Email and Social Marketing Tips | Pinpointe Blog

Webinar – Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses

Editor — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 01:43:12 +0000

(Updated 3-June 2010) Our first webinar ‘Email Marketing 101′ was focused on basic tips to improve delivery, with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control. Once challenge many Email marketers face, is knowing for sure which variation of their given email will deliver the best results. Different strategies [...]

Webinar -Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates

Editor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:35:34 +0000

(Updated March 6, 2010) This is our fourth in a series of educational webinars covering topics to help improve email marketing response rates. Pinpointe is joined by NetProspex to present ”Writing Tips to Improve Email Response Rates.” Based on analysis of millions of B2B emails that have been sent through Pinpointe’s email marketing platform, this Webinar provides real examples of the [...]

Webinar: Email Marketing 101 – Tips to Improve Email Delivery

Editor — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:23:08 +0000

(Updated 12/15/09) This is the first in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. The interactive session demonstrates tips to improve delivery and email response rates for your well crafted HTML emails. We also cover tips to help ensure your email gets read once it actually makes it to the inbox. Email Marketing 101 focuses on email content and covers the following topics: Update on CAN-SPAM Requirements Designing for the Inbox: Think "Above the Fold" 21 DOs and DON'Ts - Tips to Improve Email Delivery The total play time is 55 minutes; the on-demand version, accompanying slides and 10 page Q and A sumamry are below.

How to Embed Video in Email

Editor — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:35:08 +0000

Embedding video into emails has become a hot topic, and there are recent developments that are leading to some limited support for direct playing of embedded video in email. However for today – here’s the best way to get video into your email campaign in a way that will be viewable by virtually any email [...]

Embedding Video in Email – Overview

Editor — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:28:35 +0000

Embedding Video In Email – Overview With over 15B emails being viewed online each month in the US alone, we’re seeing an uptick in customers asking about embedding video in email. This led us to head off and investigate a few different questions: Can video be embedded in email? If Video can be embedded – how exactly do [...]

How an Enterprise SPAM Filter Works

Editor — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:53:19 +0000

Want to know how a SPAM Firewall works? Cisco, who makes the IronPort Email appliance, has also put together a short, 8 minute video that explains how their SPAM firewall works. It Cisco-specific of course, but does a great job of providing an overview of operation. http://www.ironport.com/products/how_it_works.html Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, check [...]

If an Email is Forwarded, Are Click and Open Stats Tracked?

Editor — Sun, 17 May 2009 06:41:55 +0000

There are two ways one of your campaigns can get forwarded. The first is simply that an excited recipient thinks your email is useful, they forward it directly onward. In this case, the entire original email along with the trackable links and embedded ‘beacon’ image that is used to track HTML email opens are forwarded to the [...]

9 Tips for Writing Email Subject Lines That Work

Editor — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:25:36 +0000

Every copywriter and journalist knows the importance of a powerful headline. The same applies for email subject lines, because as much as 40% of a recipient’s decision to open an email is based on the email subject (and sender). Despite that, many still underestimate just how important the email subject line is. So here are [...]

The Ideal Email Subject Line Length

Editor — Thu, 07 May 2009 06:23:00 +0000

We ran multiple experiments on subject lines and summarized one particular case study example in our recent webinar: “Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses (you can download the slides and view the on-demand version). Here are the email subject variations: 1: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case Studies (Feb 4) 2: %%First%% – [Webinar] Split Test Case [...]

10 Worst Performing Email Subject Lines

Editor — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:39:21 +0000

We already covered the top 10 Best performing headlines – so read, review and emulate. Since no top 10 ‘Best’ list would be complete without the corresponding ‘10 worst’ list, here are the subject lines associated with the 10 worst performing emails campaigns, along with our opinion of what the recipient may have thought when [...]

10 Best Performing Email Subject Lines

Editor — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:28:43 +0000

Our customers ask for advice on how to write killer email subjects. We point them to our advice here “Tips for Writing Email Headlines That Work” where we explain the different approaches to an email promotion and describe top strategies for crafting winning email subject lines. This is an excellent starting point and [...]

Email Authentication – DKIM and SPF: Which ISP’s are Checking?

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:38:31 +0000

At Pinpointe, we’ve been using DKIM and SPF for nearly a year for our customers – at no extra charge. If you want to know more about which ISP’s are presently using Authentication and/or Authorization to verify the validity of your email (and thereby decide whether to deliver your email or possibly drop it into Ethertrash) [...]

Will DKIM Reduce Phishing and other Email ‘Spoofing’ Attacks?

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:11:48 +0000

DKIM is an email ‘authentication’ method that organizations and ESPs like Pinpointe use to verify to the recipient that the email is coming from a valid email server, and is not being ’spoofed’ by a spammer. In an interview, Mark Risher, the anti-abuse product manager for Yahoo Mail gives his perspective on how important DKIM signing [...]

DKIM / Authentication Advantages and Disadvantages

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:09:34 +0000

We cover an explanation of DKIM Email Authentication in our blog entry DKIM Email Authentication. Here we’ll summarize some the top advantages and disadvantages. DKIM Authentication – Advantages If you have a very large list, your campaigns are more likely to get blocked or “throttled” by major ISPs like AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. However, if you [...]

Deploying DKIM Authentication in 4 Simple Steps

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:40:44 +0000

DKIM is an emerging e-mail authentication standard supported by Yahoo, Google and others ISPs, as well as a growing number of Email Service Providers like Pinpointe and that was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. DKIM allows an organization to cryptographically sign outgoing e-mail to verify that it sent the message. Deploying DKIM for [...]

DKIM Email Authentication in 2009

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:11:37 +0000

Email authentication is a way to say, “This email is from Pinpointe’s servers, but it’s being sent on behalf of me, so you can trust it.” It basically prevents your email from looking spoofed (like a forgery). DKIM is the e-mail authentication standard developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to address one of the [...]

What is Email “Phishing”?

Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:52:33 +0000

You know those annoying emails that pretend to be from PayPal, EBay or the local bank, asking you to login to your account and validate your password or other credentials? Those are “phishing” attacks – you’ve officially been “phished”. According to Wikipedia: “Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, [...]

How do I know if I’m on a SPAM Blacklist?

Editor — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:45:23 +0000

We often get the question: “How do I know if my company is on a SPAM Blacklist?” Followed by “If my company is on a SPAM blacklist, how the heck do we get unlisted? There are several hundred SPAM blacklists but luckily, there are a few tools that can help you check most of them quickly. [...]

6 Tips to Make Your Email Social

Editor — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:19:30 +0000

Email by itself is kind of like… a one legged stool. It can’t stand on its own. To be effective and useful, combine email marketing with search, social marketing and blogging. Most Business-to-Business (B2B) marketers are still trying to figure our how to apply social marketing techniques to their business. Here are 5 tips to [...]

Install an SPF Record to Improve Email Delivery

Editor — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:10:27 +0000

This entry applies to anyone who will be outsourcing any of their outbound email sending from servers other than their corporate email servers. You are likely an IT person who had landed here because someone from the marketing department said ‘Hey IT dude – we started using an ESP and we want to maximize email [...]

Which is Better: Person’s Name or Company for Send-From Address?

Editor — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:39:02 +0000

Our goal as marketers is to develop a ‘relationship’ with our audience. Generally speaking, people respond to people better than they respond to ‘things’ – like your company. Based on our split testing, we’ve found that in most cases, you’ll see better results by using a specific contact person (yourself for example) vs. a general address [...]

Use RSS to Keep Email Subscribers Informed

Editor — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:42:34 +0000

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is an excellent tool to help you ‘push’ relevant content to subscribers who want to keep up with your latest blog entries. For example you can subscribe to Pinpointe’s Blog RSS feed here. Why should you care about RSS and how can you use it? Keep you pulse on your market. Say [...]

Impact of Blackberry and PDAs on Email Design

Editor — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:31:00 +0000

According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. Chances are, your email looks downright awful when viewed on a Blackberry or similar. The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their mobile devices / smart phones to [...]

Tracking Statistics for Forwarded Emails

Editor — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:17:26 +0000

There are two ways one of your campaigns can get forwarded. The first is simply that an excited recipient thinks your email is useful and they forward it directly onward. The original email along with the original, unmodified trackable links and embedded ‘beacon’ image (used to track HTML email opens) is forwarded. When the *new* recipient [...]

Hard and Soft Bounces… What’s the Difference?

Editor — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:26:05 +0000

Each Webinar series we run, we get questions about the difference between hard and soft bounces. A ‘Hard‘ bounce is a permanent fatal error such as – the domain no longer exists (company went out of business), the email does not exist (the person retired / left the company / died). Most Email solutions, including Pinpointe’s [...]

Using ALT Text Tags in HTML Email

Editor — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:36:38 +0000

What is ‘ALT Text’ and why should you care? As most of us have now experienced, many email clients now DISABLE graphics images by default. We haven’t seen specific metrics on what % of email inboxes have images disabled by default but general consensus seems to be in the 50% range, and increasing. So, if your [...]

11 Common SPAM Content Mistakes

Editor — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:15:07 +0000

If you send email campaigns long enough, you will run into spam filter issues. As a legitimate email marketer you can still expect 20%+ of your emails to just get lost in cyberspace, mostly due to overzealous spam filters. SPAM filters / firewalls use multiple techniques to determine whether your legitimate business email is SPAM . [...]

Webinar: Email Marketing 201 – Improving Email Delivery (NetProspex)

Editor — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:32:44 +0000

Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ were focused on more straight-forward tips to improve delivery, with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control. In this Webinar, (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) we take it up a notch and explain [...]

CAN SPAM Act: Update

Editor — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:24:53 +0000

During each of our Email Marketing Webinars, we get questions about CAN-SPAM regulations, so I thought it would be useful to review the CAN SPAM laws. You will note in this post that, contrary to popular belief, ‘opt-in’ is surprisingly not a legal requirement. Offering additional impetus for the timeliness of the topic: we just passed the five-year [...]

Tracking Clicks for HTML & Text Emails

Editor — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:04:24 +0000

Clicks can be tracked for both HTML *and* text based emails (and multi-part emails too since that includes both HTML and text). How? Pretty easily. When your email campaign goes out (assuming you have selected ‘enable tracking’), Pinpointe automatically converts your actual link to a link to a Pinpointe redirect program. When a recipient clicks [...]

How Email Open Tracking Works

Editor — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:50:36 +0000

Click tracking and Link tracking are built in to Pinpointe, so you don’t have to do anything to generate nice campaign reports to show these results, but it helps to know how these features work. Tracking Opens To track an “open” in an HTML email, we embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of [...]

Webinar: Email Marketing 201 – Tips to Improve Email Delivery (ProspectDB)

Editor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:34:49 +0000

Our first series of webinars – starting with ‘Email Marketing 101′ focus on straight-forward tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content – the easiest component for most of us marketing folks to control. The followup webinar can be downloaded here or at the bottom of this post – “Email Marketing 201: Advanced [...]

Create “Ambient Awareness” with Twitter

Editor — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:15:06 +0000

We just started using Twitter - our page isn't too impressive yet, but you can find us at www.twitter.com/Pinpointe. Twitter is among the fastest growing social networks. Nearly 4 million times a day, the 140-character limit “tweet” attracts some percentage of Twitter’s 200,000+ weekly users. According to TechCrunch, Twitter has 1 million total users. And Popacular.com runs a GigaTweet counter, claiming over a billion tweets and counting since Twitter launched in 2006. Here are a few Twitter tools you might find useful:...

Using Google Website Optimizer to Increase Conversion Rates

Editor — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:55:26 +0000

Our theme for the start of 2009 is – squeeze every bit of performance out of every campaign. The only way to do that is to test, measure, optimize, and test again. Since one of the cool new features in Pinpointe 2.0 is split testing (so you can automatically optimize campaign results), I thought it [...]

How do I find/list unsubscribed contacts?

Editor — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:11:48 +0000

To view the unsubscribed contacts: Go to Contacts -> Search Contacts in the menu, Choose “View specific contacts from within the selected lists below”, Select the list you want and click Next, and Choose the Activity Status “Unsubscribed” and click Next. You should now be presented with all of the unsubscribed contacts of the lists you selected. You can click [...]

When I create a form, how do I choose which list my contacts will be added to

Editor — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:58:59 +0000

To create a subscription form that you can place on your web site, you first choose which contact lists you want your subscribers to be added to when they sign up, as select which custom fields you want to include on your subscription form. Begin by creating a form. Select the list(s) you want your subscribers to be added to [...]

Resending existing campaign to only new members

Editor — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:07:22 +0000

Here’s the scenario. You’ve created a campaign and sent it out a month ago. Since then you’ve had new prospects sign up for the same list and now you would like to resend the same campaign to only the new contacts. How do you do this? This is easy. We’re going to send to a list [...]

Downloading list of contacts who opened specific newsletters

Editor — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:17:42 +0000

Yes. You can export a list of contacts who opened or responded to a specific campaign or a series of campaigns. To do this, when you select your contact list make sure you tick “Yes Use Filtering Options”. Then select the specific email campaign or campaigns you wish to filter by. Be Nice.. Share With Your Friends And Enemies

Can I personalize email subject lines and email bodies?

Editor — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:55:49 +0000

Yes. Pinpointe is designed to help you personalize your communications to improve response results. Any field that exists in your contact lists can be easily inserted into the email subject or anywhere within the email body. When you create and configure your contact lists, you will probably create some additional custom fields too. These custom fields can [...]

Are my contact lists separate from other customer’s lists?

Editor — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:45:14 +0000

Absolutely. Each customer has their own dedicated ‘instance’ of Pinpointe running, so your data, contacts, campaign information, templates etc are all separate from other customer’s accounts. Be Nice.. Share With Your Friends And Enemies