Archives – April, 2010
PIPEDA is a Canadian law relating to data privacy. It governs how private-sector organizations collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial business. This law requires organizations to:
- obtain consent when they collect, use or disclose their personal information
- supply an individual with a product or a service even if they refuse consent for the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information unless that information is essential to the transaction
- collect information by fair and lawful means; and
- have personal information policies that are clear, understandable and readily available. (more…)
April 30, 2010
Unsubscribe Compliance
- a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism must be present in all emails
- opt-out requests must be honored within 10 days.
Content Compliance
- The email address you send from must be accurate and not a fake one (spammers often fake the email they’re sending from to avoid detection)
- Relevant subject lines relative to your email’s content and not deceptive (spammers often use misleading subject lines to trick people into opening their emails)
- A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present (use your email signature for this and put it at the bottom of the email) (more…)
April 29, 2010
One way of reducing your spam complaints is by creating your own “mark as spam” option. Put a message at the very top and bottom of your email stating “Click here to mark this email as spam” or simply “mark as spam”. Within this message provide a link to your unsubscribe page. The person will get taken off your list and the email provider won’t get a spam complaint from them. (more…)
April 28, 2010
Delivery Throttling – throttling is the practice of gradually sending out emails to a database rather than sending them all at once. The reason for doing this is many email providers will block a sender if too many emails are received from them in too short a period of time. This practice is only necessary if you have thousands of prospects in your database or if you have several hundred emails in your database from a single provider (eg. @hotmail.com). To throttle your emails split your database into chunks of no more than 300 emails each. When you send to each group of 300 put a couple of hours in between each mailings. Do this by scheduling the mailings within your email service provider. (more…)
April 27, 2010
Avoid Commercial Sounding Words – anti-spam technology usually looks at the words you use in your emails as a factor in determining whether or not to filter the email into the spam folder. So you should avoid using commercial sounding words whenever possible. Now this is somewhat difficult to consistently do and still get your message across. But you needn’t worry about every word you use. One commercial sounding word here and there won’t get your email spam filtered. (more…)
April 26, 2010
- Is your message relevant and compelling? Keep your newsletter and listing updates focused on your farm neighborhood.
- How frequently are you sending to your subscribers? Is it too much? Or too little? If you haven’t emailed to your list in some time, they may have forgotten they signed up to hear from you and mark the message as spam. (more…)
April 23, 2010
Some people setup a new email account specifically for a single purpose like this and then have all emails forwarded to their main account. In any case, consumer type email accounts such as these receive the most spam and so the email providers have the most safeguards in place to prevent spam.
Now how do you tell if you’re blacklisted by any major email providers? (more…)
April 22, 2010
Vistaprint is a great provider. Vistaprint has a huge variety of marketing products to choose from – everything from business cards to pens to lawn signs to presentation folders. Best of all, you can use any of about 3000 different graphic designs they offer with any of these promo items. They allow you to really customize these items on your own very quickly by using their online design tool. They have quite a few templates designed specifically for real estate and real estate professionals. As of this writing there were a total of 129 real estate related designs as follows: (more…)
April 21, 2010
Trouble Viewing Email? – a wide diversity of email software is available today, and each has it’s own way of rendering an email for the recipient. Sometimes graphics will not appear properly on certain email clients (especially on PDAs). The graphics may be too large for the viewing area and get partially obscured. The screen is relatively small with PDAs compared to home PCs or laptops, so fewer text characters can appear in a line. If you put too many characters on a line PDA viewers will have to use the left-right scroll bar, and that makes for cumbersome reading. Some email programs such as Hotmail by default block all images unless the recipient marks the email as ‘safe’. Some people configure their email software to only receive text based emails. (more…)
April 20, 2010
Weekends are somewhat different because they’re most people are doing very different things than on weekdays. You may want to avoid sending on weekends (especially during the summer) as many people are out of town then. Perhaps avoid sending on Sunday morning because people may be attending religious services and will not look at their email that day until early afternoon. That means your email will get lumped in with the spam sent overnight. As with weekdays, between 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM can be a really good time to grab their attention on Saturday, Sunday or on holidays. (more…)
April 19, 2010
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