Boomerang Email Marketing Blog

As you’re probably aware after several emails and blog postings on the subject, Boomerang was a Bronze Sponsor of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, and what a week it was!

The impressive crowds of Salesforce customers, partners, analysts, venture capitalists, and even the occasional day-passer on the hunt for cool chatchkis brought an excited and hopeful vibe to the event.  Our blue, green, red, and yellow foam boomerang’s were a hit with everyone, and provided our booth with a steady stream of interested marketers looking for the next great AppExchange integration, many of whom decided that BlastWizard for AppExchange was it!

It was also a delight to meet and greet so many current Boomerang customers, who walked away with authentic handmade Australian boomerangs and a better understanding of how to use the many different features in BlastWizard.  With inspiring keynote speeches by SFDC CEO Marc Benioff and one of our personal favorite authors (Malcolm Gladwell), and a rocking concert by The Foo Fighters, we left Moscone Center with our heads ringing and our minds spinning with all of the possibilities that SaaS offers e-marketers.

Did you know that Boomerang offers four live webinars each and every week?  Two of the 1/2 hour meetings are essentially training sessions for BlastWizard 7.0, comprised of a high-level overview of all of the features and functionality of the system.  The third webinar is for Salesforce.com users who wish to learn about BlastWizard for AppExchange, and the last one is called “Email Marketing 101″, and is designed to teach email marketing beginners about the business.

Because of the frequency with which we offer each of these sessions, people who sign up are often one-on-one with the instructor, which means that it’s more of a conversation about the attendee’s specific needs than a one-size-fits-all program.  This type of training eliminates the costly trial-and-error method that usually wastes so much time.

Of course we still have our on-demand recorded demos that cover campaign creation, reporting, the Salesforce.com integration, how to use the HTML editor, and more in the Resource Center within BlastWizard for those clients who wish to get their training on their own time.

However you decide to learn more about Boomerang and its products and services, we encourage you to take advantage of all of our resources to enhance your experience.  And if there is any topic or feature on which you’d like for us to provide more training, please let us know!

As more and more companies attempt to stem the tide of spam, spam appliances have become almost common  place in business.  Here’s what you need to know to help your mail get through.

Today’s Filtering Appliances

Commercial filtering appliances are not really new, but they are becoming more turn-key (and low cost). This means that smaller and smaller companies can afford to purchase one of these devices, install it and have it running in only a few days (in some cases, the same day).  In the early days, spam filtering was complex.  With appliances such as Barracuda’s spam firewall, this system allows an administrator to set up spam filtering in a very short time without too much work.

How do these appliances work?  

These appliances have web based front ends that allow you to configure exactly how you want your mail to be filtered.   These appliances combing Real-Time Blacklists (RBLs) with, as an example, Barracuda’s own reputation filters.  In essence, these interfaces are completely customizable by the system administrator.  During each configuration step, Barracuda offers recommendation tips on how to define a particular setting on the unit.

Where’s my email?

How the administrator chooses to configure the spam appliance is entirely up to the administrator.  This means that while there is a default configuration that comes on the unit out-of-the-box, it really isn’t very usable that way.  So, the administrator is forced to make choices to set the unit up. 

The main settings for how to handle a piece of email is in the following:

• Do Nothing
• Quarantine
• Tag
• Block

 
The setting that does the most damage without people’s knowledge is ‘Block’.  This setting is extreme and harsh.  While it may prevent unwanted emails, there is also a chance it could also block legitimate email.  If you are a business, this may not be the best setting to use.  This is particularly true if you are a small business and a missed email could blow a deal in the works.  That’s why there are also other settings.
 
Tag is the setting that allows the recipient to decide what to do with the email once in the mail client.  Tagging is how many older systems worked including Spamassassin.  Tagging is the least problematic, but it also pushes off processing of garbage email to the recipient.

Quarantine sidelines the email until it can be reviewed.  Most administrators use this technique to sideline unwanted emails for a time and forward on an email if a user complains something is missing.  Unfortunately, this setup requires the mail administrator to manage the quarantine and keep it clean and functional.  So, this method can be time consuming for the administrator.

Your email campaign

These spam filtering appliances use many methodologies to block emails.  Because these methdologies can be enabled or disabled by the administrator, you will need to ensure that the users in your list are aware of the symptoms of a spam filter and what to do should they suspect false positives.

If your users suspect false positives, they will need to contact their IT department to discuss the issue.  Sometimes, it’s a matter of looking through the quarantine and the administrator will find undelivered emails.  They can release the emails and send them on.

Content

There are things you can do to help reduce your chances of being caught in the net.  Make sure that your HTML syntax is correct (no long lines, all tags are closed, etc).  As far as content goes, make sure you aren’t using trigger phrases like “FREE’ or ‘20% Off’ or ‘$9.99′.  Phrases like this in the subject line are almost immediately flagged as problematic.  When you create your campaigns, be sure to give them a subject that’s relevant to your body content.

Boomerang can help you improve your emails to get better responses.  Our sales and customer care staff work dilligently to help you get the best results possible.

This series of articles is intended to discuss the facets of CAN-SPAM compliance. It is not intended to be the end-all be all for legal compliance around the world. This blog posting is also not to be misconstrued as legal advice. As an email marketer, you will need to make sure that you remain in legal compliance for not only the locality where you reside, but also every territory you intend to email. While any ESP can give you tools to help you remain compliant, it is actually your responsibility to ensure that your campaigns and practices remain compliant with all jurisdictional laws.

If you are concerned over the laws in your area, you should contact a knowledgeable attorney to help you remain compliant.

May 2008 update

In May, the CAN-SPAM laws were revised. After a long judicious review and discussion process, four major changes took place:

1. The definition of a person has been clarified.
2. The definition of a sender has been clarified.
3. The definition of a valid physical postal address has been clarified and expanded.
4. Opt-Out requests must not cost money and require only one action by the recipient (i.e., click a link, send an opt-out email) and must not request additional information

What is a ‘person’?

This is defined to be “an individual, group, unincorporated association, limited or general partnership, corporation or other business entity”. Basically, this section clarifies and specifically defines the definition of ‘person’ to mean any individual or business type whether for profit or non-profit. Effectively, no one is exempt from this definition.

What is a ’sender’?

A sender is defined to be someone “…who initiates [a commercial electronic mail] message and whose product, service or Internet web site is advertised or promoted by the message”. Where only one recipient (From line) and one company (matches From line) is evident, only that one person is responsible for the content. Where multiple products are advertised in an email from multiple companies, each company is responsible for that email content.

What is a ‘valid physical postal address’?

This definition of ‘valid physical postal address’ is set to mean “the sender’s current street address, a Post Office box the sender has registered with the USPS or a private mailbox the sender has registered with a commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) that is established pursuant to USPS regulations”.

This means that if you use your actual business or home address, this will suffice. If you have a PO Box or other USPS authorized address, you may also use these. You cannot use addresses that are outside of this definition within the body of an email. There is also still some question as to shared addresses. The concept of “one business, one address” was part of the discussion for this change, but it is not defined above. However, this is implied if you use a USPS registered address. A business’s street address could, in fact, accept mail for multiple businesses at a single address where USPS registered addresses typically do not (unless registered in advance with the USPS).

For further legal implications of this, you may want to consult with an attorney. However, as long as your address is registered for delivery by the USPS, your address should be safe to use in your email. Email addresses that do not receive mail by the USPS (such as some rural routes), do not qualify as a ‘valid physical postal address’.

Opt-Out mechanism changes

The final change is in opt-out consideration. Basically, email marketing campaigns must provide a mechanism to the recipient to opt-out of the email with only a single action (click one link or send one email). This opt-out mechanism must not charge fees or require any additional information other than the email address itself. This also means that you can no longer require people to log in to change preferences in order to opt out. It must be a single action that removes the user.

Additional information

The 16 CFR Part 316 PDF document is a very long read and discusses many considerations in the changes including how to classify certain types of emails such as forward-to-a-”friend” style messages and other transactional style messages. If you are interested, it is probably worth reading through these sections as some of these issues may arise again during the next revision of CAN-SPAM.

Email Campaigns

As an email marketing manager in the US, you will want to review your email campaign procedures to ensure your emails remain compliant with these new CAN-SPAM provisions.

Note that Boomerang does require a physical address to be entered before the first email can be sent. However, you must ensure that the address that is entered complies with CAN-SPAM. When using Boomerang’s opt-out links, these links work with a single click without fees or additional information as do remove requests when emailed to us. If you provide your own opt-out link that leads to a site that requires a login and password before the user can remove themselves, this does not comply with these new provisions. If you want to manage the emailed removal requests yourself, you’ll want to make sure your systems comply with these new CAN-SPAM provisions.

Next up… the purpose behind the CAN-SPAM Act (why does it exist?)

With this series of blog articles, it is intended to discuss the ‘did you know’ aspects of the CAN-SPAM ACT to help you remain compliant and improve the results of your campaigns. In this edition, we discuss deceptive header provisions.

Before we begin with this issue, we’d like to discuss some comments that were made on the last blog posting. This series of articles is intended to discuss the facets of CAN-SPAM compliance. It is not intended to be the end-all be all for legal compliance around the world. This blog posting is also not to be misconstrued as legal advice. As an email marketer, you will need to make sure that you remain in legal compliance for not only the locality where you reside, but also every territory you intend to email. While any ESP can give you tools to help you remain compliant, it is actually your responsibility to ensure that your campaigns and practices remain compliant with all laws.

So, the point in this blog series is to inform and educate you. However, if you have questions about legal compliance, you should consult with an attorney who is familiar with laws in your location (and any locations where you intend to email).

Deceptive Headers

What exactly are deceptive headers? Let’s reverse this question to understand this issue better. When isn’t a header deceptive? An identifying header is not deceptive when it accurately identifies and describes the person who originated the email. When you utilize an ESP such as Boomerang, there are two parties involved. You, the email marketer and Boomerang, the infrastructure provider. Because you are using Boomerang’s infrastructure, there will be some level of Boomerang information that remains in the headers. This accurately identifies Boomerang as the ESP. Some of the information is customizable. Also, Boomerang offers methodologies to prevent people from inserting deceptive headers to help maintain compliance. For example, Boomerang verifies an email address prior to allowing its use in an email campaign. Boomerang also inserts additional headers that allow us to identify the client who sent the email.

So, as long as the headers accurately identify the individual or company who sent the email, then it is not considered deceptive from the identification standpoint. What about content?

Content Deception

When sending your email campaigns, CAN-SPAM has rules regarding who becomes responsible when a product or service is advertised in an email. For example, if the From: line contains a completely different company than the product or service that’s advertised in the email, then all businesses must handle and process opt-out request and complaints and also be equally responsible for the email and its content. If an affiliate chooses not to identify themselves in the email and sends the email on behalf of different company, then the company that’s advertised becomes the responsible party over the content. As long as the header and body accurately reflect the actual sender, this does not violate CAN-SPAM.

Your content links should also accurately reflect what you are intending to sell. For example, links to a product or service in the email should take you to a page that primarily discusses that product or service. These links should not take you to foreign sites, to login pages or other pages that don’t directly relate to that product or service. Note that this is just a best practice overall. If you want to sell your service, your email links should accurately reflect where they lead.

Note: there are other laws that may also apply to your advertised products and services, such as local or federal fraud statutes. So, you will also want to ensure that your product or service advertising claims do not violate these laws.

But I didn’t send the email, CAN-SPAM doesn’t apply!

Wrong. If you have an affiliate, a marketing firm, a freelance company or any other outfit send email containing your company name, logo or information, you become responsible for that email and must comply with CAN-SPAM. On the other hand, if someone begins sending emails rogue on your company’s behalf without anyone’s knowledge or consent, you should probably try to find out who it is and get them shut down fast. With regards to rogue email, this is a problem area that CAN-SPAM doesn’t fully address.

Overall

To avoid deceptive headers and body content, it’s best to make sure that the From: line and body content accurately reflect who is sending the email. Body content and links should point to where they appear to point. Making sure that your campaigns keep these basic rules in mind, your campaigns should comply with these above discussed CAN-SPAM provisions.

Next up… May 2008 update provisions

OF COURSE YES! especially if you are marketing in the B2C world. Yahoo as you know is one of the biggest and most popular ISPs and has in place several measures to protect its users from spam (the snazzy kind) and unsolicited bulk email (the kinds that you think you are sending to your ‘opt-in’ list but not quite so).Because of these stringent measures your marketing email could end up being bounced either as temporarily deferred or permanently refused. Heres a great article posted by Yahoo! on the best practices sending to Yahoo! mail. <http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/postmaster-15.html>.

You can be rest assured that Boomerang implements all of the best practices discussed in the above article including offering dedicated IP addresses, email authentication techniques such as domainkeys and SPF, ensuring that your emails are CAN-SPAM complaint even as you create them in BlastWizard, retrying ‘greylisted’ emails over a period of time to ensure their delivery and the rest of the laundry list of infrastructural measures. That being said, here are some of the best practices that need your attention -

“Manage your lists by paying attention to bounces and rejections”

Our applications weeds out invalid addresses even before they are sent and suppress hard bounces & unsubscribes from future mailings. You may also want to know that we employ several other advanced techniques to watch bounces over a period of time and conclude on their nature and classify them in great detail according to the actual reason for the bounce.

And you can help the success of your marketing campaign by paying attention to other types of bounces which indicate that your emails look spammy. There are two soft bounces ‘YahooSpam’ & ‘YahooSpamAlert’ that are specifically used to classify bounces from yahoo. You must pay attention to your content and list, especially when you see ‘YahooSpamAlert’.  (Refer to our Reporting System on how to get this data).

If recipients unsubscribe through your organization, use our Unsubscribe Management tool in BlastWizard to add them to your Boomerang database. You can import a file of such addresses or add one-offs right there.

“Don’t act like a phisher”

When designing your emails, pay attention to the details of the URL of your links. Yahoo! recommends the following -

• Link to domains, not IP addresses. The Yahoo! Mail client warns users that IP address links are dangerous.
• Use standard ports. The Yahoo! Mail client warns users that links containing ports are dangerous.
• Don’t include html forms in emails. The Yahoo! Mail client warns users that submitting forms in email can be dangerous.
• Don’t include Javascript in emails. The javascript is stripped out and will not run.
• Don’t include embedded objects in emails (like flash or active-x). The objects are stripped and will not run.

“Use a consistent From: header address”

Use the same from address in the email job options section when your schedule your job. Did you know that BlastWizard helps by remembering from the last job you created and auto populating this field for you ?

We will continue to keep you posted on more best practices.

With this blog article, we will introduce a series of small blog articles focusing on aspects of CAN-SPAM compliance with email marketing campaigns. I know that a lot of people discuss CAN-SPAM compliance, but this series is intended to be a small series of articles to discuss the ‘did you know’ aspects of this US federal law to help you remain compliant and improve the results of your campaigns.

What is CAN-SPAM exactly?

CAN-SPAM was enacted by the US federal government to establish a minimum set of requirements when sending out commercial email campaigns. These requirements are designed to ensure that email sent from commercial entities do not deceive, entrap or in any way intentionally falsify sender information. Basically, it is set up so that when you see who the email is from, you know that it is from that entity.

How is this different from authorization systems like SPF or Domain Keys?

Domain Keys and SPF are technical resolutions to the same issue the congress attempted to address legislatively. Effectively, there are two ways to attempt to force compliance:

• Through Law
• Through Technical Measures

Legislative Measures

Basically, congress enacted penalties for companies or individuals who violate the law. Once it’s determined that a company or individual has violated, then the federal government or another individual can file a lawsuit claiming violations.

Setting up law serves to force compliance through penalties (usually in the form of monetary fines). Although, some laws define jail time as the consequence. In the case of CAN-SPAM’s penalties, these penalties can start at $250 per email and go up to $6,000,000 depending on intent, how much was sent and other factors that are left up to the judge.

The bottom line is that these penalties can end up quite stiff, so it’s best to learn how to craft your campaigns to remain fully CAN-SPAM compliant.

Technical Measures

Measures, such as SPF, consist of producing softwares that force compliance by technical means. Effectively, this forces users to maintain compliant email with not only CAN-SPAM requirements, but any more recent requirements that may not have originally been part of CAN-SPAM. Technical measures are usually the most effective because developers are a lot more nimble in getting updates out the door. Law mandates a minimum, but technical measures are able to require the minimum and expand on it.

Getting law through congress can be quite slow. By the time the law is law, it can also be somewhat outdated by newer technical issues.

Email Harvesting

With all of the introductions out of the way, we can get to the meat of CAN-SPAM. Email harvesting will be the first topic of discussion that is a violation of the CAN-SPAM act. What is harvesting?

Harvesting is when a company or individual visits a web site, visually sees an email address, copies it and stores it. Then, later uses that list to send emails. Not only was list harvesting a bad practice long before CAN-SPAM, it is now also a crime to do it.

As a company, you want to ensure that your lists are obtained directly from your customers. You can do this through subscription forms, trade shows, customer interfacing, login preferences and even contests you may host. As long as the person filled out your form of their own volition and then submitted that data to you (along with an opt-in consent check box), this is considered opt-in. Harvesting, however, is when a list is obtained through means without consent by culling email addresses from websites, forums, blogs or in other similar places.

Renting or Purchasing Lists

Note that rented or purchased lists could have been harvested. You simply have no idea where or how that list may have been obtained. One thing for certain with a rented/purchased list, however, is that you didn’t obtain that list yourself through your own collection means. So, with these lists, you risk CAN-SPAM violations by purchasing or renting lists from a third party. Considering the compensatory damages, renting or purchasing a list may ultimately not be worth it.

Ultimately….

Violating the CAN-SPAM act is not worth it. The provisions in the CAN-SPAM act are a completely common sense approach to marketing. You want to market to people who want to see your content. There’s no point in marketing to people who don’t. CAN-SPAM’s provisions are there as voice of reason and set basic guidelines for your best email marketing campaign. Boomerang offers methods to ensure your email campaigns remain CAN-SPAM compliant and also excel in producing returns for you.

The next blog article in this series will discuss CAN-SPAM’s deceptive header provisions… see you then.

There’s a little-known reporting feature in BlastWizard that needs a lot more attention and praise.  The Variation Report allows clients to see how individuals or categories of people perform from an email activity  standpoint compared with other individuals or categories of people.

In order to use the Variation Report you will need to upload with your list the database fields that you would like to compare.  For instance, let’s say that in your CRM database you have a field for each of your customers called “estimated income level”, and you export that data as a column in your email list.

When you bring up the Variable Report you will be able to choose to vary on the field called “estimated income” from your list, which will show you how many people in your list fell into each income range as well as each group’s delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, and so on.

Here’s how to access these very cool reports:

1.  Log into BlastWizard and click on Reports (or click on any complete or active job #)

2.  You will now be on the Job Summary Report page.  Click on or mouse over the Job Reports tab in the  upper left hand corner and find and click on “Job Variation” in the dropdown list.

3.  Note that in this new window there is a drop down list in the upper right hand corner that says “Select Field to Vary”.  In that dropdown list are all of the available fields from the list used in this job.

4.  Simply choose the field that you would like to compare and the report will auto-generate once you click on it.

That’s it.  Now you’ll be able to see how your different subscribers react to your email based on any attributes that you have on them, and over time you may note trends that allow you to tailor your email to appeal more specifically to those different groups.

Sales Reps are great at selling but what good is a sale without getting paid?  Paying your Sales Reps’ commissions only when their client has paid encourages them to assist in the collection process.  Because the Sales Reps have built a rapport with their customers, often they can elicit a faster response than Accounting for payment inquires.  The Sales Reps can use their frequent communications with their clients to drop hints such as “by the way, your monthly invoice was due last week and we have not yet received payment.”  Once we changed our commission process, we had one Sales Rep who began contacting his clients only three days after an unpaid invoice was due.  Previously, it was like pulling teeth getting him to assist with collections.  He didn’t want his clients viewing him as the “bad guy.”  Now he figures the sooner we get paid, the sooner he gets paid! 

If you’re a new SFDC user you’ll be happy to hear that Boomerang’s BlastWizard is the easiest email distribution tool that’s integrated with SFDC.  After polling our customer base, ease of use is mentioned by most as one of the reasons they chose BlastWizard for Appexchange.  In addtion to a flash tutorial on Appexchange and our website, we also offer a free trial and live demos you can sign up for at http://boomerang.com/Static/EventRegistration.aspx or by calling 800-792-7792 x138.

Within BlastWizard you will find flash demos on our wysiwyg html editor, list management and on our 60+ reports.  We also offer an extensive FAQ and links to various materials you’ll find useful.   Most of our clients find BlastWizard for AppExchange so easy to use they tell us they get started immediately without any training.  But isn’t it nice to know it’s there?  As always, Boomerang is known for our excellent customer service and we’re always a phone call away.