Adventures In Digital Marketing

Spam Scoring

Spam spam spam spam spam. We all get it, we all hate it – so what are we doing potentially adding
to the problem by using email as a marketing tool? Discuss.

But seriously, spam is a big issue for email marketing,
and it’s something that you need to consider a great deal if you want your
message to be delivered to as many people on your list as you can.

A good 3^rd party email provider will provide a
built-in spam scoring engine for you to use but if yours doe not then do not
worry as there are several others available for free on the web, or as
downloadable freeware you can install your self, to do the job.

The basic way that spam scoring works is that you “send” a
test email through the system, which in turn “reads” it, and returns to you a
score of how much it “looks” like a spam email. This score acts as an indication of how likely that email then is to get
blocked by a spam filter and, by association, not delivered to your intended
recipient.

The spam scoring software will look at the email in two
distinct ways. Firstly, one a
human-style level, by reading the actual copy of the email and assessing how
likely it is to be spam. Offensive words
(no need for me to explain what these are), words with common spam like content
(such as viagara) or common phrases which sound human but are often used to
“trick” or try to trick a user into opening an email (such as “great to see
you!”) are all likely to grab the attention of the spam software and affect
your overall score. You can then use the
report to look back at the copy you have written and re-write it to achieve a
better ranking, and thereby improve the deliverability of your email. This is probably a reason why, if you happen
to work in the pharmaceutical side of things, email marketing probably isn’t
going to be your best route to the target market.

The second way that spam scoring works is to look at the
actual HTML source code of the email and report back on any possible “tricks”
that spammers employ to get through spam filters. These can include things such as having
nothing but images in an email with no text content so spam filters cannot read
the copy, or using copy of a colour that is the same as the page background –
white on white for example. Obviously,
most of us won’t be using these techniques anyway because it doesn’t make sense
in any way, but it’s still worthwhile from a best practice point of view.

The results of your spam score should be used to rework
the email if required to achieve better deliverability. This can sometimes mean that the copy needs
to be re-written, especially the subject line which is very important, and at
times this can seem like a pain for all involved. Developers may not want to
put the copy back in, account managers may state that the client has already
signed off the copy, and the client may think along the lines of “why didn’t
you get the copy correct in the first place”. But, spam scoring must be done
with the email built in HTML as if you were going to send it out, due to the
two different ways that it is “read” by the tools. Scoring on copy alone would not give a full
reflection of the communication.

If you and your client is serious about reaching as many
people as possible on their list, this is a critical step that should be
followed.

Final tests - Preparing
your test list

Before you send the email for real, and even though the
client and other stake holders will have signed off the email as a HTML
document before by viewing it offline, as a print out, or on a website as a
HTML page, it is essential that they get a “live” version sent to them from
within the bulk email system so that they get the actual email version to
review and sign off as it will be seen by each and every one of the recipients
on the list.

In order to do this you will need to prepare a test, or
seed, list containing a set of data for each stakeholder in the project who
needs to sign off.

The complexity of this list will vary depending on how
much personalization there is in your template. If there is none, then you simply need a list with the email addresses
in it. However, for each personalized
element in the email you will need your list of stakeholders to be completed
accordingly. Otherwise, when the
stakeholders receive the email there will be gaps, omissions and possibly
errors in the email which will, of course, make them not sign it off and throw
it back. It will also make you, NOT the other
departments, look bad. Therefore, you
must ensure that whoever it is providing you with data for the seed list
ensures that all elements are in place.

Again, as I said before, it’s not your responsibility to
ensure that all the right people are on this list, that’s the job of the
account team, but rest assured that because you as a digital campaign project
manager are effectively the last link in the chain, you and your team will look
bad – so you need to do everything you can to avoid this.

When you have your seed list, you can upload the data into
the bulk system, and should be able to flag it as a seed list so that when the
actual email goes out live these people are not sent to again, unless they want
to be.

All that remains then is to send the email to the list and
wait for the comments to come back. If
you’ve covered off all of the points above then at this stage you should simply
be receiving sign-off to say it is good to go. If you’ve done something wrong, i.e. a bug, then this will come back to
haunt you so hopefully you’ve checked everything up to this point.

Often, even though everything has been signed off at this
point, clients or other stakeholders will continue to make copy or design
amends to the document. This is an
annoying yet frequent problem and hard to avoid. In general I would recommend being flexible
to a certain point. If the copy amend is
a small one such as a single word, then it isn’t too difficult to do directly
in the template itself. If the amends
are more involved, or there are quite a few of them, it’s probably best to go
back a few stages to the copy writing phase and take it offline again. Use your own judgement, all clients are
different after all, but be flexible as you see fit.

Hopefully though you will get back a sign-off from all
parties to say you can proceed to the “go live” stage and schedule the email
for the actual send.

Uploading your live
data and scheduling the send

Uploading your live data is likely to be exactly the same
process as uploading your seed list, the only difference being the way you flag
or classify the data within the 3^rd party database. Depending on the number of people in your
list it could take some time so be prepared for quite a wait, even once the
data file itself has been uploaded.

When you have uploaded the data you will most likely be
presented with a data report which will list the following items:

· New records

· Amended records

· Non-valid addresses

· Bounces

· Un-subscribed

· Total addresses in batch that will be sent

You should make a note of these numbers and send them to
the account team for them to record. These numbers are very useful and will give you an indication that the
data has been uploaded in the right format and all is as it should be. If, for example, you’ve uploaded a dataset of
100,000 recipients, but the system is reporting that there are only 30,000 in
the send list, something major has gone wrong and you should pause the process
and speak to whoever supplied the data.

It’s perfectly normal to lose a small percentage of
recipients to bounces and un-subscribes. These are simply addresses that the 3^rd party system knows,
probably from your previous campaigns, are no longer valid or no longer wish to
receive communications from you. This
will take time to build up, so logically the very first email you send from the
system should have none, but once you have sent a few there will be numbers in
this. Therefore, aside from the very
first send, it is extremely unlikely that you will send to 100% of your
list. 

A good 3rd party system will give you the un-subscribes,
bounces and other address which you can no longer send to in an exported file
such as a CSV of XLS. You should take
these files and give them to the account team. They in turn should feed them back to the data provider so that these
names can be removed from the database and not be sent back to you in the
future – it’s just good data practice to keep your lists clean and tidy.

Scheduling the send

Once you’ve uploaded your data, and got full sign off from
all stakeholders – not just the account team but the client as well – you’re
ready to send the email.

You should be able to just hit a button and send the
email, but my advice is to resist this urge and use the scheduled sending
option that most 3^rd party system provide, and set the email for
some time in the near future.

Fifteen minutes delay is often a good idea even if you
want it to go “as soon as possible”. The
reason for this is that it still gives you, at the very last hurdle, a little
bit of a buffer zone for protection. You
don’t need to tell other people that this has been done, as far as they are
concerned the email has been sent. What this delay gives you though is a little
bit of space to breathe incase you or any other member of the project team notices,
at the final hour, a problem or error with the email. 

Most times this will not be the case, but I have
personally experienced the horror of sending an email to thousands of people
only for an account manager to run up five minutes after the send shouting “you
haven’t sent it yet have you? It’s the wrong list!” Even with all of your sign
off procedure in place mistakes can and do happen – so this last bit of room
that you yourself put into the process gives you that last bit if
professionalism that, should disaster strike, allow you to rectify it at the
eleventh hour.

To wrap up…

And that’s it. If
you follow all of the above, not to the word, but use the various points as a
general guide to best practice in email process, you should cover off most eventualities
that can and do arise. Email sending
isn’t a dark art – it’s pretty straight forward if you look at it in it’s
component parts. But what is almost
frightening about email is the fact that you can, in a very short period of
time, send a message out to thousands of users in which there can be a
potential error, be it technical or communication based. Unlike web pages, you cannot take them back
once you’ve hit send to limit the impact. But, even with this in mind, by
applying careful process and checks to the campaign you can limit the risk
involved at all stages.

One final point – although this process may seem long
winded at time, and you may get hastle off other stakeholders for applying it,
it really is there to help you and them communicate effectively to your target
audience and, at the end of the day, that’ what everyone wants to do – so stick
to your guns.

Howard
–

Pre-build Sign-off

Before you start to cut up a single PSD, or write that
first line of HTML code, you should ensure that the design for the email, and
the copy that is to be included in it, has been signed-off by all of the stakeholders
involved in the project. These can be a
wide range of people, but will most of the time include an account manager, a
creative director, and the client.

I cannot stress how important it is to say that under no
circumstances should you be tempted to start building the email template until
the photoshop design has been seen by the client and signed-off. The same is true of the copy which ideally
should be flowed into the email to act as an indication of how it will look
once it is built. What we don’t want to
happen is for the client to continue to make creative amends to a design once
it’s been coded. If that begins to
happen, throw it back into the designers and get them to re-work it in
photoshop.

Importantly the client should be informed (and often the
account teams as well!) that the flat designs are not be a direct
representation of what it will look like when it’s coded up. Why? Well, remember those basic FONT tags we’re having to use to cope with
the many different email clients there still are? Well, they have a tendency to make fonts go
all weird, and so even if a designer likes there to be a 1 pixel gap on the
right-hand border, or is worried by a widow that’s appearing on the last line,
don’t let that get in the way of your building the file in HTML. A lot of people now are used to the power
that CSS gives us and expect the same in all digital formats, but with email we
have to go old-school and forget that. It’s a shame, but it’s true. Emails can, and often will, look ever so slightly different when built
to the flat PSD.

So, when you are running a project of this type, make sure
you get sign-off of the finished creative and copy from all the stakeholders
before you accept it for briefing in the developers. If not, you will be making a rod for your own
back and no matter how much you think you’re doing the others a favour, or they
complain the client cannot visualize it as a flat design, resist the urge to
say “ok, just this once”. Trust me!

Build Stages

As HTML goes, emails are
pretty simple beasts really. Tabular
layouts and nice clear concise paragraphs of content, so what I don’t want to
do is get into how to write your <H1> tags etc.

There are four things to
consider in the build of an email and these are the HTML version, the plain
text version, personalized tags and multiple emails.

HTML Version

The HTML version of an
email is pretty much the one that most people are going to see. Graphically interesting, with good formatted
text and visually appealing – it’s what everyone thinks of when you say the
words “email campaign”.

There really isn’t that
much to say about it – get the design (signed off!) and get cutting your
code. Stick to basic HTML, tables are
preferable to DIVs, and use FONT tags like it’s 1999!

Job done.

Plain Text

The plain text version of
an email is often over looked by everyone in a campaign – because generally
people are focusing on the good looking guy! But, you will need to have a plain text version of almost every email
you send unless, of course, you know 100% that the list of recipients that you
are sending to are all HTML email opt-in. And even then I’d suggest you send multipart (which we will discuss in a
short while).

There are two schools of
thought in the plain text world. The first is to fully replicate the copy from
the HTML version, but lay it out as if your only word processor on the PC is
notepad. If this is the case, it’s a
good idea to get the copy writer to provide the plain text version to you when
they create the HTML side of things. As
copy writers they will undoubtedly be concerned with the flow and layout of the
text, because it’s their job and they should be, so it makes sense for them to
provide it. In my experience, when a
HTML developer is asked to make the text only version, they’ll get something
wrong in the copy.

The other school of thought
is that you cannot possibly reproduce the HTML version accurately enough in a
text only version, and the message will be lost, so you put something along
this line in the plain text:

If you can see this then
your email client cannot display HTML. Because we want you to experience the full email please visit the
following URL in your web browser to see the email. http://www.bobbinsemails.com/thisemail/”

And with this you simply
ignore text only email users and redirect them to the HTML version on the
web. A lot of 3^rd party email
providers will set this address up for you automatically if you want so there
isn’t even any extra work required from your developer.

It’s up to you and the
stakeholders really as to which route you take, but one thing to consider is
that desktop PC email clients are not the only way to check your email any
more, and you should probably think about mobile, PDAs, media centres and so
forth. I can say I’ve seen both sorts
though, and I have no problem with either.

Personalised Tags

We discussed personalized
tags in the copy post yesterday, and so if you’ve done your checklist as you
should have, by now you’ll know all of the personalized elements that you are
expecting to appear in this email. 

The main thing to do at
this point is make sure that your HTML version has the tags for tying up the
data set with the fields in your 3^rd party system correctly. Generally these tags will be in the form of a
bespoke mark-up language that the 3^rd party uses and will look
something like:

##my_data_field##

Or

%%another_data_field%%

When the HTML
is being built, just make sure the right tags are in the right place, otherwise
you’ll end up calling a customer “

COVENTRY

”
and directing them to a new car called “DAVID”.

Message Formats

This part is really just to ensure that whoever it is who
uploads the email code and images into the 3^rd party system does so
in the right format for the job. This
might be you, a developer or a dedicated email administrator, but the key thing
to remember, which will have been decided on before, is to get the right
formats uploaded and selected in the system.

These are HTML, plain text and, importantly, multipart.

HTML and plain text we know, and for the easiest
explanation, all that a multipart email is, is an email that contains BOTH the
HTML and text versions. The reason for
doing this is to ensure that the users own email client can decide on which
version they should display.

For example, if a user has a basic HTML client that for
some reason cannot show HTML, if you only send them an HTML email, they will
see the raw code when they view it. This
is obviously undesirable.

Similarly, if you were to send a plain text only email,
and yet they have a nice advanced email client, then you’ll miss an opportunity
to show off the design and the branding by giving them the basic model.

Multipart allows the users own software to show them the version
they want or, if they haven’t gone to the trouble of setting it up, show them
the HTML version, which is often assumed to be the most desirable.

Most modern 3^rd party email systems can cope
with this choice, and my advise would be to send multipart to cover off as many
bases as you can.

That’s all for now, next time I’ll go into the details of
spam scoring and copy adjustments.

Email Design

When I say email design, what I don’t mean to be is an art
director in any way (god forbid!) No, what I mean is to help to guide the
people doing the design work towards something which will work for the majority
of users we intend to send out to. In an
ideal world designers would have an understanding of the limitations of working
with email but unfortunately that’s not always the case. Email is a temperamental beast and, because
it is something we all use everyday now as much as, if not more than, the web
and the browser it’s often assumed that it’s as advanced as it’s friends that
help us connect to the Internet. The truth, however, is that email is still,
for all intent and purpose, living in the dark ages of the web, circa 1999
around the time that XHTML was a far off dream and people were just beginning
to understand that CSS was the way forward.

The reason for this isn’t that email hasn’t moved on – it
has and the modern clients such as Outlook 2003, Thunderbird and Apple Mail as
pretty much cutting edge supporting all types of standards and
bells/whistles. However, unlike the
browser in which most people have progressed as new versions are released,
email clients tend to be stuck in the past to a certain extent – particularly
for corporate clients, something to consider if you’re going for a B2B audience. In addition we have to consideration that a
large portion of people use web-based email clients to check their mail, such
as Hotmail, Gmail and so forth (myself included – I cannot live without my gmail!)
These services, whilst running in the browser, can and do have some peculiar
rules on displaying content, and so yet again it’s not safe to assume that all
the tricks we can and do put into websites will be accepted or displayed in
emails.

The basic rule of thumb is to play it safe and stick to
“old school” HTML. Basically, avoid CSS, stick to FONT tags, and forget all
thoughts about video, sounds and flash content. Aside from it being perhaps unacceptable to the audience to include
content that we assume they will want to see, it can provide hefty downloads
and, in many cases, simply not work.

Text; HTML; JPGs; GIFs; That’s your lot.

Copy Writing

As I mentioned before, what I don’t want to do is come
over all “creative”, and so when I talk about copy, I obviously don’t mean
anything about tone of voice, what or how you say something (although I think
that’s a perfectly valid topic for adventuresDM but perhaps by a different
member of the team!)

When preparing copy for an email campaign there are, by
default, a set of key elements that you must include in your brief to the
writer, otherwise the project will be left without important elements that will
mean your developer or email administrator will not know how, and therefore be
unable, to proceed. In some ways these may not appear to be the responsibility
of the copy writer, and perhaps they aren’t, but they still need to be on-brand
and relevant to the campaign, so if not the copy writer then someone else such
as an account manager or even the client should provide them.

The three key elements are the email basics, the
customized fields and link URLs, and I’ll go through those now in order.

Copy Writing - Email Basics

This phrase perhaps makes you think that these items are
not so important, but I assure you they are. There are three key items within this that you need, and these are the
Senders, or FROM, address; the REPLY-TO address; the subject line of the email. These three items MUST be included in the
copy deck for an email campaign. If not, you simply cannot send the email
out. I have seen it happen time and time
again that emails go back and forth for days between agency and client, going
over in the smallest possible details the design and content of the email, only
for the campaign to run right up to the deadline and fall over at the last
minute because for some reason or another there wasn’t a subject line included
in the original spec.

Copy Writing - Customised Fields

These are the second important part of the copy writing
stage and are to do with any personalization that is required in the
email. Emails can get very, very
complicated, especially in a full CRM programme where a users clicks and what
they read is fed back into the loop and forms the basis of the next email (this
is also out of scope for this post, and really we’re just covering a one-off
style campaign although these points are just as valid for full-on campaigns). 

What I mean by personalisation at this point are things
such as:

· Greeting – Mr, Mrs, Miss?

· Name – firstname only, full name, surname?

· Any other elements such as a contact name or
telephone number at the client’s business?

· Details of an event, date or location

Basically any other item of text content that can and will
change either on a person-by-person basis, or frequently for large chunks of
users. At this point it is key not to
worry about what these items are going to be, because they won’t necessarily
come from the copy writer, but more from data or from either the client or your
own agency. The copy writer will, however, need to bear in mind what these
items are going to be and include them when they produce the text so the HTML
developer knows where to include the codes.

Similarly, the people supplying the data need to be sure
that any customizable or personalized item they include in the brief for this
email is actually going to be possible to provide for EVERY recipient. It is simply not going to be good enough for
a customized item, for example a person’s home town, to be included in an email
if it cannot be displayed for all recipients. The email engine will not be able to tell the difference between

BIRMINGHAM

and “ “ (blank)
or even GIRAFFE, and so if the data is not there, or it’s not clean, you may as
well forget it.

Occasionally, you’ll be asked to put in a special case to
cope with gaps in data. “We have images
for every one of the 20,000 users, except for some where we don’t – that’s OK
isn’t it? You can just display a picture of a monkey right?” Wrong – do not do this. You will cause more
trouble than it is worth for yourself and your team. If something is missing for a group of users,
no matter how small, you should question how valuable that piece of information
is in the first place and why it’s important for some, but not all – do we need
it in the first place then?

All of these data and copy elements should be agreed
up-front by all stakeholders before anyone puts pen to paper, or certainly
before anyone starts to write a single line of HTML.

Copy Writing - Link URLs

The third and final element in preparing the copy for an
email is link URLs. As with subject
lines, not having the right link URLs for an email is another last minute
mistake that often gets made. It’s very
easy for people on a project to say something like “click here to view the
powerpoint document” but then forget that actually that power point document
needs to sit on the end of a URL on a server somewhere, and we cannot guess
what it is.

In addition to simply not having the URLs to begin with,
having the right URLs is just as important when you consider the message you
are trying to get across. Imagine you’re
sending out an email for an important automotive client, and they want to link
through to the latest specifications for their new car. How terrible would it be for you to send that
email out to 100,000 recipients, but direct them through to last years model,
or a cheap model when you’re trying to sell them the luxury saloon. All URLs need to be provided to you along
with all of the other items mentioned above, and signed-off by both the account
team and the client. It is not your
responsibility as a builder or project manager to make sure it’s the right
product! Your responsibility is to
ensure the HTML you end up building links through to their URL and not
somewhere else. What that URL actually
is you don’t care.

A good way to deal with this is to create a check list of
content items to give to your account team and have them fill it all in and
make sure they don’t miss anything. Then, they can provide this to you and the
developer. Anything that changes can be
re-submitted to you using the same form.

In my next post I’ll be discussing the sign-off
process you should follow before you start to build, and what the build process
should be like once you do begin. I’ll
also provide you with a link to the check-list I mentioned above.

Introduction
How to ensure that the project within your company, be it an agency, one man
band or otherwise, goes as smoothly from A to Z, or should that be B (brief) to
S (sending), as possible.  What the email looks like and what you say in
it isn’t in the scope of this post - I’ll leave that to the more creative
amongst you.

I’ve broken down the process into several key stages, each of which is
essential to ensure your project goes as smoothly as possible. These stages are listed in the bullet points
below and include elements such as the preparation of the content, creation of
the various files required and the steps you should take in order to get things
done efficiently.  It goes on the focus on uploading into a bulk mail
system provided by a third party and eventually sending. This is a complete set of steps you should
pay attention to and follow to ensure delivery is as accurate and effective as
possible.

The points in
any email process are as follows:

1. email design - images vs text and
considerations for the "base line" email client

2. copy writing

1. essential
copy:

1. senders/from name

2. reply
to address

3. subject
line

2. personalisation
data planning

3. links

1. link
text description

2. link
URL

3. Pre-build sign-off - don’t build until it
is!

4. build stages

1. html

2. plain
text

3. personalisation
tags

4. html,
text or multipart?

5. spam scoring and copy adjustments

6. final tests

1. preparing
your test lists

2. final
testing and sign-off

7. sending

1. uploading
your live data set

1. estimated
send amount

2. deduplication
against unsubscribe/bounce list

2. schedule in the send deadline for the
future

That’s it for the introduction. I’ll continue in my next post on the subject by covering the first
point on the list – email design considerations.