Dear Mr. Internet,

I use e-mail extensively in my marketing and lately many of my recipients have been complaining that they are not receiving my materials. What is happening and what can I do about it?

Todd Luke
Viereck Commercial
Sioux Falls, SD

Dear Todd,

You can thank the Spammers for this one. The volume of Spam has grown so rapidly that most organizations that deliver e-mail have put into place draconian e-mail filters to cut down the deluge of unwanted mail. Unfortunately, these also catch and stop a lot of e-mail that was supposed to go through as well.

It's Not Who You Are, It's Where You Come From...

This has become a very serious problem especially for Web-based e-mail marketing services. These are companies that will manage your e-mail database and send out your messages from their servers. This is a very easy and typically inexpensive way to do outbound e-mail marketing including sophisticated e-mail drip marketing campaigns. In fact, I use just such a service to manage my very large ePOWER NEWS newsletter subscriber base.

However, these services make it easy and inexpensive for anyone to use, including spammers. And all it takes is just one Spammer to ruin the service for everyone else! Reputable Web-based e-mail marketing services will try very hard to screen out the abusers, but that is a losing battle. Once a Spammer starts sending out unsolicited e-mails using their system, it causes the major Spam filtering systems to ban all e-mail coming from the service -- including yours and everyone else's. And there is not much the Web-based e-mail service provider can do about it. When this happens, you will suddenly find that you lost the ability to contact many of your recipients via e-mail through the Web-based system you are using. This is exactly what has happened to me with my ePOWER NEWS newsletter subscriber base. However, there are ways to mitigate this so that your e-mail gets through, no matter what.

Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Spam...

The single quickest fix is to change where your e-mail comes from (i.e. the server used to send your mass e-mail). If your list is relatively small (i.e. under 1000 names), then you can use a very easy and inexpensive software solution called World Merge to send your messages out including personalizing each one through its data-merge capabilities. You would set it up to send the messages through the same server your personal e-mail software uses. Unless you have previously sent Spam the Spam filters will not likely tag your messages.

For larger lists (i.e. 1000's of names), you may want to consider getting a dedicated (i.e. no one else can use it) e-mail server through an ISP and have it set up so it has its own IP address and domain name. You will also need to use e-mail marketing software that has quite a bit more horsepower in terms of setting up various campaigns, handling bounce-backs, bad addresses, opt-in and opt-out requests etc. I personally am exploring the use of Campaign Enterprise from Arial Software for all my e-mail marketing needs. This is not for the faint-hearted however, as it is not cheap and takes a bit of time and programming to incorporate seamlessly into your e-mail marketing procedures (look for future article on this once I have had a chance to thoroughly test it.) If you do decide to take this route, be sure to hire a pro to help you set it up. You can ask the company who they would recommend or find a Virtual Consultant on Elance.com.

In addition to changing the server from which your e-mail marketing messages originate, here are some other tips to help make sure your important messages get through: