Category: Email Marketing

I’m not sure if this is a rant or not, but this keeps on happening with customers at RocketResponder. Almost every day we’ll get customers asking about emails being marked as spam. It’s true, if we have bad reputation your emails won’t get delivered. But for the most part it’s up to you.

1. Don’t send spam! It sounds simple enough, but if you are sending spammy content of course it will get filtered. Every person who has asked why their emails ended up in spam is sending emails that I would consider spam if I got one. Obviously their list subscribed so hey they want the emails, but the primary filters are looking at overall email quality, if they see you look like spam, they’ll think it’s spam.
2. Click Not Spam!!  This again sounds simple, but the people asking say they always goto spam. Especially with Gmail, secondary filters learn what the end user sees as spam or not spam. So if you see an email is in spam, and aren’t clicking not spam, it thinks it was right that the email was spam. Its the same reason if you don’t mark an email as spam you’ll start to get more spam going to your inbox. It’s also the same reason that when I subscribe to these user’s lists, I get it to inbox while they still get it to spam!
3. Open your emails! This one is less known, but Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc monitor which emails you open. They care less about the content and more about engagement. If you want marketing type emails and are opening them, they want to put them in your inbox. The best way to help show your emails are wanted, is to actually open them yourself. Every email you don’t open is just re-confirming that you don’t really care if you get the email or not.
4. Click links in your emails! Similar to opening, they actually track if you are clicking links or not. Hotmail will go as far as to warn you if you click a link in an email that looks spammy and ask if you’re sure. Click yes you’re sure, it’s your email and it confirms that it’s legit.
5. Send emails people want! Obvious? yes but still people have this concept that if you “blast” enough emails you’ll get enough clicks to warrant the time sending the email. If this is your view, you’re going to get your emails filtered.

What people don’t seem to understand is that most email providers use reputation systems. For instance the from email address you are sending from. Or the links in your emails. I’ll bet they even track the address line that’s required by CAN SPAM. It’s no longer solely the responsibility of the ESP to get the email to the inbox which is why so many sketchy senders are finding their emails not going as far.

So I’m sure you’re wondering what we do at RocketResponder to ensure your emails aren’t being filtered because of other users. Well we do a few things:

1. We send the emails from your email address.
2. We use a different sub domain for every member for all links in the emails themselves.
3. We monitor engagement and group similar senders into different sending IP groups.
4. We monitor all our IPs against blackists and feedback loops and get notified every few hours of changes.

If you aren’t using RocketResponder then you should give it a try, we give you 30 days to try it out without paying or entering credit card info or even creating a Paypal subscription. You’ll also save some money too,  we charge $20 per 10,000 subscribers which is a huge bargain. Most other guys charge in 1000 subscriber increments, and they charge for unsubscribed users!

Well this is something I’ve been wanting for a while. I love seeing the number of subscribers to my blog right smack on every page. It motivates me to keep that number growing and it gets visitors interested in subscribing.

Let’s face it, people don’t want to miss out so if they see lots of people have subscribed they want to subscribe too. It’s almost like an authority ranking of sorts. It proves you’re someone worth subscribing to!

We’ve got widgets in a variety of styles that will stand out. And what’s even more cool about them, if someone clicks the subscriber count they’ll get to a subscribe page for your list, and if they click the Powered by link they’ll be clicking your referral link ;-)

So it’s just another way to get more people subscribing and more people in your downline at RocketResponder!

I’m actually surprised how many people want single opt in for Rocket Responder. I understand the core reason, they want more people on their list. But the whole reason you confirm a subscription is to make sure the person actually signed up for it.

Everyone rants about spam. Nobody likes it. So why wouldn’t you want to play by the same rules you expect for your inbox?

You want an active list right? You want your subscribers to click your links, buy your products, etc. So start out on their good side with a quick confirmation email.

It’s OK if they don’t confirm immediately, it’s OK if not everyone confirms. It’s MUCH better than having them think negatively about you or even worse, reporting your email as spam!

You could also think of it this way.. Most autoresponders charge based on number of subscribers. Do you really want to be paying MONTHLY for subscribers who never wanted your email, marked it as spam and have it always go to spam, or filter it to delete automatically? No way!

Just something to think about.

I’ve done a video tutorial for using RocketResponder with blogs. This is the reason the site exists. I’ve been too frustrated with all the other options out there. Poor Jon has been logging into his autoresponder and sending an email out manually for years.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mguRsPHpa1A]

If you full screen you’ll see full detail. But it’s so simple people are confused when they are done. Justin was waiting wondering what the next step, I had to tell him there was no next step it was already done.

I really see my success in business as a result of starting this blog. I don’t do crazy pitching I don’t do much with it really, but it has given me a voice and is the reason most people know who I am.

Before the blog I was just a guy running a traffic exchange. People knew my name but that was it. After my blog people see me as a friend and they get to interact with me.

So that’s why I’ll be pushing blogging & list building from now on. I’ve been holding back because all the other options were too expensive or too difficult for newbies. I can now show people how easy it is!