Forcing messages on someone is not going to ever be easy or effective with email. But email marketing can be very powerful and rewarding if you accept and follow the one truth.

We all tend to see things through the lens of the past. We get new tools, but try to use them like the same old tools we have had for years. I wonder if the first person to hold a screwdriver, flipped it around and tried to use it to bang in a nail?

I am approached by a lot of marketers, who have a lot of experience in traditional forms of marketing and advertising, and who are now trying to apply that to email. Specifically, they want to deliver a message to a crowd of people – without regard for the fact that some of these people might not care to receive it.

This does not work with email. Email is different. Very different.

To effectively market using email, you need to know – and ACCEPT that it will NEVER, EVER be easy to send email messages to people who do not want to receive them. AND if you try, it is very, very likely that these unhappy recipients will cause you swift, immediate and long lasting pain by destroying your ability to even reach the people who would be receptive to your messages.

How can this be? Why is email different than traditional advertising like billboards, magazine ads, postal mail, television advertisements, telemarketers, etc…

EMAIL IS INTERACTIVE. Recipients can easily fight back by simply clicking the spam button or forwarding the message to a service like spamcop.

THE RECIPIENT CAN CAUSE YOU IMMEDIATE PAIN IF YOU DISPLEASE THEM. With just a click, the recipient can report your mail (spam or not). These reports get immediately funneled into central databases (blacklists) which are often even shared by multiple ISPs. If you generate too many of these complaints, many ISPs will stop accepting your mail period.

Why do the ISPs care? Because the ISP is a link in the channel and the recipient is a customer of the ISP. There are a zillion ISPs competing to please and retain their customers. For example, if I am using a gmail.com email address, then I am a customer of Google (the channel). They want me to be happy, and only want me to receive the email that I want. Otherwise I will go use some other mail service, and they will loose my eyes, and thus ad revenue. They are doing what they can to block the mail I don’t want to receive.

“But I am not sending SPAM,” you say? I should hope not. But just because you don’t consider your messages “SPAM” does not mean that they will be welcome by the people you are sending them to.

Remember this rhyme and make it your golden rule: If it causes the recipient to complain – it will cause you pain.

Forcing messages on someone is not going to ever be easy or effective with email. Bad lists are easy to find, but impossible to use.

But if you have a list of people who have REALLY opted in to receive YOUR messages.
Email marketing can be easy and rewarding. Good lists, built organically over time and kept clean, are an extremely effective, low cost, and deliver an incredibly high ROI.

My advice to any marketer is that the sooner they accept this reality, the sooner they can start building a successful email marketing system.

A few weeks ago we quietly rolled out a great new feature to the SocketLabs Email On-Demand control panel. The new interactive Suppression List report, allows you to view and manage your suppression lists.

We have been using an automatic suppression list for all SocketLabs Email On-Demand accounts since day one, but until now, it was hidden, and behind the scenes. In case you don’t know, our automatic suppression lists are an extremely powerful feature of SocketLabs Email On-Demand that dramatically increases your deliverability by:

• Automatically blocking email to addresses which have previously hard bounced
• Automatically blocking email to any recipient which has previously complained about one of your mailings

With the new suppression list report, you can see and search for email addresses on your suppression list, and even remove them if they are erroneous hard bounces.

Two things which destroy your deliverability are repeatedly sending to invalid addresses and sending to people who have complained about your email.

The SocketLabs Email On-Demand automatic suppression lists always work magically without any effort on your part. Now, if you want to manage them, you have the option!

Each SocketLabs Email On-Demand account has a new “Quality Score” which is now displayed prominently on the control panel dashboard.

The Quality Score is a measure of how well we think your email is performing on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

It is important to note that the score is based solely on factors relating to your email lists, content and practices. At SocketLabs we are doing everything that can be done from a technology perspective to improve your deliverability, however deliverability is also based heavily on the quality of your lists, content and practices. We (at SocketLabs) can not do anything to increase your Quality Score. It is based solely on factors exclusively under your control.

The Quality Score is based on a number of factors including:

How many invalid vs good email addresses you have tried to deliver to
How often your email is marked as spam
How often people complain about your email

The score is recomputed every day and takes into account a variable window of activity extending into the past.

This is a beta feature for now as we are continually working on improving the algorithm which computes the score.

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