Spam, Outlook, Spam, Microsoft, Spam, Spam, and Spam

Anyone who uses email marketing knows how disastrous it can be to be blacklisted as a spammer. Your emails won’t be delivered, your reputation suffers… not to mention your bottom line.

Fortunately for you, we have tools that report how different email programs evaluate incoming messages. Here are our latest discoveries about how Microsoft Outlook decides what is spam and what isn’t:

1. What day your emails go out: Messages sent on a Saturday or Sunday are more closely correlated with spam than messages sent on a weekday.
2. UPPERCASE IN THE SUBJECT LINE: If words in uppercase make 25% (or more) of the total number of words,…

Build Your Opt-In List Fast with this Powerful Technique

Are you looking for quick ways to build your opt-in list? Conduct an online survey!

Surveys are great for doing market research. But there’s an extra, hidden benefit to conducting a survey.

You can use it to grow your opt-in list!

That’s important because you can build a strong relationship with the people on your opt-in list by offering them lots of great information. Then, once they love you for all the free stuff you’ve given them, you can present your offer to them — and they’ll be far more likely to buy!

Here’s how you get started…

Simply create a survey with a program…

Win Apple Prizes from iContact

Are you looking for a company to manage all your email marketing chores? We’ve been recommending iContact ever since we did a long search to find a company that could handle the email marketing needs of the small online businesses that make up our customer base.

Now there’s another good reason to sign up. Prizes! iContact is awarding an Apple MacBook, an iPod touch, and a $100 Apple Gift Card to the email marketer who becomes their 50,000th customer.

If you already have a trial account, you just have to log in and upgrade to the full account. Do it before Sunday May 31 and you’ll also…

Canada Closes Loopholes for Spammers

Just a heads up… if you’re a Canadian email marketer, the forthcoming Electronic Commerce Protection Act has slightly different rules from CAN-SPAM. The Act was introduced mainly to prevent phishing, malware, and spamming from within Canada, so if you’re doing legitimate email marketing to your opt-in list and following CAN-SPAM rules you shouldn’t have a problem. But if you want to make sure, this MarketingSherpa article goes into detail about any differences that might affect your opt-in list management.

Email Responses — Are People Taking Longer to Take Action?

Have you noticed any changes in the response times to your email marketing?

With a mailing list of many hundreds of thousands, we’ve always had the luxury of quick and easy email testing. We’ll usually split-test two or three versions of an email on groups of 10,000 subscribers and look for results the next day.

For years we’ve been able to get reliable results and send out the winner to the rest of the list in 24 hours. But lately we’ve been seeing a gap between when subscribers get a promotional email and when they actually do something about it. These days we have to wait a…

Why People Unsubscribe from Your List (And 5 Ways to Make Them Stay)

You work hard building your email list… and you spend ages crafting your email newsletters and promotions. But every time you press the “Send” button, you’re hit with a bunch of new unsubscribe requests.

Why?

Often we Internet marketers think that it’s simply because our subscribers have signed up for too many email lists. We imagine their inboxes overflowing with unread messages from all sorts of subscriptions… and assume they’ve decided to purge a few to make their email more manageable.

(We just happen to be the unlucky recipients of their desire to clean out their inbox clutter.)

Nice excuse, but not always true.

In…