Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

So the other day, my friends at SmartUSA sent me a nice email about “Thank you for attending our Chicago event to test drive Smart ForTwo’s.” That was really nice of them I thought. But wait, I didn’t test drive any Smart ForTwo’s. In fact, I meant to attend that event, but didn’t have time that weekend to make it there at all.

Email marketing lesson #1: Don’t assume. It wouldn’t have taken very long to vet a list of people who DID attend and send them one email and send everyone else another, “Sorry, we missed you in Chicago. Maybe next time…” Although, I know what they were trying to do, it should have been more personalized/customized.

I also received an email from Kayak.com telling me about great summer vacation deals. Great I thought! Oh, cheap flights to SFO, Oakland, Miami, and Chicago? Wait, they knew my default airport is O’Hare. Why would they include Chicago in this email? Why not try and sell me on another destintation, NOT Chicago.

Email marketing lesson #2: You have the data - use it. Kayak knew well enough that my default airport was O’Hare, so it’s pretty safe to say that I live/work in Chicago or the surrounding area and probably do not need a travel deal to Chicago. Instead, they could have further customized the message to remove my home airport and replaced it with another sales message. I used to do this ALL the time at my previous employer. We used every little piece of information to customize email and print communications we sent out. Kayak should do the same.

Just a few handy tips to remember when implementing an email marketing campaign. There are tons more here:

• Tips and Best practices
• Constant Contact Learning Center
• Microsoft Small Business email tips

Anything I forgot? Let me know in the comments.

So I continue to get twice daily emails from Performance Bike. I know they are trying to do good, but the volume and inability to unsubscribe only angers me more. As I have noted in the past, it only takes one email communication to upset a customer enough to turn them off completely to your brand.

To further the situation, the “Report Spam” feature in Gmail doesn’t seem to care what I do. If I hit “Report Spam”, it moves that message to Spam and then the next day I get two more. I think we’re approaching a CAN-SPAM violation here.

Taken from the CAN-SPAM website:

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or another Internet-based response mechanism that allows a recipient to ask you not to send future email messages to that email address, and you must honor the requests. You may create a “menu” of choices to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to end any commercial messages from the sender.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor’s email address. You cannot help another entity send email to that address, or have another entity send email on your behalf to that address. Finally, it’s illegal for you to sell or transfer the email addresses of people who choose not to receive your email, even in the form of a mailing list, unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.

So what is my recourse here, send in a report to the FTC? They say to email spam@uce.gov, but I can imagine how inundated with spam that email address is on a daily basis. Shame, shame on the FTC as well for not obfuscating that email address on their own page.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Attention all email marketers: Make your unsubscribe link easily visible and easily found, or feel my wrath.

When I first started doing email marketing a few years ago, I stumbled around with design problems, browser issues, spam blockers and the day-to-day headaches associated with this fluctuating medium. Through some personal stumbles and research I have done, I have seen both the really good uses of usability in email marketing and the really bad.

The Really Bad
The most blatant abuser of the lack of unsubscribe policy is the hardcore spammer. These are the jumbled jargon of words you receive that pertain to nothing. There is no visible way to do anything in the email and in 99% of cases, there is no unsubscribe link or method obvious to anyone. In fact, the point of many of these spam emails is to have you respond saying “UNSUBSCRIBE” in order to validate that a real person was on the end of this spam solicitation.

Read more

You must be trying to get whitelisted, because nobody really cares about RFC compliancy unless you are a spammer or trying to get whitelisted. For the average user, RFC compliancy is a non-issue.

I compose the email, I send the email, the email is received. Done and done.

For the spammer email marketer, RFC compliancy is very important. It means that your email message complies with the rules and regulations set forth in the RFC 2822. RFC 2822 is a very long document, which I can boil down to a few points that are relevant to email marketers:

1. Don’t mess with To:, From:, CC:, BCC:, Subject: lines. Big no-no. The recipient has to know where this message came from and that you are indeed the sender. No cloaking or other nastiness.
2. You must specify your real address. If you are a company, this has to be the company address. If you are an individual working as a company, same deal.
3. You must give them, your recipients, a method to unsubscribe, whether it’s phone, fax, email, web page, or smoke signal and it has to be “relatively” easy to complete the process, which means no jumping through 25 hoops to get off a mailing list.

Got it? Now go play nice with the children.

*** TORA *** TORA *** TORA ***

WTF? Gmail image spammers have reverted to spamming Stock tips using WWII Japanese references? Is that what it’s come to?

Also, what’s up with the “hi, It’s Jeff”, “hi, It’s Joey”, “hi, It’s Francois” spams?

I have no idea what Gmail is doing to try and filter those, besides IP address. Can’t really filter based on anything else, as most of the message is just random text.

And what is the point of those? I assume just probes to test if the message got through or not, because they have no action item “Visit www.hi-its-francis.com” or “call 555-555-5555″, so what else can it be for?

In case you have been living under a rock, you know what spam is. A question recently came up of how do some companies (see Overstock.com, Buy.com, Angie’s List etc. etc.) get through spam filters and restrictions and others do not. The answer dear Watson is that they pay. Dolla, Dolla bills y’all.

Two solutions are Goodmail Systems (which works for AOL and Yahoo) and the ever popular Sender Score Certified (which works for Hotmail, MSN, Roadrunner “and 34,000 other ISP’s”). So if you are looking for the reason why you are getting messages from these companies and not others, it’s because they have a high speed route right to your inbox. A good analogy is the Illinois Tollway… You’re driving along minding your business, and all of a sudden a huge roadblock ahead. What’s with all this traffic? Well, you can either be a sucker and wait in the toll line with all the other “mail” or you can pay $399 a year and be “certified” by these mail services and zip on through the iPass lane.

Get the drift? So if you have $399 a year to spend, as well as $1000 annually for Sender Score Certified, you too can break on through, break on through, break on through to the other side, hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY!