Email marketing

[johnegood]

First, I searched the forum for a category that deals with email. Is there one?

Does anyone have experience with how the people at ISPs looking at SPAM make their determination? I've read (but I'm not sure that I believe) on The Institute on Social Internet Policy website that:

...one of the first things many email delivery and anti-spam specialists will do when presented with a “is this spam?” situation, is do a WHOIS lookup on the domain - either the sending domain, or the domain being advertised as a link in the email.


And guess what happens if that WHOIS returns nothing but “this domain is privately registered”, with no way to really determine who is behind the domain - with nobody willing to take responsiblity for the domain - nobody saying “if there is a problem, the buck stops here”?


You look like someone with something to hide.

And if you have something to hide - or even look like you have something to hide - your email isn’t going to get delivered. After all, if you aren’t willing to put your name to your business, then why should you expect an ISP to deliver the email from that business.


They won’t, and you shouldn’t.


Private domain registrations. A bad idea for legitimate email sending businesses.


What do you think?

[seanyg]

This is why I count on services like Aweber.com who's business relies on a high deliverability rate. The auto-responder companies all specialize in this. It make the monthly fee ($19 or whatever) worth it!

[johnegood]

BTW, I have used aweber for one of my lists for about five years. I pay them over $200 a month. The $19 a month deal is for people with little tiny lists that don't want truly professional email marketing.

lol.

PS - If you are going to advertise aweber, you mihgt as well give real useful info. Aweber charges a monthly fee based on the size of your list. The $19.95 is for very small lists. Also, the $19.95 rate doesn't give you all the useful marketing stats that their higher end service provides.

Their rate of deliverability is pretty good but it's not as good as I'd like. I've had troubles with them through the years. AT one point, they got in a big tiff with bellsouth and bellsouth refused to carry email from them.

Aweber didn't tell any of their paying customers. They did popup for every person who put in a bellsouth email address, a note giving them a phone number at bellsouth to call and complain. The number, which I tried a number of times, just went to a recorded line. When I tried to work with Aweber about it, they were 100% sure that they were right in their treatment of the situation: "Our primary obligation is to end users who expect to get what they signed up for so we have to tell them directly that we can't at this time fulfill."

"Yea, but what about those of us who pay you money and who should be told that my sales funnel is basically broken?"

This battle went on for six months and I almost left them over it. I would have but I didn't have the tech resources to move at the time. Instead, on all my new sites, I either use a different vendor (usually vertical response) or do it myself with the help of SuretyMail. If you want to know about the aweber bellsouth story, you can probably just google "aweber bellsouth". I guess it's ancient history now but they treated me so badly and it screwed up my business so badly that I'm still pretty angry about it.

[asylum119]

Private domain registrations is not recommended, But this is well down the list of things that will get you automatically marked as spam.

Your ISP will let you send so many emails per minute over their connection. 20 seems to be a safe bet for both your ISP and the servers that you will be sending too.

Every email campaign that you send will get scanned for a spam rating, If your rating is too high then you will be flagged as spam.

I would suggest that you send a email template to spamcheck@sitesell.net make sure to put TEST in the email subject. The Email that you just sent will bounce back to the email address that you sent it from giving you a spam rating.

The list goes on and on, But I hope this helps for now