Pinpointe - Business Email Marketing Blog

Dealing with CSS Styles in Email

Pinpointe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:46:07 +0000

As an email marketer you have probably already discovered that getting your newsletter or email campaign to display as you intended across the main email clients can be a challenge. The most popular email clients in business for example – Gmail (including Gmail for Businesses) and Microsoft Outlook 2007 / 2010 are pretty restrictive and only support about 40% of HTML / CSS styles. Even more challenging for email marketers – HTML ‘Best Practices’ for designing Websites are unfortunately often ‘Worst Practices’ for designing email campaigns, so your most experienced website designer / coder is probably designing email campaigns that won’t display right in a lot of email inboxes. (Hint: Always use the Pinpointe email campaign preview tool to see how your [...]

Top 10 Email Marketing Mistakes

Pinpointe — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 08:39:33 +0000

At Pinpointe, we see very smart customers make mistakes that cause their email response rates to suffer. Here are the most common mistakes we see our new customers make: Not running the SPAM checker Pinpointe has a built-in email SPAM checker that evaluates your email content using the popular spamassassin spam engine, gives you a spam score and provides suggestions to help get your email to the inbox. Wise customers use it before sending any email campaign. Yet some customers don’t run the spam check and confidently send their email campaign to thousands of recipients, only to learn that 25% of their emails were blocked or filtered by spam filters because their spam score was too high. In the Pinpointe [...]

What is a “spam honeypot” or Spamtrap?

Pinpointe — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:28:48 +0000

ISPs and spam tracking services like Spamhaus and SORBS rely on spamtraps or ‘honeypots’ to catch spammers – but what exactly is a ‘spam honeypot’ and how do you avoid hitting them? The bulk of the spamtraps and honeypots today are from dormant email accounts and/or closed domains. The logic is simple: a ‘dead email inbox can’t opt-in to receive email’, so anyone sending email to one of these spamtrap addresses is likely sending unsolicited email. ISPs (Yahoo.com, msn.com, gmail.com for example) review their list of email boxes regularly and disable accounts that have been inactive for a long period of time. They allow the addresses to sit disabled for six to 12 months – during which time any legitimate [...]

How to Embed Video in Email

Pinpointe — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 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 client. The best method is to change your mindset from ‘how to I embed Video in Email’ to ‘How to I incorporate Video in my Emails?’ (assuming of course that you have determined that your should add video). We’re simply going to add a graphic image to our email that looks like a video to be played, and we’ll include a link to a hosted [...]

DKIM Email Authentication in 2011

Pinpointe — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 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 Internet’s biggest threats: e-mail fraud. As much as 80% of e-mail from leading brands, banks and ISPs is spoofed, at least according to the Online Trust Alliance (www.otalliance.org). DKIM is an important step in rebuilding consumer confidence in e-mail, because DKIM makes it hard (i.e., almost impossible) for evil, fraudulent spammers to send emails where they pretend to be someone else – like your bank [...]

Webinar: How a SPAM Firewall Works

Pinpointe — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:32:44 +0000

Our first webinar - ‘Email Marketing 101′ focused on tips to improve delivery with a concentration on email content. In this Webinar, (aka “Why Good Emails Go Bad“) we take it up a notch and explain in detail, the end-to-end trials and tribulations of an email message as it flows from your outbox to (hopefully) the recipients inbox. This webinar is more technical. Our goal is to not only leave you with a dozen or so specific tips, but to help understand all the places where your email can get tripped up before finally hitting the recipient’s inbox. The topics include: How current Enterprise Email Filters work Tracking an Email from send to delivery: possible pitfalls along the way Designing for the [...]

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

Pinpointe — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 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. We’ve included here a handy reference with the sites that you can use to check your blacklist status. We’ve also highlighted one or two of the more prominent SPAM blacklists. What you need to know to check Blacklist status Most SPAM blacklists track the reputation of the email servers that are being used to send outgoing email for your domain, so to get started [...]

Webinar – Use Split Testing to Improve Email Responses

Pinpointe — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:43:12 +0000

Watch Webinar This is our third in a series of webinars for your business email marketing. Based on analysis of thousands of Business to Business email campaigns and a few hundred million emails that have been sent through Pinpointe’s B2B email marketing platform, we share results of several email split tests to help you improve your email marketing results in a business to business (“B2B”) environment. Join us in this interactive webinar session that includes question and answer sessions throuhhout. Topics covered include: Which is better: Sending from a person or from your company address? Can you lift response rates using personalization? What does subject line length have to do with response rates? The accompanying slides and Q and A summary [...]

Impact of Mobile Devices on Email Design

Pinpointe — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:31:00 +0000

According to new marketing data from MarketingSherpa, 64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their mobile devices. Chances are, your email might look downright awful when viewed on a mobile device. The ‘use scenario’ we are seeing is that people use their smart phones to do real-time checking (often skimming) of email, and make a quick decision whether to keep the email and read it in more detail later, or delete it. They then go back and review / act upon more important emails from their desktop. The survey also indicates mobile email users don’t click on links from these devices — only 54 percent have ever clicked on a link from their mobile device. [...]

Webinar: Writing Tips to Improve Email Responses

Pinpointe — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 05:44:08 +0000

This is the SECOND in our series of Webinars on Email Marketing deliverability. Which is more important - a great subject line, or a fantastic graphic design and witty content? Will having more links in your email increase your email response rate, or decrease it? We'll explain in this 'Email Writing Tips' webinar .

Based on analysis of 100's of millions of B2B emails and thousands of email campaigns that have recently been sent through Pinpointe's email marketing platform, we'll cover specific writing tips that will help you to improve email response rates. First, we'll break the email down into sections, including the subject, send-from, introduction, body and signature. Then we'll cover email writing tips for each section to explain what you can do to maximize responses.

Join us in this 50 minute on-demand Webinar, where we cover:

The Top 9 Best / Worst Performing Email Subjects
What content should all good emails have in common?
Optimizing your Subject Line
Embedded Link analysis - how to optimize links in your email

The accompanying slides and Q and A summary are below... And hey, please Diggit, Fave or Tweet about it!

Hard and Soft Bounces… What’s the Difference?

Pinpointe — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 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 on-demand B2B email marketing, automatically process bounces and either remove them from your email list(s), or change the email status from ‘Active’ to ‘Bounced’. Hard bounces are automatically flagged and removed from your list so that you do not ‘waste’ email credits sending to non-existent emails (doing so can also damage your email credibility). A ‘Soft‘ bounce is an intermittent, temporary condition. For example, [...]

10 Worst Performing Email Subject Lines

Pinpointe — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 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 they skimmed through their inbox.. and decided to delete the email instead of open it. Join Us for a FREE Webinar on April 2 2011! - Webinar about what? Why? From Whom? Aren’t most Webinars FREE? Shop Early and Save! - Oooh. Yet another promotional email. I’ve only received 219 of these today. - What will I be shopping for? Early for what? Save how [...]