Here are some factors that may be leading to the messages from your email marketing program being tagged as SPAM along with what you can do to prevent that from happening. Wouldn’t it be great to reside amongst the very happy 6% of messages that are positively received by their intended audiences?

Your messages aren’t reaching your list members. The problem could be that your email marketing ASP isn’t reliable enough. Do some research into which email service providers have the highest deliverability rates, which have good reputations and so forth. Problems could arise for many reasons including if you get assigned a recycled IP address or if the servers of your email marketing ASP are overstuffed.

Your messages aren’t being identified. Your list members may be having a hard time distinguishing your messages from the saturated, nearly all encompassing SPAM pile (Remember, 94 percent!). To remedy the situation you need to be sure to have a recognizable name in the “From” field. Your subject line needs to be short, to the point and grammatically correct. Read more on this issue in a former email marketing tip of the week.

Your messages aren’t being read. You may not be compelling enough with the subject lines your email marketing program utilizes. Additionally, it may be time to scrub your list clean of list members who are uninterested in your messages. From here on out, get some information on your list members when they signup. Find out what kinds of messages they want to receive from you so you can segment them accordingly. Don’t forget to set the ground rules either. Inform your new list members when they can expect to receive your messages and how frequently you’ll be in their inbox.

Your messages aren’t being displayed properly. What kind of template or design are you using within your emails? Excessive images can leave the monitors of your list members filled with open spaces and X marks. Complicated HTML or other coding languages could load improperly. Keep your templates simple and clean, and consider offering a text only option for subscribers. Check out another post to learn more about choosing an email marketing template.

Starting from sheer deliverability and ending with your emails being displayed properly, there are lots of landmines and pitfalls that your email marketing program can run into. Find a quality email marketing ASP, identify yourself, compel and target your list members and design your messages effectively and your email marketing program will hopefully find a home in that 6% sliver of opportunity.

1. Be Polite – As in, participate in permission email marketing rather than harvesting addresses from the Internet or buying an email list for sale. Throw signup forms on your website, collect addresses from your physical store and generally find prospects and list members in any way that you can as long as you have the person’s permission to contact them.

2. Identify Yourself – All of your B2B email marketing messages have to be easily identifiable as coming from you. That means the “From” field should have the most recognizable name your business has. For some people that might be your personal name, but for most businesses it will be the name of the company itself, or the shortened version of the name that the company commonly goes by.

3. Be Descriptive – An overlooked piece of FTC CAN-SPAM compliance is the subject lines of your emails. You should be accurate, descriptive and concise so your recipients clearly understand what the email is about. Use proper punctuation and grammar and avoid all things SPAMMY: “Buy now!!! Free, free, free!!!”

4. Stay in Touch – Even prospects that were at one point highly interested in your business and your messages will forget about you or lose interest if you don’t stay in touch with them. That means you can’t be infrequent and random with your B2B email marketing messages. Send out your newsletters or other emails at regular intervals and inform your list members upon signup how often they can expect to hear from you.

5. Ask WWIDWTE? – When in doubt, ask yourself WWIDWTE? Or, what would I do with this email? Take an honest, objective view of your emails or have someone else do it for you. Does it look like SPAM? Can you clearly see who it’s from and what the message is about? If you can spot a problem with your messages, you can be sure that your list members will, which means you’re one step closer to the SPAM filter and trash bin.

6. Time for a Wash – As in, actively clean your list from time to time to keep it up to date and as targeted as possible. Remove email addresses that don’t exist or routinely show up as bounces for other reasons. This will help improve your deliverability rate and will leave you with a list that has much more quality, even if it’s smaller.

7. Rinse and Repeat – You just cleaned up but you aren’t done yet, it’s time to rinse and repeat. That means that FTC CAN-SPAM compliance is an ongoing process. You can’t ever stop. You always have to be following B2B email marketing best practices that will leave you and your company in compliance with both written legislation and unwritten rules.

Follow these 7 steps to FTC CAN-SPAM compliance and you and your company will be that much closer to B2B email marketing success.

Before you make the leap and acquire an email list for sale, consider these points.

• Reason to buy: You quickly get a huge email list.
• Reason not to buy: Having a large permission based email marketing list is one thing, but purchasing a large list is a completely different story. Yes, you have your hands on tons of email addresses, but how many of them are even active? More importantly, how many of them are even remotely interested in any of the products or services that you’re offering? But make it even simpler on yourself, how many unsolicited emails from unknown sources do you respond positively to?

• Reason to buy: People think all emails are SPAM anyway.
• Reason not to buy: This is a misconception, because highly targeted permission based email marketing lists are not mistaken for SPAM. It’s your job as the person in charge of your email campaigns to ensure that your messages are received by interested parties that can recognize you and your messages.

• Reason to buy: There’s no other effective way to build an email list.
• Reason not to buy: It’s true, there are hardly any other ways to gather email addresses besides using an email list for sale. Besides acquiring targeted prospects from your website by offering tips, coupons, promotions, guides, reviews and other useful content, from your physical storefront, from conferences and tradeshows, from local community events, from your colleagues and their acquaintances… and anywhere else you can think of. Besides all of those, you’re right, there is no other way.

• Reason to buy: Time is money, and purchasing an email list for sale is better than spending the time to build a list.
• Reason not to buy: Sure, time absolutely is money. But you know what else equals money? Money! As in, if your massive, untargeted and uninterested email list doesn’t buy anything, you made no money. As in, a small, highly qualified list of prospects can easily be converted into customers and sales, putting money straight into your pocket. Which sounds better to you?

This isn’t even touching on the legality or morality of the issue. Putting all of these hefty matters aside, it still hardly makes sense to purchase an email list for sale. Permission based email marketing is the only way to safely and effectively conduct your email campaigns, and that’s the bottom line.

5 Ways to Differentiate Between Email Marketing Programs

1. Price: The price for different email service providers can be quite different. Many popular programs start plans for between $10 and $20. However, many other companies really target larger businesses and have services that start at $100 or more.

Additionally, your price may increase based on different factors. Some companies increase price based on total emails sent, while others increase price based on the size of the list you have, regardless of the number of emails you send.

2. Surveys: Many businesses today are turning to customer survey software to help them connect with their customers and clients and to further improve their own offerings. There are of course many separate providers that deal with surveys, however many email service providers also provide online survey solutions

The benefit to integrating the two services in one spot is that you can quickly send out a survey to your entire list or to particular segments of your list without having to export or recreate your list in a separate environment. Of course, housing both services under one roof can also lower costs and provide a level of convenience that two separate services couldn’t provide. If you’re also in the market for customer survey software, than you should seek out the email marketing programs that provide that as well.

3. Customer Support: When you encounter a problem or have a question, you need a company that is going to be responsive to your needs. With options such as forums and live chatting in addition to emails and phone calls, you should have plenty of ways to reach out to the staff of most email service providers. However, some take more pride than others in this area and you’ll quick see which businesses live up to your expectations.

4. Templates: You want to have a vast selection of templates to choose between. Only a handful, no matter how great they look, isn’t going to help you out very much. You need to stand out from your competition not blend in with them. Additionally, consider that email marketing programs often target different types of businesses and therefore will have more templates geared towards specific areas or styles than others.

5. List Management and Building: What are the options you have for building your list and managing it? You should be able to break down your list based on a wide range of variables. You should also have signup links and buttons for your websites as well as an autoresponder.

Finally, steer clear of any company that says they will provide your list for you and build your list instantly. Purchasing email lists is a great way to land yourself in legal trouble while you watch your campaigns flounder along without success.

As you can see, there are clearly plenty of ways to differentiate between different services and providers. These are just 5 ways that should help you spot which email marketing programs may be the best fit for your organization.

Remember, you plan on entrusting this person or agency with one of your principle methods of customer and prospect outreach. Don’t take the decision lightly.

What’s their track record? An email marketing agency that has been successfully completing campaigns and performing valuable services for their clients will prominently display their track record of success. Generic testimonials are fine, but what you really want to see is the hard data that shows, for example, that Company Y saw a 50% increase in conversions after switching to their new email marketing consultant. Good companies have good track records, and they display them proudly.

What’s their reputation? Of course you want to choose an email marketing agency that delivers results. But choosing one that puts success above legality – or morality – is shortsighted and could end up hurting your organization’s credibility, and even landing you in hot water with the government. Make sure the company you choose has a reputation for keeping up with industry standards, laws and best practices.

Have they completed any whitepapers or research? I should preface this by saying that not all successful and reputable companies take the time to create and distribute whitepapers or research projects. However, companies that do take the time to do so clearly show an attention to detail and an experience level that others might not have. Browse around for any thorough, published documents released by the consultant you’re checking out to give you a better idea of their expertise.

Will they be committed to you? Sometimes the best email marketing agency in the world is a little bit too popular for its own good. With a client list that resembles the phone book, how can you be sure your campaign is going to get the level of attention and the amount of time that it deserves? There’s of course nothing wrong with having a huge repertoire of clients, but you will want to make sure that any consultant you choose has the staff in place to handle your email campaign with care.

How much do they cost? Last but certainly not least, you have to figure out if the price they are charging is worth the services you are receiving. I wish I could provide a general price range that could serve as a guide to see if their fees are fair. However, what one email marketing agency charges for a campaign another charges for an hour of work. Additionally, you may only require a portion of the services that another company requests.

Ultimately, the money you end up paying has to be worth it or you. That means considering the results the agency provides, the time and hassle the agency saves you and so forth. Nobody else can tell you what’s too much or too little to pay.

If you’ve asked yourself these 5 questions, you may have a better idea of whether or not the email marketing consultant you have been using, or considering using, is a good fit for your company. The perfect email marketing agency for one company isn’t necessarily the perfect agency for yours, so do your homework and keep these questions in mind.

Top 7 reasons why you need email marketing companies

1. Deliverability: Reputable email marketing programs are going to have relationships with ISPs that ensure that the messages they send get delivered. Manually sending out emails leaves the door open to get unfairly blacklisted or blocked, or seeing long delays before your messages reach their intended audience.

2. Tracking: Email marketing companies provide detailed tracking services that allow you to follow the results of your campaigns. Without tracking the success of your emails, you’ll never know if what you’re doing is paying off and you’ll never understand how to improve.

3. Templates: An email marketing template will enable you to send out a professionally designed and visually appealing email. The best email services have hundreds of potential themes and options to choose between, in addition to allowing for customization of existing templates.

4. Autoresponders: Autoresponders allow you to signup new prospects and leads from your website. This lets you grow a permission based email marketing list of qualified prospects and interested parties.

5. List Management: Email marketing companies are going to handle all of the hard work of list management. This means allowing for and processing unsubscribe requests, segmenting your list into different groups based on a variety of factors and so on.

6. Bulk email service: Bulk email service is going to let you send out hundreds or even thousands of emails instantly. You can scale up your program to allow for a maximum quantity of emails. There is no limit to how many people you can have in your list or how many emails you can send to them.

7. Time saving: Some of the above services could not be accomplished without email marketing programs, while some could be accomplished on your own if you had hours upon hours to do nothing else except handle your email marketing campaign every week. Using a reputable service will save you loads of time and frustration.

Recommended Email Marketing Companies

There are lots of choices to think about when you’re looking at email marketing companies. Here are two of my favorites that I highly recommend for nearly any purpose. These email services are highly effective and flexible, and are extremely cheap to use and get started with.

iContact Try it FREE for 15 Days
– 15 day free trial, over 300 templates, detailed statistics and tracking, surveys, industry leading deliverability

Constant Contact Try it FREE for 60 Days
– 60 day free trial, over 300 templates, surveys, comprehensive customer support

When in doubt, try reversing the situation. If you received this email from some company, would it be compelling to you? Would you delete it or open it? If you opened it, would you really read through it and consider taking some kind of action – clicking, making a purchase, visiting a website – based upon it?

Considering all of that, this week the email marketing tip I would like to talk about concerns whether or not your list knows who you are. The bottom line is that if your list does not know who you are, you’re in a world of trouble, and you have to get to changing that as soon as possible.

When you’re in the midst of an email marketing campaign you can ensure that your list recognizes you and your emails in a variety of ways. It really comes down to paying attention to all of the small details you may be overlooking.

To begin with, be sure that in the “From” field, you make sure that your list is going to see something they are familiar with. It shouldn’t be your personal name unless you truthfully have that kind of recognition with your customers, clients and prospects. Additionally, you need to be careful even when it comes to your company name. If  your company’s full name is “John Miller’s Snow Blowing USA Incorporated” but all of your advertisements, invoices and marketing materials reference you as “Snow Blowing USA“, than that is what needs to be in the from field.

Continuing along the same path for this email marketing tip, you also need to pay attention to the “To” field. Whenever possible try to address your emails to the name of the person you are sending it to, not their email address or a generic phrase. If I’m John Miller from Snow Blowing USA, I know I look much more carefully at an email that is talking to John or John Miller than an email that is talking to jmiller43301921@yahoo.com or “all”.

Finally, one last thing I would like to cover with this week’s email marketing tip is that you also need to be careful with your subject line. Always avoid all spammy phrases such as “free free free” and use proper punctuation and capitalization. Additionally, keep the subject short and sweet, try to max out around 60 or 70 characters. Finally, make sure the subject line is intriguing and is on topic. Somebody glancing at the subject line should be able to quickly spot what the message pertains to.

Paying attention to these small details not only will improve your email campaign performance but will also help you avoid the dreaded SPAM filter. That wraps of this week’s email marketing tip of the week, enjoy.

1. Automatic Unsubscribe Service – Not only is dealing with every unsubscribe request manually a time consuming chore, but you may end up missing a few requests and landing yourself in big trouble. There’s no sense in worrying about this when the majority of providers have automatic unsubscribe services built in to their list management capabilities.

2. Email List Management – In addition to the above, you should also have further list management options at your disposal. These include the ability to sort and segment your list based on a variety of different factors. You may, for example, want to quickly find all of the people who clicked through to your site from your last email, and send them a specific message. Or you may want to target people within 20 miles of your physical location with a special in-store discount. Whatever you may need to do, you’ll want to have these email list management capabilities at your disposal.

3. Tracking Services – Beginning a new email campaign isn’t going to get you very far if you don’t have any way to track how your emails are performing. You don’t to have this valuable information at hand and easily available so you can determine your various messages are being received, how they are being perceived and if people are ultimately taking the action you want them to be taking.

4. Autoresponder – An autoresponder is a crucial component to your email campaign software. It’s going to allow you to build your list so that you can find new prospects and eventually convert them into returning customers and clients. Any email program that does not offer this is seriously lacking. The only reason you wouldn’t need this is if you don’t have any kind of website or blog presence whatsoever.

5. Additional Features – There are a variety of different features and add-ons you may be interested in having along with basic emailing services. For example, most providers offer a variety of templates based around different themes and message types. Many email service providers also include surveying options, which opens up an entirely new world of possibilities. Consider what else you may be interested in and find a provider that offers it.

These aren’t the only things you need to consider, but finding an email campaign software provider that has these 5 elements will ensure you are investing in a quality service.