Recently we’ve been searching out software solutions, tips and research material for successful email campaigns and email marketing.

While doing this, we found some good sites to go to for designing tips, variances across email clients, good testing and test plans etc – and I thought I would share them with you here.

Now this isn’t the be all and end all, but it’s just some of the highlights we wanted to share.

CampaignMonitor

CampaignMonitor has a good resources section.  They not only give you guides to CSS support by email client but also some inspiration as well.  Some of these articles are really good, but seem to be based more around using their service.  So if you are looking for a place to not only get some good tips but also a place where you can send from, you should check out CampaignMonitor.  The prices are reasonable – we use them from time to time and have never had a single problem with this site.  The reporting as well as testing is also well worth the package.

MailChimp

MailChimp is another really good place to go for resources and services.  I personally haven’t used them, but I have heard nothing but good about them.  Their resource section is very detailed and quite handy to have.  They have guides in .pdf format and it’s not just about their services but also about things that you should know as far as “breaking into the business”

JayMail.net

I came across Jay when doing research on this – his site is full of articles, tips and all sorts.  The agency is based in the UK and run by Jay Chambers.  You can sign up for his newsletter (which I would suggest) to get previous posts on really good articles on how to get started and how to continue and build your email marketing and email campaigns.

I can’t tell you how helpful his articles and advice have been and Web Tips Magazine hopes to snag some of his free time to do an article to grab some of his genius-ness for all of our readers.  I highly recommend  Jay as a superb resource of information.

I also came across some specific software solutions that I would like to share, that I think are pretty cool too.

Postmark

Postmark was nice.  You can host your services right there with them and get your tracking statistics and everything.  They offer the hosting with them through RackSpace so it’s an all-in-one stop, depending on the needs of your campaign.

SendGrid

SendGrid was another good one.  This has a little bit more to offer such as incorporating Google Analytics, good reporting on bounces and spam as well as scalability.  Pricing is a little different on this package since you get the extra features, but it is definitely worth a look.  The downfall is that on top of this monthly cost, you also have the cost of your server as well as any emails you send outside of your allowance.

ActiveCampaign

In the end, we decided to go with ActiveCampaign.  They offer 2 different solutions on pricing and that is HOSTED and DOWNLOADED.  With a variety of add-ons such as Spam Filter Checks, RSS Triggered Emails, Subscriber Date Based Emails and Email Templates Bundle. The list of features is very impressive with this software and you can contact them for a link to the demo that shows you in more depth some of the automation, reporting and over-all use of the application.

Other Information

I’ve stumbled on to a few good places on checking on Spam rules and how to avoid getting your emails marked as Spam as well.  Some suggestions from around the web would be

• To make sure that your Image to Text ratio is not too high
• If you are sending an HTML email, make sure the Title of your HTML matches the subject line of your email you are sending
• Avoid too many uses of the words “Click Here”, “Buy Now”, “Free”, “Why Pay More”
• Avoid using the colors Bright Red and/or Green
• Avoid using lots of exclamation points
• Avoid using all caps
• Using the double opt-in is another good way of keeping your emails out of the spam filters (double opt-in is when someone has requested to receive information from your site and receives an email to click to confirm that they in fact want to receive your information)
• Use your company name, address and phone in the body of your email
• Using the AB Testing is another good way to deduce what works for your campaigns (AB testing is where you would come up with 2 concepts of your email and send a percentage of each email to your subscribers to see which email – content included – is your most successful)
• I personally also test by sending my email to my test email clients first to see if they will be picked up (aol, gmail, yahoo, hotmail) – if they show up in your Spam box or marked as Spam, you know there’s some things in there you should work on before sending out your email so you don’t end up black listed
• Make sure that you don’t send out too many emails to the same email client to quickly as this will be sure to get your emails flagged as spam

This is a good web address to find some rules about Spam – some of them are pretty hard to understand for a non-script type person like myself, but I wanted to share it just in case.  If your still unclear about Spam, there is some Spam filtering software you can get to try and help run your emails up against.  Here’s a link to a review site that goes through some of them for you to check out yourself.

A good rule of thumb as well, is to keep checking your IP address hasn’t been black listed.  Here are some of the sites we check on a regular basis

• http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
• http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/
• http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/lookup

- you don’t have to use just these, there’s a host of sites out there to check your IP address against.  You can always Google it if you want to find alternatives to the links we’ve listed here.

A general rule to use is that no matter what – 20% to 30% of your emails are going to be picked up as Spam regardless to how clean your content is.  But the majority of the research that I found is that if you use the word “click” in an email – roughly 70% of your emails will end up marked as Spam.

Have any suggestions?  Please feel free to share any others for our readers so they can make the best most informed decision for their Email Marketing solutions and tips.

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