Top 10 Spammers of All time
Someone on a forum I am part of posted this. The article is found here.
This list looks like something out of America’s Most Wanted. I’ve met two of these people on this list in person. These are the guys who have done some real crazy scammish forms of marketing. Two of the guys on here are dead while another 6 are in jail or about to be jailed. I know that this list is not complete because some of the bigger spammers haven’t been identified.
Enjoy, fascinating read
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All About Autoresponders
What are autoresponders?
Autoresponders in a nutshell are email responce programs. Any email sent to you that gets an automatic reply is an autoresponder. For example, when you send in a ticket for a support or sales inquiry to an ecommerce website, the bot that sends you an email saying that your ticket is recieved is an autoresponder. Pretty simple.
Other uses
- Auto reply when you subscribe to a newsletter
- Auto reply when you unsubscribe, confirming your opt-out
- Used as a FAQ when people write in questions
- Build campaigns and have them sent out automatically over time
Benefits
The benefits are endless, but the main one would be saving time. Developing a solid campign that can go out automatically without you having to monitor frees up your time to work on other marketing efforts. the questions and requests that cannot be anwsered via autoresponder can be anwsered by your reply. this weeds out alot of the common frequently asked questions.
How to setup
Most newsletter software systems, well ALL that i’ve seen, have a feature that allows you to setup an autoresponder. You can set up different autoresponders for replies and campaigns. I am going to talk about how to setup your autoresponder for email campaigns.
- Create a normal newsletter campaign - Develop your message as if you were going to deliver it now. Save as a draft or template.
- Develop additional campigns - After your finished with the first campaign, create the follow up messages you want your consumers to recieve and set them in equal intervals apart. For example if you have a 5 week program, set the autoresponder to send one campaign a week for 5 weeks. Refrence your calander to make sure you have the timing down right.
- Test and verify - Make sure that all your links work and content is to your liking. This is the most important step. A bad setup hurts your credability as a marketer
- Schedule and monitor ever so slighty - Are people clicking and opening your message? Monitor your statistics and make changes accordingly. Notice the trends.
Autoresponders are a great tool to use in conjunction with your email marketing plan. They ehance the quality of your newsletter and cut down on time for FAQ, support requests, and developing campaigns. If you aren’t using them already you should be!
Cheers and happy marketing.
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Tools to Enhance your E-Marketing Experience
Listed below are websites and online tools that I reccomend to go in conjunction with your email marketing experience.
- DNSSTUFF - Highly reccomended. Absolutly worth the $50 per year fee. Allows you to check everything from rdns records, spf, and aganist the top anti-spam sites on the internet. A life saver!
- Senderbase - Great for checking the volume you are mailing. Also can spy on other people to see how much they are sending daily/monthly/yearly
- MxToolBox - Awesome blacklist checker. Scans aganist all of the biggest anti-spam sites and the lesser ones as well. free to use
I use these three websites on a daily basis to make sure I am in complete compliance with everyone on the internet. Highly reccomended if you plan on dwelling into higher volume email marketing.
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Austin Internet Marketing Meetup
This is to all you fellow Austinites.
I’ll be talking about email marketing with focus on newsletters Wednesday Nov. 5th at 6PM at Spaghetti Warehouse on 4th ST.
Come join us for a wonderful event full of good conversation and food!
RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/seo-austin/
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Innotech Conference in Austin
I must say that after attending the Innotech Conference out here in Austin I was quite impressed. Innotech is an annual event that dicusses the new technologies within the industry. There was a nice mix of small and large companies yet still maintained that local Austin feel that I have come to enjoy. The emarketing summit is the reason I attended the conference. The emarketing summit went over internet marketing strategies and changes within the industry.
I really enjoyed the Email Deliverability Secrets presented by Josh Baer of OtherInbox and Dennis Dayman of Eloqua. Both have a tremendous amount of experience in email marketing and it was very humbling learning from them. I imagine maybe a handul of people in the room had any idea on what they were talking about. For the novice email marketer it would have definately be tough to comprehend the value of the presentation. I, however, really enjoyed the presentation and learned some neat insights. Of all the conferences I’ve been to in regards to internet marketing, this is the first one that went into detail on email marketing. Email has the biggest ROI of any internet marketing verticals, thus should be taken more seariously!
Other highlites inlcude the landing page presentaton in which a friend of mine, Laura, was part of and Brett Hurt of BazaarVoice’s presentation on Social Media. Brett is a true inspiration in growing a company. I can tell he values people and his business proves that.
After the event there were further networking oppurtunities. I ended up going to a happy hour at Six Lounge on 4th St. I was dissappointed to learn that there was a cover charge to enter. I was under the assumption that this was part of the emarketing summit as were many of the other attendees. Oh well, I paid the petty $10 and stayed for maybe an hour to do some networking and chill with some of my good friends.
Overall the event was fantastic! Great bang for the buck for the value of information and networking oppurtunities. (I paid $75 for the all day event). I will definitely be back next year.
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Structuring Your HTML Campaigns
Question: I was wondering if you could elaborate on your process of developing html emails. I am good with tables and what not but I still have a hard time developing emails that look very sleek.
The process of developing highly effective, appealing HTML campaigns is an art in itself. As with designing webpages, the development of email creatives takes skill. They are comparable and a solid webdesigner should be able to develop well designed email creatives. Like a webpage, HTML messages can display images, graphics, colorful fonts, etc. Load up your favorite design software, Dreamweaver, Front Page, etc and start playing around. The key here is testing. You don’t want to overload the user with a multitude of images and graphics that take away from the purpose of the email campaign. The ability to track just about everything is why I love email marketing so much. You can hone and test to see which campaigns work best.
Personally, I go a different route when sending out my newsletters. Instead of having to create a new design for EVERY single email drop, I prefer my designers to create HTML templates. Templates are great because they are easily modified and can be used over and over again. At AustinInbox, we have on file numerous template structures that make it easy for the novie user to modify. The biggest benefit is that it cuts down on time and we can use the higher performing templates more effectively.
The drawbacks of using HTML vs. text messages include image blocking and load times. As mentioned in previous posts, most of the bigger ISPs and email clients like Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and Gmail automatically block images. A good designer, however, can get by most of the image blocking and still develop sleek, appealing emails. Load times can be an issue as well, especially if you are targeting foreign users who don’t have access to the fast internet speeds we enjoy in the U.S. Know your audience and always test the campaigns. If the load times are slow, get rid of unnecessary images and modify until you are satisfied.
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Questions
Have any questions that you would like me to anwser?
Email: jason@inboxtruth.com
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How to Handle Complainers
No matter how meticulious you are on your privacy policy, unsubscribe, and confirmation email, you will eventually have a few complainers. Have no fear, ISPs know this as well. All complaints are not created equal. They range from the user who thinks he mistakingly signed up to your newsletter to bonafide lawsuits. I had the experience of dealing with the worst of these type of complaints so I want to discuss what to do when you recieve them.
The first thing to check is your unsubscribe information. Do you have an active, working unsubscribe and is your mailing system removing users when they click on the unsubscribe button? It’s always good to do frequent checks, since an invalid remove link is aganist the law and can result in a huge fine. Additionally, you need to make sure your physical address remove is posted correctly. By physical remove I mean an active postal address. it should look something like this:
To unsubscribe from all future newsletters please click (unsubscribe link here), or write to:
Unsubscribe ME
2983 Mystreet
Austin, TX 78759
Yes, and believe it or not, people DO pay the postage fee to send a letter for unsubscribe removal. At my peak I would get about 2 to 3 of these a month.
If your unsubscribe message is doing its job then you need to access the level of threat the complainer is. Alot of times I will recieve messages like:
Screw you spammer!
I’ll k*ll you, remove me
I did not sign up to this spam!
When I do recieve these types of complaints I remove immediantly. Do not waste your time replying back to these guys. It will only waste both parties time and start a never ending flame war of who is wrong or who is right. It is possible that someone else using their email information signed up to your newsletter or offers. Move on and live to fight another day.
Now for the more serious issues. Their could be a time during your email marketing career when you face the worst of complaints, a lawsuit. This is Amercia, anybody can sue anyone for anything. This is why it is so important to make sure your privacy policy is clear and that you save ALL user subscribe information. By subscribe information I mean, first/last name, addresss, website signed up to, ip, and timestamp. This has happened to me in what was a clear extorition attempt. It’s highly unlikely that any lawsuit of this matter would go to court unless you are clearly violating the law. If you do recieve a threat or a lawsuit, find out what the other party wants and try as best as you can to come to a win/win situation.
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Protecting your Email Box from Unwanted Spam
People complain all the time about the legitamacy of email marketing. How can I get rid of all this spam? Every email account I have is filled with spam, what do I do? These are very common questions I get when explaining how to avoid getting the masses of unwanted emails that flood are box. Make no mistake, most of what the user is recieveing is pure spam. Here is the best tried and true way to avoid getting those spam messages.
Create two email accounts. One for all your online ecommerce purchases and online activity, one for your personal day to day emails from bosses, co-workers, friends and family.
This is the #1 way to curb your enthusiasm for spam! Let me explain.
When you purchase services or goods on the internet, almost always your email will be used for verification purposes. Confirming the email verifies that your email address is a valid address to the website. However, when you purchased your product, did you look at their privacy policy? Was there any verbage that states that you might be recieveing 3rd party offers or be automatically signed up for a newsletter? Ah, ha! Here’s where you run into trouble. The privacy policy of the website states the intention of what your data will be used for. The policy must be clear in order to be Can-Spam compliant. If the privacy policy states that you might be recieveing 3rd party offers, you can almost guarantee that you will be recieving a load of junk mail. Even worse, much of the time these lists get passed around to other email marketers. You can see how over time that just signing up to one of these sites can overload your box with junk.
Additionally, the spam problem is not limited to eccomerece sites. Using your email to sign up to forums, message boards, dating sites, social networking sites, or any website that requires you to register via email can cotribute to the spam problem. These websites are just liek ecommerce sites in that sometimes your email can be passed around. I’ve even seen high quality fortune 500 companies show up on some email lists. These email lists weren’t opted in to the email marketing company. They were aquired as purchased data! So be very careful when registering your email anywhere.
The Solution
The solution is simple. Do not signup for anything with your personal email. Your personal email is used for one purpose, communication. There is no way for other marketers or spammers to get a hold of your email if you don’t give it out. Also, if you happen to slip up and start receving spam messages, have no fear. these days the unsubscribe button is an affective way to opt-out. Even more so than an ISP’s “This is spam” button. The unsubscribe process is automatic, handled by a machine, not a human. When you unsubscribe, your email is automatically removed from the database. Thus the next email blast which gets sent out will not include your email.
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