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Your Email Newsletter Is Not Spam
A new web development studio from people you already know.
Francesca Murphy Ben Curtis
www.bivia.com
E-mail is a critical part of a comprehensive online strategy. It ties up the loose ends of delayed website actions like order fulfillment, and it allows you to announce timely information to your base of interested customers. But every business that uses email runs a risk these days of being labeled a spammer. Setting yourself up to run a clean operation is no meager feat, and your first email newsletter is sure to be the hardest. (So, apparently, is the second.) But hopefully we can help navigate some of the more treacherous terrain so you can use this powerful tool to the fullest.
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CAN-SPAM Act (legal text) CAN-SPAM Act (plain english) Email GlossaryNext Issue: Choosing A Web Host Subscribe to the InSite
Why Legit Email Matters
Your e-mail newsletter is the only prevalent Internet “push” technology. Like a telephone call, e-mail allows you to bring the information to your customer when there is something new they are likely to want. And like unexpected telephone calls, most people will throw up a number of defenses when they see e-mail they aren’t expecting.
This reaction is justified; you need to respect it and know why it exists before you’ll be invited in. This is why Bivia started the InSite with a limited invitation. We respect the value of your e-mail, and that’s why this will be the last InSite you’ll receive unless you subscribe now. Over the next few months we’ll be covering such topics as picking service providers, understanding your site by reading your server logs, modern trends in Flash and dHTML websites, and a review of tools you can use to manage your own site. Subscribe now, so you’ll be sure not to miss an issue.
This month, we’re talking about e-mail. We won’t show you how to make your e-mail newsletter effective from a marketing standpoint – there are plenty of books that do that. Instead, we’ll cover a couple of straightforward steps that will dramatically increase your chances of getting through to the people who want to hear from you. In a world choked with spam, spam filters, anti-spam laws, and victimized e-mail users, these steps can make a big difference.
The Law
The past few years have seen new anti-spam laws in more than a dozen U.S. states. Many are vague or contradictory, making the whole collection nearly impossible to follow. All that went away January 1, 2004, when the Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 superseded these state laws. There are six basic things to be concerned about if you want to stay out of the courts. The most surprising of these, especially if you’ve been sending well-received e-mail newsletters, is that you’ll need to include a physical address in your e-mails.
That’s right. From now on, in cyberspace everyone will be able to MapQuest you. It doesn’t have to be your office address – apparently, a post office box is fine, so there’s no need to start calling that third-floor apartment where you run your home-based business a “suite.” But you do need to receive postal mail there, and any unsubscribe requests that come in need to be processed within ten days.
The Law Breakers
Spam is annoying, but it’s far from the only nasty thing conditioning e-mail users to be wary of your e-mail. E-mail viruses (aka “trojans”), advertiser beacons, and phishing schemes all overwhelm users with seemingly innocuous requests that can have devastating consequences. Not only are people becoming increasingly sophisticated and wary, but the e-mail programs and services these people are using now include relatively unsophisticated and blunt filters for these sorts of malware attacks. These filters can nab your legitimate e-mail, even if the recipient wants to receive it.
This happens partly because there is nothing in the way e-mail works to prevent spammers and viruses from using a false “from” address – making their e-mail appear to come from you, your credit card company, or even, for example, president@whitehouse.gov.
New technology may help by verifying the domain that the e-mail is coming from: Later this year, Yahoo! will release Domain Keys, and Microsoft will release Caller ID for Email. Already AOL is requiring mass-mailers to implement an open standard called Sender Policy Framework (SPF). The downside of all this new technology is that they are difficult to set up, and possibly impossible to set up unless you own your server.
To Do
Get An Email Provider
- Constant Contact (host of the Bivia InSite)
- Microsoft’s bCentral
- Yahoo! Groups (also e-mail lists – be sure to set it up so that you are the only contributor)
I know some of you are thinking of creative ways to use rules, filters, your address book, and the BCC header to get your e-mails out. Stop it. This sort of thinking will leave you tripping over every spam filter made, and it could end up with your account being blocked by your own ISP. Instead, have someone else deal with the headache. A good e-mail service provider will individually address each e-mail to help it get to its destination, and it will also:
- implement the changing technologies you don’t need to know about
- keep you informed of current legislation and enforce any legal requirements
- monitor blacklists to make sure you aren’t banned
- manage subscriptions, unsubscribes and bounces
As mass-mailing gains popularity, there are more and more dedicated e-mail service providers who do nothing except send your e-mails for you. They’re good at it, and some will do it for cheap, or even free. Take advantage of that.
Straighten Up
Your e-mail list should only contain people who have chosen to subscribe, plus your current or past clientele unless they’ve opted out. Any purchased lists or recipients you do not have an established relationship with have got to go. Now you have what is called an “opt-in” list; everyone on it has opted (chosen) to be on it. Some lists go as far as double-opt-in (aka, “confirmed opt-in”), where an e-mail is sent to the recipient after sign-up to confirm that the person at that address really wants to receive the mail; this prevents your evil twin from subscribing users to lists they don’t want.
Carefully managed lists are a valuable commodity that require maintenance. If someone offers to sell you a list, more than likely it is untargetted, unmanaged, unverified, and possibly full of illegaly obtained addresses. Legitimate lists are rented or leased for a specific use, over a specific time period.
Once you’ve got a clean list, the best way to get past people’s anti-spam measures is to get whitelisted. Most filters support whitelists, which allow certain email addresses to skip past the spam filter regardless of the content. This helps mom’s e-mail about cheap mortgage rates get through, and it can help your newsletter get through too. Get your readers to add your “From” address to their whitelists. You can include some instructions on how to do this in your e-mail or on your signup page – usually, this means having the recipients add your e-mail address to their address book. Most importantly, you need to choose an e-mail address to send from and stick to it.
Love The Law
CAN-SPAM requires the physical address of the sender to be included in the email. Here are some other requirements:
- a legitimate header – if you don’t know what this means, you don’t have to worry about it
- a valid "From" address – and more than just valid, you must actively monitor this address for potential unsubscribes
- a straightforward “Subject” line describing the contents of the e-mail
- a working unsubscribe/opt-out link and/or instructions
- all unsubscribe requests must be processed within ten days of receipt
Clean Up After Yourself
Once you’re sending on a regular schedule, you need to manage your list to make sure it stays happy and you stay out of jail. Bounced e-mail addresses should be removed after two or three bounces; repeatedly trying a failed address can get you blacklisted and automatically marked as a spammer. Unsubscribe requests, whether they are following the instructions you gave or not, must be processed within 10 days of receipt or the next mailing, whichever is later.
You’ll also need to monitor your return address for “challenges.” Some ISPs (notably Earthlink) block e-mails from new senders, automatically replying with a challenge in the form of a link you click to prove you are a person and not some mindless responder. Once you do, your email gets through.
Another reason to monitor the response mail and bounces: You’ll be surprised at how many people do respond – asking for help on the site, offering ideas, requesting prices, or just looking for someone to chat with.
Final Thoughts
Spam is more than just filling up our e-mailbox, it’s changing how we use e-mail. Simple steps can keep your email from being swallowed by your customers’ defenses, but because someone out there is buying the stuff spammers sell they will always adapt to anything we put in their way. As the defenses change, and as you need to adapt to keep from being a spammer, Bivia will keep you informed.
Choosing A Web Host
Be sure to subscribe to the InSite so you don’t miss this important issue!
This is the end of your invitation. We hope you choose to subscribe to the InSite. Next month we’ll go over some of the basics of choosing a host for your web services: what you should look for, what you should demand, and what services you may or may not need. In future issues, we’ll talk about changing how you publish by reading your server logs and seeing what’s read, deciding between splashy technologies like Flash and dHTML, and tools you can use to manage your own site. We hope you’ll join us.