresses are people on your email list who haven’t opened or clicked in an extended period. Sending to disengaged recipients hurts your email deliverability.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
A protocol that lets organizations take responsibility for transmitting an email. Their efforts are digitally verifiable by mailbox providers. DKIM is used to help cut down on and prevent spam.

Domains
A domain name is the “online” location of a website and may comprise one or more IP addresses. URLs use domain names to identify web pages. A domain may be as short as one character or as long as sixty-three, but they’re often easy to remember ways to visit your favorite sites.

Drip Marketing
An email marketing strategy that ensures there is always a steady flow of scheduled email marketing messages relevant to the recipient. The goal is to “drip” information to the subscriber. By gradually educating and ultimately exciting the user with content, you can spur them to action such making a purchasing or engaging with a website. Autoresponders are a common tool for drip marketing.

Duplicate Mailing
The process of copying an existing email, including the “From” address, hyperlinks, and all its HTML content. This allows you to easily modify a previous mailing into a brand-new mail to put into the pipeline.

Dynamic content
Email or webpage content that regularly or constantly changes based on a user’s activities. You can pre-define certain conditions, such as particular user signals, to automatically adapt the content to better interest the user. Dynamic content allows websites to present different content and approaches to different users.

E

Email analytics
A digital methodology for analyzing email behavior, used by marketers seeking more in-depth data about how recipients interact with their messages. Analytic metrics used often include email opens, clickthroughs, and any further engagement recorded by a user’s visit to the sender’s website.

Email client
A client is any program that allows users to send, receive, and read emails. Microsoft Outlook is the most commonly known client used for managing emails, but in recent years web-based clients have come to dominate the market. These include Microsoft’s Outlook.com and Google’s Gmail service.

Email domain
The web address that follows the @ symbol in an email address and tells an email server where to send a message.

Email harvesting
The unethical process of obtaining large numbers of email addresses through methods that include theft, purchase, or automated gathering programs. Basing email campaigns on harvested lists often yields poor deliverability and can result in domain blacklisting. The primary users of harvested lists are spammers.

Email Phishing
Any email message that appears to come from a legitimate institution or business and tries to direct users to a fake or compromised website in an attempt to gain personally identifiable information. Phishing is a key factor in identity theft and many email servers now use anti-phishing filters.

Email queue
Emails scheduled to be sent go into this digital “line” on an email server to wait their turn while the server processes each email. The server then transmits these emails at a very high rate.

Email shares
The number of times users have posted your emails on social media or forwarded them to another user, widening their reach and impact.

Emoji
Emoji are the next generation of the old-fashioned emoticon. These small, digital images and icons can be used to express ideas, emotions, and more. Email marketing messages can now include Emoji to increase their impact and relatability. The word derives from the Japanese words for picture (e) and character (moji).

Engagement
Any type of interaction a subscriber has with one of your marketing emails. This could be an open, clicks inside the email, forwards to other users, or even a share on social media. Interactions define the success of an email.

ESP (Email Service Provider)
An ESP or an email service provider is any company that offers you services for sending email to customers and list subscribers. They can simplify the process by providing platforms purpose-built for sending mass emails or transactional (one at a time) emails.

F

Footer
An area at the end of an email message or newsletter that contains information that doesn’t change from one email to the next, such as contact information, the company’s postal address and the unsubscribe link. The CAN-SPAM law requires these elements.

Forwards
Any email sent onward by one user to another user who was not the original recipient. This is a useful statistic to track to see when subscribers manually send your emails to others not on your list.

From address
This indicates where the email is coming from and identifies who the sender is. The format is always prefix@website.com.

From domain
The domain that is contained within the from address. For example, the from domain of the from name prefix@website.com is website.com

G

GIFs
“Graphic Interchange Format,” an image file format often used for the display of animated pictures. No matter how you pronounce it, it’s identified by the file extension .GIF.

Global Opt Outs
A global opt-out is a feature that email service providers use to allow customers to opt out of all e-mail communication. If they signed up for multiple email newsletters, a global opt-out will remove them from every list immediately.

Google Analytics
A web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and interactions by your visitors. Google Analytics can also include email campaigns and assists in tracking what happens on your website as a result of your emails. This requires connecting your email service provider with Google Analytics and provides a wealth of valuable data.

Gravestoning
The use of an inactive email to trap spam.

Gray Mail
“Gray mail” is any email that a user signed up for voluntarily but which they no longer wish to receive. Most marketers will experience problems with gray mail that result in elevate spam complaints, especially if the opt-out process is difficult.

Group
A folder within your ReachMail account for keeping lists or mailings.

H

Hard Bounce
An email message returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is invalid or does not exist. This is a type of deliverability problem that occurs due to a “permanent” error. It may be the result of account deletion, or it may be the result of typos and other syntax errors.

Header
Important routing and program information placed at the start of every email message. This includes the sender’s name and email address, the originating email server’s IP address, the recipient’s IP address, and any transfers that occur. See also: footer.

Honey Pot
A decoy computer system such as a web server meant to trap spammers who harvest email addresses and to identify their digital origin. Email blacklisting services regard users sending mail to emails operated as honeypots as spammers.

House List
Your own list of email addresses generated by people signing up on your website or otherwise giving you permission to send email to them.

HTML
Hypertext Markup Language — one of the most common languages used to create webpages and digital content on the Internet. HTML is used to create complex and visually interesting emails. Any email message that contains any type of formatting beyond basic text is classed as an HTML email.

I

Image Blocking
A setting used by email clients to block incoming images for security reasons, allowing only text to be displayed unless a user opts to download the content. If an image is blocked, the email will instead display its Alt text.

Image Library
An easily accessible repository for images that you can use repeatedly after uploading. An image library is any sufficiently large enough collection of images that can be searched and indexed. ReachMail offers users access to an unlimited image library.

Inactive
Inactive recipients are addresses that are marked as a hard bounce or opt out. These addresses are not eligible to receive mail.

Inbox Placement Rate
An important rate based on overall deliverability. It is used to determine the percentage of sent emails that reached the recipients’ inbox. To calculate, take the number of emails that reached an inbox and divide it by the number of emails sent.

Inbox Preview
This is a feature that allows you to see how your email will look and perform on a variety of popular email clients before you send it. Popular services include Litmus Inc.

IP
An “Internet Protocol” address. This is a unique address used by computers to identify themselves. With an IP address, a device can communicate with other devices over a network such as the Internet. IPs play an important role in identifying senders and recipients online.

ISP
In the email world, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) typically refer to the major recipients of marketing email messages — usually Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Comcast, AT&T, AOL, and other providers. They are the primary gatekeepers between Email Service Providers and your subscribers.

J

JPEG
An image file format commonly used on the web and in email messages, recognizable by the file extensions .JPEG or .JPG.

L

Landing page
A landing page, sometimes called a destination page, is the web page that visitors arrive at after they click the link included on an email message. It’s often a specifically designed page for an email campaign.

List Broker
A marketing company that lists or sells contact information for marketing. Most email service providers ban the usage of purchased lists as it constitutes spamming.

List Cleaning
A process that compares your list to a known list of invalid email addresses, checks for proper syntax and expired domains. Some list cleaning services also attempt to validate that the remaining email addresses are valid.

List Churn
The list of subscribers that have discontinued their emails or unsubscribed from your list.

List Engagement Scanner
A process that allows you to identify which subscribers engage with your email campaigns within a set of period of time. This is useful for culling the list of those who no longer want to receive your messages due to a lack of interest.

List Fatigue
The reduction of responses and interactions on email lists that occurs over time. Disengaged subscribers are characteristic of email list fatigue. This is most often the result when a marketer sends too many messages or those with irrelevant content.

List Growth
The positive change in the number of active subscribers after you remove those subscribers who’ve opted out. List growth is a key indicator of your marketing health.

List Hygiene
The process of maintaining an email subscriber list that maximizes its efficiency. This includes taking care of unsubscribe requests and removing email addresses that bounce while also updating valid email addresses. Most email service providers include this automatically.

List Rental
An arrangement between companies that allows a list of names and addresses of possible customers to be rented by one firm from another. It is permissible to use lists this way when the owner of the list sends the renter’s message on their behalf. This way, the renter never engages with the owner’s users on their own.

List Segments
A subset of an email list; you can break your list into as many smaller segments as you want based on certain conditions. See also: segmentation.

M

Mailing Volume
The absolute quantity of email sent out over a given period, representing the total number of issued emails.

Manage lists
An organized maintenance routine meant to optimize delivery and response rates by keeping the list free from disengaged emails while also dividing your list into manageable segments.

Marketing Automation
An automation of the engagement process that adjusts marketing messaged based on known end user interactions. Based on this data, users receive messages with different content at different intervals in order to maximize their long-term engagement and optimize revenue.

MIME (Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions)
A special format that allows the display of either HTML or text-only emails to a recipient based on the user’s email client settings. Some clients allow only text and will never see elaborate HTML messages. If a client allows HTML, they receive the full content.

O

Open
Any time an email subscriber clicks on an email to view its contents. When a user opens an email, it can also load an tiny, invisible image, often only a few pixels, hosted on a server. This enables the tracking of the email.

Openers
Openers are all the individual recipients in an email campaign who have opened the campaign’s email one or more times. Each individual is counted one time. (See examples explained here)

Opens
Opens are the total number of opened emails within a campaign. Each open is counted, even if an individual has opened an email more than once.

Opt-in Box
These are the sign-up boxes located on a website where a subscriber provides their email address. Additional fields can include name, phone number, and specific product interests.

Opt-in Rate
This refers to the percentage of site visitors who subscribe to your email list.

Opt-out link
A mandatory inclusion in all email marketing messages to be CAN-SPAM compliant. This provides a way for a subscriber to stop receiving further email messages.

Overage
An overage in email marketing is when a user sends more emails than their plan provides for, and additional charges may apply.

P

Permission
The allowance granted by a user to an email marketer to use their email address for sending them messages. Consumers rightly assume this is a privilege that marketers will not abuse. When abuse does occur, consumers react strongly in the negative, marking further emails as spam.

Personalization
Personalization is all about writing an email to make the recipient feel that was sent with him or her in mind. Personalization methods might include using the recipient’s name in the subject line or salutation, referring back to past purchases or communications, or offering special recommendations based on their buying patterns.

Plain text
Plain text is exactly what it sounds like: simple text, with no formatting options such as italics, bold, underlines, or special layout options. A plain text email can also not contain any no HTML coding, links, or images.

PNG
Portable Network Graphics, a file format (.PNG) used for the lossless compression of images in emails and on the web.

Preference Center
A digital hub that allows a subscriber to an email list to manage what types of messages they receive from a marketer. When you operate multiple newsletters at once, this is a very useful and user-friendly feature.

Pre-header text
A short summary text that comes after the subject line when an email is viewed in your inbox — often the first few lines of the email. Besides the subject, it is an important element users consider when determining whether or not to open an email.

Preview Pane
A section of the message that is seen before a user opens the full email. Optimizing this can improve open rates.

Privacy Policy
A complete public policy available on a company’s website that describes in detail how that company manages customer data, and what steps a user may take to modify or remove that data. Privacy policies provide an important framework for handling customer information. An example of a Privacy Policy.

Promotions tab
A tab or folder in a user’s Gmail account where Gmail places promotional offers and marketing emails. Gmail bases this placement on individual user actions and sender reputations.

R

Re-engagement campaign
A special email campaign sent to non-responsive email addresses on a marketer’s list, designed to reignite the user’s engagement with the marketer’s messages.

Rendering
How an email displays on an email client when a recipient opens the email message.

Resend
To send the same email marketing message out to the same subscribers again. A highly risky activity as it can lead to a spike in spam complaints from users, ultimately tarnishing the sender’s reputation and hampering their deliverability.

Responsive design
An email designed to be responsive has been coded to be device-agnostic — in other words, it should display optimally whether opened on a desktop PC, a tablet, or a smartphone.

Responsive template
An email template built on responsive design principles.

Retention
Campaigns designed to target a marketer’s own customers, as opposed to a rental campaign, in which a marketer sends emails on their behalf to another brand’s customers.

Revenue per email sent
A measure of the gross revenue divided by the number of addresses that received marketing emails. This is a good way to derive a rough estimate of a campaign’s effectiveness.

S

Schedule and Send
The act of setting a future date and time for an email campaign inside your email management program. Once you’ve scheduled the campaign, there’s no further action required on your part — the email provider will send the out the campaign as requested at the right time.

Scheduled
An email campaign that is waiting to be sent at a future date and time by the email marketing program.

Scraping
The processed used by spammers of using programs to search websites for email addresses to copy into a list for spam.

Seed list
A small list of email addresses that are used to send test email campaigns. Usually seed addresses are fully accessible to the marketer so you can review the email’s performance directly.

Segmentation
The act of dividing your email list into parts to provide more granular targeting for your campaigns. Common segmentation categories include geographic region, interest categories, purchasing behaviors, demographics, and many more. Each can be used to target specific email campaigns. By selecting audiences carefully, you can target those most likely to engage.

Sender Score
An independent service that grades the reputation of outgoing mail servers on a scale of 0 to 100. A higher score indicates a more trustworthy sender and one less likely to send spam. It is compiled through a trusted cooperative of networks who simplify the data they have and determine a sender’s reputation.

Sending domain
The originating domain for an email, used to indicate who sent the message. The reputation of the sending domain is a significant factor mail services use to determine where a message lands in an inbox.

Sending list
An email list that is used in an email marketing campaign containing all the email addresses to be targeted with a campaign.

Sent
The total number of email addresses that you attempt to transmit messages to during a campaign. The “sent” number does not include how many emails were delivered, bounced, or even viewed — it is simply a raw initial number.

Signup form
An essential form for sites that want to offer newsletters for frequent and interested visitors. The sign-up form allows visitors to easily register for an account or enroll their email in your mailing list. This form is embedded on a website that is easy to access and view. Many ESP’s provide tools to create signup forms.

SMTP
“Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” — the protocol that moves your email on, around, and across networks. Your email account uses SMTP to send a message to a server, and that server then uses SMTP to send the message to the right recipient server.

Social Media Sharing
The process by which your email campaign is sent to your email list while simultaneously being posted to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Soft Bounce
A soft bounce occurs when an e-mail message sent to a working address gets as far as the recipient’s mail server but is bounced back undelivered because of a temporary error. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full or because of email content issues. Soft bounces are most often returned with a technical code explaining the reason the email was returned.

Spam checker tool
This feature analyzes the content of your email to see if anything in your email would be considered spam in other programs. The tool looks at the text, images, domains, and HTML code.

Spam complaints
A spam complaint occurs when a recipient clicks on the ‘report spam’ button in their email program. If their ISP has a Feedback Loop (FBL), that action is passed back to ReachMail, and the user is automatically opted-out of your campaign. ReachMail also counts people who opt-out and give the reason of “spam” as a spam complaint.

Spam trap
Spam traps are email addresses that are never used for legitimate mail but are placed around the internet to be picked up by scrapers. Spam traps are able to detect spam, track where it has come from, and block that IP address for future. See also: honeypot.

Spammer
A person or entity that sends unsolicited email or text to a large number of recipients.

Statistical relevance
The likelihood that a relationship between two or more variables is caused by something other than random chance. This can be important when assessing the impact of different changes in your marketing campaigns.

Subscriber value
A formula that is used to calculate how much each subscriber is worth to you. “Lifetime value” is a similar term based on the customer, rather than their specific email.

Subscription form
A basic but important form that you can place on your website, containing fields for an individual to complete, such as their email address, name, phone number, and so on. A good subscription form provides marketers with detailed information for targeting the user.

Suppression file
Another term for suppression list; see below.

Suppression list
A list of email addresses used by a marketer to prevent messages from reaching particular individuals during a campaign. This might be temporary, e.g., suppressing customers who’ve already purchased a promotional product, or it can be permanent for subscribers who’ve chosen to opt out.

Survey builder
A useful tool for creating online surveys to send to your customers as part of an email campaign. These surveys can use yes/no questions, multiple-choice options, or even open-ended response questions. Survey Builder reports individual responses alongside summarized statistics.

Surveys
Surveys are a systematic way of collecting, recording, analyzing, and interpreting of the data about existing products or services in the market. Generally, surveys are done in accordance with the needs, opinions, and expectations of the consumers asking or raising some relevant questions.

T

Tag
A way of updating email addresses on the fly with new information. For example, a customer who purchases Product Y can be tagged as a purchaser of that product. Tags can be used to direct specific marketing messages or as a part of targeting.

Targeting
This is the selection of customer email addresses that are most likely to respond to your offer. Ideally, targeting selects customers who’ve made inquiries or purchased similar products recently and with frequency. You may also include people who are highly engaged with the campaign.

Template
A template is simply a type of online stationery that has built in colors, fonts, and formatting. A marketer can add images, text, and links to the template to customize and make it their own. This cuts down on the work needed to create new campaigns.

Test email
An email campaign sent to a small list enabling the sender to view how the email renders and to see how it performs in inbox placement.

Text
The words contained in the message of the email campaign.

Thank you page
A page to which subscribers are redirected immediately after filling out a form or making a purchase. The “Thank You” page communicates the next steps for the subscriber or records the details of a sale or a form completion.

Throttling
Controlling the amount of emails sent out from an ISP or a remote server at one time; in other words, throttling is the process of slowing down the emails you send out in order. There are many reasons for this, but often it helps to improve deliverability.

Tracked Links
Links within your email campaign that are assigned a tracking page. Subscribers who click the link briefly hit this link before their landing page. ReachMail counts the number of visits to those links within a campaign.

Transactional emails
Transactional emails are emails sent based on a specific action of a customer or prospect. Typical examples include account signups, password resets, or order confirmations. ReachMail’s Easy-SMTP is a free service designed to send transactional email.

Transient block
A temporary block which we categorize as a soft bounce. ISPs typically use this to tell you that the email campaign being sent is above the threshold for spam complaints from users and indicates you should make some immediate changes.

Triggered Emails
These are emails sent on a trigger based on a customer’s purchasing behavior or data profile. They are timely, personalized, and relevant, and can maximize their impact when timed correctly.

U

UCE (unsolicited commercial email)
A legal term to refer to any email sent to a consumer without their prior request or consent with the intent of creating a commercial gain.

Uncomfirmed opt-in
When a user only needs to submit their email address to a sign-up form one time, this is an “unconfirmed opt-in.” Users added this way do not need to interact in any other way; they immediately go onto your email list for messaging.

Unique Openers
All individuals who’ve opened one or more emails in one email campaign. Each individual is counted just once – even if they opened the email multiple times. This is another important way of tracking campaign success.

Unique clicks
All individuals who have clicked on a specific tracked link in an email campaign. Each individual is counted just once – even if they’ve clicked on the email multiple times.

Unsubscribe
The act of un-enrolling from an email list. Users can either click an “Unsubscribe” link or send an email stating they no longer wish to be on the list. Also known as “opting out.”

Upload
The act of transferring a file from one program to another program. Most commonly you “upload” users to a list or a mailing program, adding them to your marketing efforts.

URL
“Uniform Resource Locator,” a major way of describing where to find a website online. This is the address of a specific Web site or a file on the Internet. URLs are used to produce hyperlinks and allow users to send emails with a single click.

W

White List
A list of domains/servers and/or IP addresses that Internet service providers have judged trustworthy and unlikely to represent spam or malware risks.

Knowledge is power – familiarize yourself with these terms

And that’s it! From A/B testing to whitelisting and everything in between, this primer should be the perfect springboard for taking a deeper dive into email marketing. Soon, you’ll be perusing analytics, thinking about your CPM, and boosting your impressions like a pro. It all has to start somewhere — so why not with a brand-new vocabulary? Questions? Feel free to Contact Us and we’ll update this blog as email marketing evolves.

How do you know what offer/creative will perform the best for your subscribers? ReachMail makes it easy to find out by using our A/B testing tool. You can find out what’s the best:

Subject Lines
“Buy one get one free this Saturday only”
Or
“50% off this Saturday only”

Content
Does a red background perform better than a blue background?

A/B testing allows you to test any email against another at the same time. ReachMail’s tool allows you to randomly pick an equal small sample of email addresses from your list, send them at the same time and compare the results. You can then pick the top performing email version and send just the winner to the rest of your list.

Easy Reporting
The A/B testing reporting here shows clearly that the red version performs better than blue.

Same Detailed Reporting as regular campaigns
Our new enhancement now also provides full regular detail that you’ve come to expect. See complete details including open, bounce and clicks. You can download each as usual.

Check out step by step how to use the A/B testing tool here.

Questions? We’d love to hear from you – email support@reachmail.com or call us at 888-947-3224.

• Use automated campaigns: We’ll start with one of the clearest ways to make your email marketing more effective. Set up an autoresponder email service that runs automatically. Using ReachMail or a similar platform, you can make sure that your company never fails to acknowledge an email from a potential customer by having it send a predetermined response whenever you receive a message. NGO charity: water exercised this strategy to great effect in a campaign that automatically sent each donor an update on the project and showed them the people it was helping.

• Pay attention to your copy: a lot of companies understand that it’s important to send emails, but many of them don’t pay enough attention to their content. You might be surprised to learn how many companies are run by people who can’t or don’t take the time to write well—but customers notice. That’s why successful email marketers like the ones at Buzzfeed make a point of jazzing up their copy with jokes, catchy phrases, and references that their target markets will enjoy. Join their mailing list, and you’re sure to see good examples whenever you open a message from them. Pro tip – use an A/B testing tool to see which version works best.

• Offer incentives: marketing shouldn’t be a con, it should be an offer to exchange value. You’re not trying to trick people into giving you their time, attention or money—you’re providing them with something that they need, and they’re compensating you for it. Ramit Sethi offers some good advice on how to create meaningful incentives for your potential customers: make your free content better than your competitors paid content. Focus on giving your target market something they can use is an excellent way to boost your conversion rates and see them opt into your mailing list or subscribe to a paid service.

• Reward your subscribers for referring others: incentives aren’t just necessary for acquiring new subscribers. You’ll also want to make sure that you’re growing your mailing list—and the best way to do that is through word of mouth. You can turn a customer into a recruiting asset by offering them further benefits for bringing in their families and friends. Since potential clients that have been referred are over 30% more likely to convert than those who haven’t, this is an area you can’t overlook.

• Grab ‘em with your subject lines: ever open an email from an unfamiliar company with a subject line that includes phrases like “special offer” or “best product ever”? Yeah, me neither. If you want your emails to stand out from the deluge of spam that your customers receive every day, you have to be creative. It’s even better to be funny—check out this list of clever email marketing subject lines for some excellent ideas.

Email remains one of the most practical tools for you to grow your business—you just have to think outside the box a little. You can test these strategies for free with ReachMail, and watch as your emails net you increasingly more customers.

We recently attended the Email Sender and Provider Coalition semi-annual meeting in Palo Alto in May, Gmail’s Product Manager Sri Harsha Somanachi had these suggestions to get into the Gmail inbox:

• Personalize as much as possible – Gmail empowers users to control their inbox. If your email ends up in the bulk folder and the user marks your email as “Not Spam” Gmail will weigh this heavily in your favor and lean towards placing your email into the inbox. How should you personalize? Consider:
  • Segregating your non-openers – This will keep your spam complaints down. (Here’s how it’s done in ReachMail)
  • Personalizing content – Use the subscribers history to send them a unique appeal. Possible options beyond their name include product purchase history, website usage and to a lesser extent demographic data including age, geography and gender.

• Take seed list inbox data with a grain of salt. If your seed list is bulking that may not necessarily reflect bulk folder placement. Seed lists such as Return Path’s Inbox Monitor may not show user engagement like actual subscribers. Somanchi said that when he gets complaints of seed lists bulking, he often see actual subscribers inboxing.

• Make sure your email is authenticated - At a minimum, conduct an SPF check or DKIM check. Furthermore, to be extra careful, Gmail recommends publishing a DMARC policy.

• Send from a consistent sending IP – Gmail still strongly measures your sending IP reputation. Don’t switch it up.

• Use GMail’s Postmaster Tools You can check on your sending reputation and can see the trendline in how your email is perceived by Gmail.

• Starting new? Start extremely slowly – If you have a new brand or domain, Somanchi recommends starting very small. Send just 10 emails per day and ramp up only by a factor of 1.

• Warm-up ALL your sending infrastructure - Gmail looks at everything – your sending IP, the “From” domain, DKIM, SPF and the “from” header. If you change just one of those – (e.g. from domain), you need to warmp-up all over again.

• Screw up? Take a break - If you send an email that severely damages your reputation – don’t “mail through”. Rest your sending infrastructure at least 3 or 4 days, correct the issue and start very slowly again.

• Enable one-click unsubscribe - Top brands know that making it easy to unsubscribe dramatically cuts down on “spam” complaints. Don’t feel like making it easy? Your subscribers will mark your mail as “spam” if it’s difficult to opt-out. Here’s how it looks:

To enable one-click unsubscribe, Gmail states “Provide a ‘List-Unsubscribe’ header which points to an email address or a URL where the user can unsubscribe easily from future mailings. (Note: This is not a substitute method for unsubscribing.) “ Check out more at ReachMail.

Nothing is certain, except death and taxes—and according to the latest surveys, nonstop work email. In Part 1, we talked about Americans’ relationship with work email and learned that while there are some differences from region to region, as a whole, work email remains a major, constant component to most people’s lives. So, is that a problem? ReachMail recently surveyed 1000 people to learn what it means to manage their inboxes.

When asked how much email respondents deal with, it’s unsurprising to see that 54% stated that they receive more email now than they did three years ago. Thanks to remote work and smartphone access, emailing is not limited to the 9-to-5 hours offices used to keep. 25% of respondents said they send emails after 6pm, and 23% admitted to sending emails even later, after midnight.

So who’s sending these emails? Interestingly, it’s men who are sending more after-hours emails, with 62% to women’s 46%. By age demographic, Gen Xers are most likely to send a work email after midnight, whereas 49% of Millennials claim to never click Send after 9pm. This might be because Millennials are not far enough into their careers to warrant more urgent or immediate action on business emails. The survey notes the connection between growing work responsibility and the tolerance for after-hours email. In fact, only 1 in 5 respondents who make $105k or more consistently say no to email during time off.

If Millennials are least likely to be sending post-work emails, they have the opposite issue for receiving such emails. According to the survey, Millennials get the most after-work emails at 62%, followed by 49% Gen-Xers and 47% Baby Boomers. This could be because Gen Xers were first adopters when emailing became such a prevalent part of work culture, whereas Millennials have always had email integrated into their lives, and companies might incorrectly assume that Millennials want to be connected at all hours. If they do, it’s probably not to their jobs but friends, family, and Facebook instead.

Speaking of personal time, at least 29% of those surveyed said that they frequently check their work email on days off and on weekends, and 46% check occasionally. Those percentages decrease for vacation but still—61% of people check at least occasionally while on vacation.

Why? Some respondents—in fact, 55% of Millennials—say that receiving and responding to work emails makes them feel important. That might help explain why Millennials are most likely to adopt the practice of inbox-zero than Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers. The fact that inbox-zero practitioners are more likely to check email more than 25 times per day, it’s no wonder that after-hours emails are so easily tolerated.

You can pick say people who’ve opened your email in the last week – or people who’ve clicked between January through March 10 – whatever you want. You can refine your search until you’re satisfied.

You can add additional segmentation too. Cross open activity with any other fields in your list i.e. State, Products Purchased, Gender, Job title – whatever you have.

Using list segments should should significantly increase your open rates and have a positive impact on your deliverability. Questions? Email support@reachmail.com.

We surveyed one thousand people who consider email significant to their work, to find out which parts of the country have the busiest professionals.

Americans differ when it comes to the rate at which they check work email. Thirty percent have their email open constantly, 54 percent check their email multiple times per day, and just 16 percent check their email once a day or less. Thirty-seven percent of workers in the Northeast report their email is constantly open in front of them at work, and 31 percent from the West say the same—these two regions are both above the national average. Massachusetts has the national high, with 68 percent of professionals in the state reporting they have their email open throughout the work day.

How about the infamous “first check” of the day—does it happen in bed, at breakfast, on the train, twenty minutes after you’ve arrived at the office and gossiped for a bit? Well, 71 percent of Americans check for the first time between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m. New York and New Jersey average the latest first check—just before 9 a.m.—and people in Utah check earliest, just after 6:30 a.m., on average.

As for checking for the last time before bed, thirty percent of Americans check before 6 p.m. and 70 percent after 6 p.m. Forty-six percent of Virginians check their email for the last time between 9 p.m. and midnight, while 13 percent more finish up after midnight. Not to be outdone, 71 percent of Tennesseans are fellow night owls, checking their email after 9 p.m., and just 12 percent check last before 6 p.m., well below the national average.

When it comes to sending emails, nearly half of all Americans (46 percent) send fewer than 10 emails per day. Thirty percent of people send 10 to 25 emails per day, 16 percent send 25 to 50, and eight percent send more than 50 emails per day. The West has the lowest average of sent emails, at 18 per day. The Northeast tops all regions and averages 22 sent emails per day, while Massachusetts has the national high of 28 emails sent per day, on average.

Response time on these emails also varies from region to region. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say they respond to emails within one hour. Twenty-six percent respond within one to six hours, 11 percent respond within six to 24 hours and the remaining five percent respond after 24 hours, on average. Virginians report the quickest email replies with an average response time of just over two hours. New Yorkers, surprisingly, are on the slow end—12 percent say they average a day or more to respond and 33 percent take at least six hours.

Unread emails also vary in number based on region. Over half of Americans have less than 10 unread emails in their work inbox. Twenty-six report having less than 50 unread emails, 13 percent have more than 100 unread emails and six percent have between 50 and 100. South Carolina reports the most unread emails, with an average of 29, while a whopping 30 percent of Tennesseans report having more than 100 unread emails. The Midwest has the fewest, with an average of 17.

A common question we receive from marketers is “How do I get better deliverability?” We typically review a sender’s lists, offer and authentication setup to make sure the sender is sending the right offer to the right person using a valid email configuration (i.e. DKIM or SPF with the proper domain setup)

But what if your list is great, you’re sending out highly engaging email using the correct setup? One possible source of problems is what if a spammer is “spoofing” your email? Unbeknownst to you, a spammer could be forging your sender address and get a free ride on your reputation. Until very recently you’d have no idea how to find out if this is happening.

Fortunately, major senders like PayPal and major banks and receivers like Gmail, AOL and yahoo have collaborated to develop a specification called DMARC to combat this problem.

Basically – it’s a way to tell the recipient what to do with email that they receive that’s not aligned. You publish a policy on which authentication mechanism DKIM, SPF or both.

Examples are:

• Mis-matched From and DKIM signature domains.
• Use of sub-domain in signature or From without corresponding support in the DMARC record.

You have several choices to tell the recipient what do with misaligned email:

• None – monitor – telling the recipient that you are not making a recommendation on what to do with any misaligned email. It’s best to start here and then gradually move to making recommendations
• Quarantine – tells the receiver to treat the email with suspicion
• Reject – tells the receiver to not accept any email that doesn’t pass alignment

Why wouldn’t you consider automatically telling recipients to reject non-aligned email? Keep in mind that you may be a larger organization that sends a variety of email – corporate, marketing or transactional. Plus you may have a variety of users sending out different versions – legitimately of each type of email. It’s best to get reports on the failures sent back to you so you can fix alignment. Participating receivers send back:

• Source IP – the IP sending the email
• Count – how many of each version received
• Disposition – what the recipient did with the email
• SPF – pass or fail
• DKIM – pass or fail
• Header from: ie. example.org

Besides getting great information on your email that’s sent another major benefit is that you’ll see enhanced email deliverability. Gmail, for example, states that email that’s not authenticated are likely to be placed in the junk folder. They recommend publishing a DMARC policy. For more detailed information check out our DMARC support article.

This is great because before – you would have to have advanced technical skill to connect ReachMail’s API to that other apps API – no small task.

The main benefit is that you can move email addresses back and forth between ReachMail and virtually any other application. Here’s just a small sampling of the applications you can connect to:

Gravity Forms and ReachMail. Gravity Forms is a WordPress app that makes it easy to create signup forms on your WordPress powered website.

Unbounce and ReachMail. Unbounce allows you to build landing pages that have excellent conversion rates – meaning visitors won’t bounce away. Hence “Unbounce”

SalesForce and ReachMail. SalesForce is the world’s largest customer relationship management tool. Extremely powerful and used by some of the biggest organizations.

Google Sheets and ReachMail. Google Sheets is a cloud based spreadsheet alternative to Microsoft Excel.

WordPress and ReachMail. WordPress is a free content management system that allows you build websites for free. You’ll be able to notify all of your ReachMail subscribers automatically when you have a new blog post.

Zoho and ReachMail. Zoho is a CRM system built for small businesses.

Invoice Ninja and ReachMail. Invoice Ninja is a free, open source way to create invoices. You’ll be able to post to ReachMail anyone you invoice through Invoice Ninja.

How would this work in actual practice? With Zapier – you can take anyone who signs up for your list in Gravity Forms automatically be added to your ReachMail account and also be added to your Zoho CRM system. Or anyone you add to SalesForce can be added automatically to ReachMail. If you then send a campaign to your contacts with ReachMail then you can update your SalesForce account with activity data, ie. opens, clicks, bounces or un-subscribes.

For a complete list of all Zapier apps that you can connect to check out https://zapier.com/app/explore.

Questions? Email support@reachmail.com or call us at 888-947-3224.

So…unless you lived under a rock for the past year, you couldn’t help but notice that emojis, emoticons, smiley faces, or whatever you choose to call them exploded across the internet.

Let’s start with the basics. What is an “emoji?” Emojis are pictographs—images that represent facial expressions, weather, emotions, or activities.

Here are some examples:

How can I use ReachMail to insert emoji’s?

COMPOSE MAILING

When you set up your mailing in the COMPOSE MAILING click on the emoji button to the right of the Subject field:

You’ll see a variety of emoji’s to pick from

Click on one or more – you can have multiple emojis

Who created the first emoji?

Shigetaka Kurita first created these images in the 1990′s. He was involved in the launch of the world’s first mobile internet platform.

There are as many as 1,800 emojis currently supported on various platforms, and thisn umber is set to grow. An indicator of their popularity is Facebook’s global adoption of emojis in early 2016. They are called “reactions” under Facebook posts.

Facebook Emojis:

In short, language is changing. Don’t be surprised if, in the not so distant future, children use emojis as part of their creative writing classes. Even the dictionary has its own specific area for emojis.

How is all this relevant to email subject lines?

Put simply, brands using emojis in their subject lines saw a 45% increase in their unique open rates, according to a report by Experian.

Why are Emojis so effective in increasing open rates?

Aside from being new and shiny there are several reasons why emojis are increasing open rates for brands.

Space savers:

Space is at a premium in subject lines, especially considering the increased number of email users on mobile devices. If you want your entire subject line to fit on a mobile device, you have about 30-40 characters to use max. Emojis save space. You can communicate more with less!

Convey emotion:

Brands are constantly working to make an emotional connection with their customers. Words can’t always convey emotion, but emojis do.

Creativity:

Creativity is infectious. Subject lines grow repetitive as they compete to entice users. Emojis provide the opportunity to include creativity to attract your audience.

Stand out in a crowded inbox:

Inboxes are increasingly full. It requires ongoing effort for your emails to stand out from the crowd. Emojis increase the visibility of your message and email above others.

Innovation:

Emojis are an innovative development in how we speak to each other. Utilizing them shows your company is an innovative and forward-thinking communicator.

Word of caution…

As with anything, it’s a good idea to assess the suitability of your marketing methodology. For example, if your email is addressed to a high net-worth firm of lawyers, maybe the below set of emojis are not appropriate. Perhaps it’s better to leave them out.

Don’t go overboard

While you might be on the emoji bandwagon, these fun little images aren’t something you want in every subject line or you’ll risk emoji burnout. Use in moderation.

Wrapping up…

There you have it. Language is changing, and in turn so are subject lines. When executed correctly, Including emojis can have a dramatic effect on your email open rates. Just remember the best emoji email marketing software is ReachMail. Sign up for free email marketing at ReachMail.

As a manager of email marketing campaigns, you like to think you get it right with your messaging—people are excited to receive the emails you create, right? Unfortunately, not everyone in charge of email marketing tools uses them correctly. It’s entirely possible you’re making one or more of the many common emailing mistakes known to more savvy marketers. We think the best way to help you remember (and avoid) these worst practices is to use memorable characters to explain them!

For starters, don’t be like Jeremy Grey in Wedding Crashers and just show up uninvited. Rather than email people who never signed up for your messages, invest time in developing strategies that encourage recipients to opt in to your list. Try offering deals and rewards, which are often very effective.

Stacy in Wayne’s World is another poor role model, never quite getting the clue that her ex-boyfriend moved on. If a recipient wants to unsubscribe from your emails, don’t ignore the request or make up a story about how it’ll take a while to get off the list. Just take care of it.

Make sure when people want to unsubscribe, the process doesn’t bring about aggravating images of Vizzini from The Princess Bride. Forget long checklists and multiple windows. It should be a simple click to unsubscribe, that’s it.

If you’re showing up all the time like Bob in What About Bob?, you’re doing it wrong! Sending daily messages (unless completely justified) is an easy way to turn off your target audience. Make sure when you email people, you have a compelling reason.

No email marketer wants to be like Chief Clancy Wiggum of The Simpsons. That includes you! Don’t move so quickly that you leave a bunch of mistakes in your emails. Typos, factual errors and spelling problems are just a few things that annoy recipients. Always take the time to proofread and edit carefully.

Don’t make people wait for your messages to download because of large images and fancy graphics, either. If you do, you’re Jack Sparrow of Pirates of the Caribbean. Keep emails simple and concise.

Make sure your email marketing software isn’t from the Stone Age. If you’re running an outdated platform, you’re Link from Encino Man. Emails should be optimized for mobile so people looking at messages on their phone can read them easily.

Another behavior to avoid is the old bait and switch. Don’t use provocative subject lines to trick people into reading your messages, let The Joker from The Dark Knight mess around with that. Avoid using overly exciting subject lines that don’t reflect what’s really in the body of your email.

Being aimless and unfocused like The Dude in The Big Lebowski can cause problems. After reading your email, recipients should have a clear understanding of the logical next step.

Be careful, too, that your messages don’t come across as insincere. Acting like you’re someone’s close friend when you’re not comes across as sleazy, like Ned from Groundhog Day.

And finally, make sure you use a consistent tone in subject lines and the content of your emails. Otherwise you’re acting like Frank Abagnale, Jr. of Catch Me If You Can. Be sincere and straightforward—people know you represent a business and you’re reaching out to a list. Don’t pretend otherwise.

We hope these tips make some of you squirm in your seat as you reflect on the email marketing tactics you’ve used thus far. From now on, be the good guy and follow the Golden Rule—communicate with people as you’d like other businesses to communicate with you!

ReachMail is pleased to announce an enhancement to the autoresponder tool – new immediate delivery. Now you can choose to have a message sent right away to subscriber as soon as they are added to your list.

Autoresponders allow you to send a timed, series of emails to new subscribers. You can set the exact time and frequency you want including send to them immediately when they are added. For example, you can send an email immediately upon signup, 3 hours later and once a week for a set number of weeks. Once you set up the autoresponder you’re done. You can use this feature to educate prospects about your product, build excitement and turn them into customers.

For details on setting up an Autoresponder in ReachMail check out our support documentation.

We’ve seen fantastic open rates with autoresponders. Why? Because you’re communicating right when they’re interested in your topic! They’ve searched for information, found your site and found it so engaging they gave you their email address.

So what are the key things you need to keep in mind when setting up an autoresponder?

1. Decide the goal of the autoresponder. Remember it’s a series of emails – not just one and they all have to work together. Here are examples of excellent goals:
   • Build interest and excitement for your online product. Here you don’t try to sell your product on the first email. You introduce the product, build awareness and excitement and then finally make an incredible offer to convert them to a buyer.
   • Educate new prospects and buyers on how to use your product. You’ll drive increased customer satisfaction and engagement.
   • Identify your best prospects – with the series you can identify who responds and to which product area generates the highest enthusiasm.
2. Figure out the schedule and role of each email before you write content for each one.
3. Don’t assume your subscribers understand your product and your brand. You know the product inside and out – they don’t.

Once you set up an autoresponder – you can forget it – but DON’T. Here’s a checklist of what to do:

• Check open and rates by each message.
• Periodically actually look at your content. The worst thing you can do is mention out-of-date information including expired sales and no longer valid links
• Experiment with dates and times – maybe a one hour delay makes more sense for your product.
• Consider adding an additional autoresponder to increase engagement.

Already have an autoresponder in ReachMail? You can convert it to an immediate autoresponder if you’d like – simply visit Tools – Autoresponder – Edit.

You’ll also notice new enhancements to autoresponder reporting. For details check out our reports documentation.

Remember – free autoresponders are included with every ReachMail account.

Questions? Email support@reachmail.com or call us at 888-947-3224.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the recent change that Gmail has begun to roll out called the “Promotions” tab. If you’re blissfully unaware, Google is now filtering users’ emails and automatically filing what they deem to be marketing-related away from the primary inbox and into a separate tab. What does this change mean for email marketers? Well, so far, the impact has been relatively minor, with reports of a drop in open rate of around 1-2%. While this may not seem like a huge amount, it can still ultimately affect your bottom line, and with the rollout still not complete, we could see these numbers rise.

The good news is, there are some things you can do to counteract this new feature and improve the chances of your emails effectively reaching the primary inboxes of your target audience. Here’s how.

First and foremost, don’t make it obvious that your emails are promotional in nature. Instead, focus on crafting messages that have a more personal feel. You can accomplish by applying the following guidelines:

• Address each recipient by name
• Format your messages more like traditional letters
• Keep your messages short and to the point
• Avoid using too many images
• Limit links to just one or two

Not only do these things make the reader feel like they are being addressed individually rather than receiving a mass sales pitch, but Google tends to view these types of messages the same way, which means they’re less likely to be flagged as “promotional.”

Next, focus on the actual content of your emails. The ultimate goal isn’t just to avoid being relegated to the “promotions” folder, but to actually get your recipients to open and read your messages. This isn’t going to happen unless they feel as though doing so will be worth their while. Make sure you’re deliveringcontent that is useful and valuable to your target audience. The more engaged your recipients are, the less likely your messages will be rerouted to the circular file.

Of course, you can’t expect people to open your emails if you’re not drawing them in with captivating and compelling subject lines. Think of these as the wrapping on a gift. You want your subject lines to catch the eye of your target audience and entice them into wanting to open up and see what’s inside.

You also have to know what words and phrases tend to trigger Gmail’s auto-filtering feature. For instance, research has shown that using words like “free,” especially when in combination with other common words, like “trial,” “sample,” or “quote” in your subject line can significantly increase the likelihood of your email being flagged. Your best bet? Grab a thesaurus and find a really good synonym.

Another simple way you can help your emails avoid ending up in the promotions tab is to simply reach out and talk to your customers. Many still haven’t received the new feature and those who have may not even be aware of the change. Others may not realize they can control their email options. Start by educating your audience about the new feature and then provide specific instructions on how they can ensure that they continue to receive your messages. (Provided you’re doing your job of delivering quality content, this part shouldn’t be that challenging because your audience will actually want to keep reading your emails.)

Another way you can take much of the guesswork out of making sure your emails end up where you want them to is by working with an email marketing service provider – preferably one that knows how to leverage technology to maximize deliverability. This includes things like automatic white-listing, identity authentication, spam analysis and ongoing monitoring, all of which can dramatically improve the chances of your emails making the cut the first time, every time.

Finally, it’s important to point out that while these tips are effective, they’re not foolproof. There’s really no magical formula for “beating the system,” so to speak. For this reason, you’ll also want to take appropriate measures so that if your emails do end up in the promotions tab, your audience will go looking for them. Some tricks of the trade include creating more time-sensitive offers and using a numbered sequence in your emails (i.e. part 1 of 4, etc.). Play on your readers’ fear of missing out.

So, whether you’ve already begun experiencing the backlash of this latest Gmail feature, or you’re trying to plan ahead, it’s never too early to start developing a strategy to help lessen the impact this change will have on your bottom line. The tips and tricks listed above should help position you for ongoing success in your future email marketing endeavors. Finally, you can experiment at no extra cost by signing up with free email marketing provider ReachMail where you can get a free account for life!

Zombie addresses or unengaged recipients are people who have subscribed to your mailings but have stopped clicking or opening your messages.

According to MediaPost about 10-25% of email addresses are abandoned annually.

Why is this a problem? Campaigns sent with a high percentage of zombies look spammy to ISP’s like Aol, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. They’re likely to start junking the rest of your good, active email addresses. Your email open rates plummet.

What should you do? ReachMail has just released an enhanced Zombie list removal tool that now allows you to select multiple lists, find out how many zombies there are, and gives you options on how to remove them. Check out the details here.

Questions? Email support@reachmail.com or call us at 888-947-3224.

You spend a lot of time and money crafting emails that are engaging to the average subscriber, and when engagement levels (open rates, click rates, etc…) start to trend down for the average subscriber, it’s up to you to re-engage before you lose them altogether. Since investing in acquisition of new customers is six to seven times costlier than re-activating past customers, there is a huge value in investing in re-activation campaigns.

Slideshare.net reports that, on average, 60 percent of subscribers to a list are “dead.” According to data from MarketingSherpa and EmailLabs, you will see a drop of between 20 and 25 percent in subscribers’ open rates within the first two months after signing up for an email list, and a 35 to 45 percent decrease two years later. MailChimp also reports that engagement tends to bottom out around the 100th campaign.

Why Subscribers Stop Engaging
One of the main causes of lack of engagement is frequency. There is a definite negative correlation between the frequency with which emails are sent and the level of reader engagement. In fact, 69 percent of American email users report having unsubscribed altogether from an email list because emails were sent too frequently.

Another culprit is the junk folder, or sending delays. Even small delays between sending and delivery can cause problems, especially if emails contain time-sensitive offers, like a flash sale. This can be caused by a number of things, like lower engagement than similar competitors whose communications the ISP may route through first. Problems can mount because of this; if open and clickthrough rates drop too low because of delays, ISPs may begin to route your emails directly to the junk folder. If you aren’t periodically checking on and cleansing your email lists of dead emails, you may even wind up blacklisted. ISPs monitor dead email addresses for sending, and often mark email senders to those addresses as spam, another way to get your email sent to the spam folder without your knowledge.

Subscribers also will stop reading if the content is bad or not useful. Of CIO’s top seven reasons people unsubscribe from email lists, quality of content represents four. Typically, the larger an email list is, the lower its open rates tend to be. This could be a result of companies being less able to tailor custom content to individual customers and/or customers having less of a personal relationship with the company.

Chances are your subscribers are opening your email on mobile devices. In fact, as of Q1 2015, 53 percent were. This can lead to a sharp drop in open rates if your emails are not optimized for mobile viewing.

Focusing On Deliverability
Definitions of spam aren’t as content-focused as they used to be. As ISPs are focusing more on how subscribers are responding to your emails, re-engaging inactive subscribers can improve your inbox placement. If the balance is off between your active and inactive subscribers, ISPs might start to think you’re a low-quality sender and relegate you to the junk folder—or worse, block you altogether.

Gmail in particular wants to see evidence that your recipients love, or at the very least, want your messages as a determining factor for whether you land in the spam folder. Generally speaking, ISPs and email providers such as Google, Microsoft, AOL and Comcast handle sender reputation at the individual level. Of the 95 percent of emails that are blocked and/or automatically routed to spam folders, 85 percent have it done on the basis of sender reputation. The idea is to give the individual user what he or she will find most relevant by reacting to his or her opening and clickthrough habits. Signs that are considered positive by algorithms include: moving a message out of the spam folder/marking as not spam, replying, adding the sender to an address book, reading/viewing or moving to another folder or tagging.

On the negative side, signs considered bad by algorithms include: deleting a message without opening or reading, marking as spam or moving to the junk folder, or reporting the email as a phishing attempt. Clicks are not tracked as a metric for reputation, as tracking what a user does within an email generally is considered to be a violation of privacy.

Defining Inactives
Taking it a step further, the majority of marketers will gauge inactives as anyone who has not responded, opened, clicked or acted on any email in the past six to twelve months. Inactives may be best defined as people whose email addresses are still active and valid, but who are not engaging in any way with your emails. The average list’s inactive rate is around 60 percent. This means that a list of 10,000 has only 4,000 true subscribers reading its posts. Considering the huge amount of time online marketers spend building their lists, having a majority of the list not responding after signing up is a huge loss in terms of engagement and revenue.

How to Re-Engage
There are multiple Do’s and Don’ts in the re-engagement process. Simply asking customers to update their email information can have surprising engagement results, where re-permission emails—where the sender attempted to get long inactive recipients into receiving emails again—were found to be ineffective. Those only had a 1.8 percent average read rate.

While the definition of an inactive subscriber will be unique to each company, ultimately you need to be able to define an inactive subscriber as someone who has not opened/clicked within a certain amount of time by analyzing your subscriber history. Use past data to determine the average amount of time between when subscribers sign up and when they stop engaging. Then strategize your re-engagement program around that window of time by having a strong call to action, removing non-responders and keeping subscribers engaged to prevent those inactive users.

You can also send a survey to current subscribers asking something as simple as what they think of your email campaigns and offering a small incentive can help to understand where things need to be shored up, but also to point out which customers have remained engaged over time, as they are your most likely responders. Don’t immediately, however, cull your list if you don’t see a good response to winback emails. Studies have found that 45 percent of people who receive a winback email will re-engage at some level with the brand, but only 24 percent of them actually read the winback email. The average time between receiving a winback email and re-engaging with a subsequent message from the sender was around 57 days.

Even in light of this information, the majority of inactive subscribers will stay that way. Having a clear idea of when you ought to disengage for good can save you problems in the future.

A new study highlighted in DM News offers clear evidence that strong visuals and offers personalized by recipients past behaviors leads to the highest open and click-through rates.

Here’s a great example of great visuals in one email by VRBO – they have multiple eye-catching images that all have the same theme – plus spiced up with great offers.

SUBJECT: Plan your leaf peeping excursion

But more importantly than visuals is to make the email about THEM. Send something that they care about – and just maybe they’ll click-through. Check out how Amex catch’s the eye with just the subject line.

SUBJECT: JOHN MURPHY, You’ve Got ✉ : Some News About Your Card

When it comes to audience building, personalized communication and sharing information quickly and efficiently, not much beats email and social media. In fact, at the end of 2014, a survey of business leaders showed that social and email would be these two channels would be the most likely to see an increase in investment in 2015; social media is predicted to grow as a channel by around 37%, and email is expected to jump from 3% growth to nearly 10% in 2015, thanks in large part to improved personalization.

Why are these impressive jumps in growth occurring? One reason might be the high ROI of email. Although email’s response rates may not be ideal (around .12%), its inexpensive nature means that it still sees an ROI of around 28.5%- an impressive amount when compared with direct mail, which only has a 7% ROI. Email is also the most popular activity on smartphones and other mobile devices, with 78% of 18-44 year olds reporting that they use their mobile devices for email.

Meanwhile, there are currently 2.08 billion active social media accounts in the world, representing 23% of the world’s population, and the average social media user spends over two hours per day using social networks. A 2013 study also showed that on average a Facebook like equates to an extra $22 spent on the company (however, keep in mind that this is likely to vary greatly by industry).

With these two channels exploding, marketers are realizing that they might be able to harness the power of email to improve their social media reach, and vice versa. Traditionally, however, the crossover between email subscribers and social media followers isn’t usually very high. For example, a recent study found that out of one company’s social media followers, only around 50% were also subscribed to their newsletter. Similarly, crossover between social media sites is also limited; only 5% of that same company’s Facebook fans were following them on Twitter, while only 40% of the company’s Twitter followers were also Facebook fans.

On the surface, email and social media are very different channels with very different purposes; email is typically considered a mid-funnel channel, while social media often sits at the top of the funnel. But how can marketers leverage each channel to improve the other?

Using Social Media to Grow Email

While social media may seem like the best way to build your brand awareness and capture new fans, capturing your social media followers’ email addresses is still the best way to own your audience. Social media audiences are “leased” rather than owned, and nothing exemplifies this truth better than Facebook’s declining organic reach. In 2014, Facebook ended the free ride they had been giving businesses and brands in order to reach their audience for free, and marketers were left scrambling- and paying- to enjoy the reach they once enjoyed for free. You don’t own your Facebook audience- Facebook does. This makes capturing email addresses (a truly owned channel) more crucial than ever.

First, make it easy for your followers to sign up for your email newsletter. Many email clients provide an app that can be linked to Facebook, allowing Facebook fans to easily sign up for email newsletters. A seamless, simple process will encourage your social fans to follow through with the sign-up process.

Next, use your social media channels to offer followers previews of your premium email content (ReachMail has a social media sharing tool that allows you to easily post your messages to your company’s social media pages). Email newsletters are more suited to long-form, original content, while Facebook or Twitter posts are better for short, pithy updates. However, your Facebook and Twitter channels are great avenues for previewing your exclusive email content, and offering those previews can encourage your social media fans to sign up for your newsletter.

One impressive example of these two strategies succeeding comes from KFC and the launch of their Double Down sandwich. During this launch, KFC implemented an email sign-up widget on their Facebook page and sent an email to current subscribers encouraging them to share an email pre-announcing the Double Down. KFC found that the email was shared more than 12,000 times on Twitter and Facebook alone in just 24 hours, and thanks to the social media shares and the traffic to the email widget, opt-ins for email subscriptions rose 30%.

You may also choose to incentivize newsletter signups. Many e-commerce retailers provide incentives of 10-20% off a purchase in exchange for signing up for an email list; however, you can also offer other incentives, such as exclusive content, free samples, or sweepstakes entries. For example, online tea retailer Teapigs offered 10% off of a purchase via Facebook in exchange for an email sign-up, which led to a 30% increase in newsletter sign-ups.

Remember the statistics we mentioned earlier about how email is now the most popular activity on smartphones and other mobile devices? 45% of all email opens occurred on mobile platforms in 2014, while 30% of consumers report that they exclusively read their email on mobile devices. Even worse, 69% of mobile users report deleting emails that aren’t mobile optimized. Therefore, it’s imperative that your emails are optimized for mobile use.

Using Email Marketing to Grow Social Channels

Facebook and other social media sites are traditionally seen as top of funnel marketing channels best-suited for attracting new customers and increasing brand awareness. But in fact, Facebook has been proven to be less than ideal for creating new customers; around 84% of Facebook fans on company pages represent current customers, meaning that Facebook is best suited towards keeping existing customers.

Email, meanwhile, is seen as more of an ‘owned’ audience, managed and controlled by the brand for the purpose of moving leads down the sales funnel. However, with a twist on the tactics discussed above, you can still use email marketing to grow your social channels.

The most immediately successful way to use your email list to grow your social channels is simple: add buttons to the bottom of your emails directly linking to your social pages. This cross-channel promotion has been shown to lead to a 325% increase in new Facebook fans on the day of the newsletter (the reversal of this cross-channel promotion is also a smart strategy; a Facebook wall post encouraging subscription to the newsletter led to a 225% increase in new subscriptions compared to the average daily sign-up rate).

Don’t be shy about using these buttons in your email list. The more often a button linking to social media is available to an email subscriber, the more likely the user is to take advantage of it. Other places to put the button can include on the confirmation page after they sign up for the email list, in welcome emails, and in customer service emails.

Another ReachMail feature you can take advantage of here is our autoresponder. If you’re already sending a welcome series, consider adding one email specifically inviting your new subscribers to join you on each of your social media channels.

Incentives also work for increasing your social channels. Use your email list to send our notices for sweepstakes and other promotions, and you’ll see your social media likes and followers rise.

Koyal Wholesale, the world’s largest supplier of products for weddings, integrated their social media presence into email campaigns to great success. Their email list had over 200,000 subscribers, and by including their Facebook and YouTube content in these emails, Koyal Wholesale achieved a 12% lift in their emails’ open rates, a 10% lift in conversion rates, and ultimately a 16% lift in revenue.

Using your email marketing list to grow your social channels- and vice versa- is a win-win situation. However, a word of caution: marketers should be careful to remember what each channel’s specific purpose is. While keeping your channels’ goals set to their specific strengths and purposes is important for successful cross-channel promotion, the fact is that using one channel to fuel the success of the other is a smart marketing strategy. By integrating your email and social media strategies, you can increase your brand’s reach, adding to your leads and moving them down the sales funnel.

Do you check email on a mobile device? If so, you’re in good company. More than 64% of Americans use smartphones; the most popular apps are those that allow users to view and compose emails. The Pew report linked above indicates that more than 87% of smartphone users regularly check email from their phone.

Need more proof of mobile email’s popularity? Check your individual campaign reports. ReachMail breaks out how many of your email openers are mobile users. Many of our clients find that a large percentage of their emails are opened from mobile devices.
For example, more than 40% of this ReachMail user’s opened emails used mobile devices to open their emails:

In another real-life example, more than 85% of this ReachMail user’s opens came from mobile devices:

With so many people checking and opening emails from their mobile devices, how can you make sure your email is optimized for these users? By making your email Responsive. Responsive emails adapt to each device (desktop, tablet or mobile) to ensure they are easy to read across the most commonly used devices and email clients.
The first step toward building responsive emails is to modify your content so that users don’t have to “pinch and zoom” to consume your content. To increase responsiveness, your email design should follow these guidelines:

• Narrow Width – scale it down from 600 to 300 or 350 pixels wide.
• Simple Design – keep it clean and make your typography stand out
• Organized Content – chunk content into simple blocks that can be moved around
• Single Column – use designs with only one single column

ReachMail offers some great built-in resources to get your mobile campaigns up and running. The simplest way to make sure your campaigns are responsive is by taking advantage of our free built-in responsive templates. These templates are free with a paid ReachMail account and automatically adapt to ensure your emails can be easily read on each kind of device.

Here are two of the more than 60 responsive templates available:

After adding your content and before deploying your campaign, you can also use ReachMail’s email previews from Litmus® to make sure your email is readable on the most popular mobile and desktop email clients. Like our responsive templates, Litmus previews are built right into your paid ReachMail account.

Litmus email previews allow you to toggle between options to see exactly what your campaign recipients will see. Check out the example below:

Building a responsive campaign is a great way to make sure that your campaign is opened by more users; ReachMail gives you the tools to do it quickly and easily. To learn more, please see our support documentation, or leave us a comment and let us know what you are seeing with your mobile email campaigns.

This year, email is celebrating its 44th anniversary of the day in 1971 when computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic mail message. To celebrate, let’s take a look back at just how far email has come in the past 44 years.

While email was first used in 1971, it took a few years to really catch on. In 1976, Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send an electronic mail message, and two years later, the first electronically-sent advertisement went out over a network of government and university computers.

In 1982, the word “email” was first used, and emoticons entered our lexicon that year as well, when Scott Fahlman became the first person to use a smiley “emotion” in an email. The “You’ve got mail!” voice that you’d know anywhere was recorded in 1989 by radio man Elwood Edwards, along with other iconic AOL phrases (nearly ten years later, Warner Bros. released You’ve Got Mail the movie, which topped $250 million at the box office).

The business of email underwent some changes in 1997, when Microsoft bought Hotmail for about $400 million and Microsoft Outlook was released. Unfortunately, it was also around this time that Internet users began figuring out how to use email’s powers for evil; the word “spam” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1998, and in 1999, a fraudulent email claiming that Bill Gates was going to share his wealth with Internet users began to circulate and was ultimately forwarded by millions.

In 2001, the founding of ReachMail meant marketers could harness the power of opt-in email marketing. In the new millennium, email began to become more regulated. George W. Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act into law in 2003, the country’s first national standards for sending commercial emails, and in 2004, the FTC codified email spam laws. (It’s unclear how much spam mail Homer Simpson received when he revealed in 2003 that his email address is “chunkylover53@aol.com”.)

Email embraced its light-hearted side in 2004, when LOL and several other Internet acronyms were officially recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary and multimedia emails were introduced after the MMS World Congress in Vienna. In 2005, email became more secure when SPF was established, a technology that verifies email senders’ identities, and in 2007, Google made Gmail available to the worldwide public. Also in 2007, the Internet Engineering Task Force adopted anti-phishing security protocol DKIM.

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama worked to harness the power of email by compiling a database of over 13 million email addresses. Three years later, the AP Stylebook officially decided that electronic mail should now be abbreviated as “email” rather than “e-mail,” and a study found that the most easily hacked email password was “password,” followed by common sequences like “123456” and “qwerty.”

Now, Americans tend to access their email on the go using their smartphones; in 2012, the number of Americans emailing on mobile devices reached 90 million, with 64% of people reporting that they do so daily. In 2012, ReachMail announced free email marketing for life, making life even easier for marketers. To address the high volume of emails being sent and received, Google rolled out Gmail tabs in 2013 to ensure smarter sorting of email and less email overload.
In 2014, the major storyline of email was hacking. Most notably, Sony Entertainment was hacked, leading to the release of hundreds of sensitive emails. The U.S. government blamed North Korea, who denied responsibility.

In the past 44 years, email has gone from being a little-used form of communication reserved for only the most tech-savvy, to something so commonplace that it’s become part of our daily vocabulary. And just think- in the time that it took you to read this infographic, you probably got an e-mail.

ReachMail is pleased to announce a new feature – email previews from Litmus^®. Paid ReachMail accounts can view screenshots of your messages rendered in nine of the most popular email clients including iPhone 5s, Gmail, Apple Mail 6, iPad, Outlook.com, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook 2013 and AOL Mail.

You’ll see your email with images on by default. One click will display your message with images off.

Here’s an example of what you’d see:

To run the litmus preview, navigate to Mailings, create a Mailing and look at the drop-down menu. Click “Run Litmus Preview” and your report will generate. Check out our support documentation for further details.

Do you send ReachMail campaigns from …@yahoo.com?

If you do then you need to know that Yahoo has made some major technical changes that will affect your campaign performances. If you do not send your ReachMail mailings from a Yahoo address, you are not affected by this change.

Over the weekend Yahoo changed it’s DMARC (email routing/authentication) policy from NONE to REJECT. What does that mean? In short, it means that any mail sent from a @yahoo.com address but not routed through Yahoo’s SMTP servers was rejected by receivers who respect DMARC.

In short – you’ll have to use a different from email address than @yahoo.com from now on. ReachMail recommends that you register a domain for use when sending mail. If you already have a website, consider using that domain when sending. As a reminder, you will be prompted to change your From address when editing a message using a @yahoo.com address

How does this affect me?
If you try to send your ReachMail mailings from a @yahoo.com address your mail will be rejected (bounced). Mailings sent through an ESP such as ReachMail will flow out through that’s ESPs domains and IP address. This change is affecting all ESPs, not just ReachMail. Though we authenticate your messages as being part of our mail network, we cannot authenticate them as part of Yahoo’s mail network.

Why did Yahoo do this?
There’s no official word at this time but it appears to be related to a large on-going attack on Yahoo users attempting to compromise their accounts and use them for sending spam.

Will Yahoo change their policy?
It’s unclear if Yahoo will restore their old policy.

What is DMARC?
The full technical specifications of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) are too complex to cover in this article but the DMARC goal is to provide another layer of anti-spam / -phishing technology by allowing domain owners to publish a policy for handling mail from their domain that doesn’t match their SPF and DKIM records. In other words, the owner of acme-inc.com can publish a policy telling mailbox providers to reject all mail in which the from domain doesn’t match the domain value DKIM signature of the message and / or the SPF domain does not match. DMARC seeks to establish the relationship between the domain in the From header of the message and the message authentication.

DMARC is primarily intended as a tool for sender’s whose domains are frequently forged by phishers / spammers such as PayPal, Ebay, banks, etc.

We understand that this can be a confusing topic, please contact support@reachmail.com if you have any questions.

Although Halloween is over you may still have the walking dead in your email list, depressing your open rates and hurting your reputation. Why? Because, according to ClickZ, ISP’s such as gmail, hotmail and Yahoo look at how engaged your list is with your email and factor that heavily in whether your email is placed in the inbox.

ReachMail’s list export tool has a feature that allows you to export and analyze unengaged email addresses. This feature is available on any list that has been sent at least 6 times since it’s creation. To use go to the dropdown menu in the Lists section and find “Export List”

Next – ReachMail can give you a preview of how exactly how many subscribers never opened or clicked your emails. To find out tick the Advanced Options “Export only records Not engaged”. You then specify how many days to look at and a query is generated showing how many were unengaged in that period.

You can then choose to export the list or re-run the query. To remove these un-engaged email addresses we recommend you upload the unengaged list and then use the “Compare and Remove” tool.

ReachMail has made it easier than ever to query your lists and better target your campaigns with our new “Run List Segments” tool.

First – go to the lists section and select “Run List Segments” from the dropdown. (The List Segments Deprecated is the previous version)

Next – choose a name for your List Segment. You have a choice to INCLUDE or EXCLUDE what you’re querying. You can also choose ANY – where the query picks matches on any field or ALL where only matches present in all are picked.

Next we’ll do an example. We want to select either an Industry of Construction OR a job title of Director of Information Technology. We recommend then clicking on the “Count Matches” to see how many the query yields.

If you are satisfied with the query click the “Create” button and you have a new segment

You can use your new segment in two ways. First, you can apply the segment to your list when scheduling a campaign. Simply select your list under “Choose Recipient Lists” and then select your segment under “List Segments”

You can also export the segment and use it as a separate list. In lists, select the dropdown menu of “Export List”

Under List Segments – click Filter Export By – select your filter. Then click export.

The importance of an enticing subject line isn’t something to be overlooked in your email marketing campaign. Your email campaign could be fantastic, but if your subject line is non-professional, confusing or deceitful, your contacts won’t open it. As an email marketer, you’ve just lost potential business and revenue.

The way in which you describe your email’s contents can make or break your email campaign. You have mere seconds to make a great impression before your potential reader moves onto the next email. It’s a complete disservice to both you and your customers to create a subject line without any thought behind it. Following are five tips that should never be used in your email marketing campaign:

1. Use excessive spacing and capitalization

Neither of these efforts will get your audience to open your email. Your product should be able to stand alone and you shouldn’t have to resort to capitalization to prove a point or spacing for emphasis.

Here’s an example of a no-no:

“DOWNLOAD this……..NOW!!!!”

2. More than one idea

The subject line should focus on the main theme of your email. Introducing too many topics in the subject line will confuse your audience and may cause hesitation on opening it. Furthermore, having a lot of characters in your subject line isn’t a mobile-friendly tactic.

3. Never mislead

Readers want to know what they’re in for when they click-through to your content. Tricking readers into opening your email campaign is going to cause annoyance and they may not open your emails in the future; worse, they may even unsubscribe from your list. The information in your email should be interesting enough that you don’t need to mislead. Instead, it caters to the reader’s interests and the subject line piques that person’s curiosity.

From an analytical perspective, misleading may also cause a spike in spam complaints, subsequently killing your deliverability.

4. Do not use “cute” spellings or put str@nge |etters 0r characters into your emails.

Not only do strange characters and spellings look like spam but they are an amateur attempt to get more readers that simply doesn’t work. Utilizing either is tacky and brings down your brand’s quality.

5. Incorrect grammar/spelling.

Spammers deliberately use incorrect spelling or grammar to identify less sophisticated recipients, according to Return Path’s Lauren Soares. By doing this, spammers can target those that are more likely to fall victim to a spamming attack.