Mailjet Right at Your Door

We love to meet our clients and supporters! We love to mingle with you, hear your vision about Mailjet and listen to what will make you happy! So please join and meet us in the forthcoming events that we will be attending! We will be right at your door!

TC disrupt – Manhattan

Techcrunch will be bringing Disrupt back to New York to reveal an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, guests, and more to the stage. Meet Quentin (deputy CEO) at Manhattan Center on April 30th & May 1st. Get your ticket!

Angelhack – Berlin, Paris, Tel Aviv

AngelHack organizes 100 hackathons. It brings together more than 10,000 developers in over 50 different cities. Mailjet will attend the Berliner, Parisian and Tel-avivian events this month! Come and join us!

• Angelhack - Berlin

The Berliner Hackathon will take place on May 4th and 5th at You is Now  It would be a great opportunity to meet Pierre-Simon (founder of Silicon Students, Nicolas and Florian (Dev Evangelists) during this event. You can still get your ticket!

•  Angelhack - Paris

The Parisian Angelhack will be held on May 11th and 12th at the Cifacom Campus. Meet Elie (Head of Marketing), Pierre-Simon (founder of Silicon Students, Nicolas and Florian (Dev Evangelists). Get your ticket now!

• Angelhack - Tel-Aviv

Nicolas, Florian (Dev Evangelists) & Elie (Head of Marketing) are off to Israel. Meet them at Angelhack of Tel-Aviv on May 24th and 25th! If you got your tickets, don’t hesitate to have a drink with them!

DjangoCon Europe - Warsow 

The Django ConEurope talks about various subjects such as getting recommendations out of nothing or growing unicorns. The conference will take place on May 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19th at the Horse Track of Warsow. Unfortunately, there are no tickets left. You can register your name on waiting list, tough. Just keep your fingers crossed! If you got your ticket, meet Florian, our Dev Evangelist.

Web2day – Nantes 

Mailjet is going back to its roots – Nantes!
We will be attending the Web2day and the Digital Festival of Nantes on the 16th  & 17th of May! Julien, CEO of Mailjet, is one of the guest speakers of Startup Story, among Bruno Walther (Captain Dash) & Céline Lazorthes (Leetchi). Hurry! There are still some tickets available! Meet Julien and Elie (Head of Marketing) during these events!

API days – Madrid

The API days will gather different projects and people from the API ecosystem. This event will be held on May 30, 31 & June 1st at Madrid. Mehdi Mejdaoui, the CEO of Webshell  is one of the guest speakers. Get your ticket and grab a drink with Elie (Head of Marketing) and Florian (Dev Evangelist) at GarAJE!

See you soon!

The Evolution of Anti-Spam Filters Over Time

These days, everyone knows what spam is and nearly everyone has an email address that receives spam daily. But this wasn’t always the case.

Auto-regulation

The first email spam in history was sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 people in 1978. At the time, it was necessary to send the message individually to each person. Thus, no filter was implemented to protect inboxes from receiving spam.

Until the first half of the 1990s, few major spam campaigns were reported. Before this period, the community attempted to self-regulate.

In 1993, the word “spam” appeared for the first time to describe unsolicited messages. The first major incident took place one year later with a massive spam campaign on Usenet (a network of forums).

Blacklists

Between 1996 and 1999, the number of email users grew from 25 to 400 million. This growth gave birth to an industry dedicated entirely to spam.

In order to combat this trend, the first blacklists were created in the late 90s, for example with the creation of Spamhaus and Spamcop in 1998.

The blacklisting technique consisted of blocking IP addresses (unique identification numbers on internet) of servers sending spam. These lists were used by the ISP and email providers to filter emails before they could arrive in user inboxes.

Content filters

Unfortunately, filtering emails based on IP addresses was not enough! In addition to blacklists, which are still used today, filters based on the content of emails sent came to be. The most well known type of content filter is SpamAssassin, which was created in 2001.

This type of filter gives a score based on numerous criteria by analyzing the content and the header of the email. These scores are then culminated to give the email an overall score, which determines if it should be considered spam or not.

Sender Authentication

In 2003, the number of email users reached over 600 million. The use of blacklists and content filters were not sufficient in stopping the growth of spam. Spammers were evolving everyday to counter new anti-spam technology, and the American legislation against spam (the CAN-SPAM Act) established in 2003 was not going to be the solution.

For these reasons, two new technologies were created to allow for better identification of email senders. These were SPF (Sender Policy Framework) in 2005 and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Email) in 2007.

Reputation Management

The latest evolution in anti-spam filters is the use of reputation scores for IP addresses and domain names. This score changes constantly as a result of campaigns sent and is calculated by ISP and email services providers, as well as by specialized companies such as ReturnPath and Cisco.

Reputations in email marketing are not a recent concept, but the technique is evolving constantly. More and more, it takes the behavior of the email user into account (deletion before reading, opens, clicks, marking as spam…) and considers the reputations of domain names more than ever.

For an exhaustive description of different anti-spam filtering techniques, don’t hesitate to refer to this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques_(e-mail)

Photo credit: Mutt - GNU General Public License

Email Press Review #4: 4 Posts to Read this Week!

Stay up to date about email with our press review. Here are the posts we’ve picked especially for you this week!

1) Trap Tips: Avoiding and Removing Spam Traps
Spam traps come in two flavors: pristine and recycled; one is more hazardous than the other, but both will negatively impact a Sender’s reputation.

2) Is Your Email Subject Line Creative… or Deceptive?
Where does the line get drawn between a creative, compelling email subject line and one that is deceptive (and possibly illegal)?

3) Website Content Builds Email Marketing Lists
80 percent of surveyed business professionals say they generate half of their sales from email content, but that their strategies aren’t as defined as they could be.

4) How to Get People to Open Your Emails
5 very easy things you can do to increase your email open rate.

See you next week!

Transactional Email: the opportunity to generate additional sales

By its nature, a transactional email is an expected event. This anticipation creates an important level of attention on the part of the consumer, an attention that is possible to capitalize on to optimize sales. Be careful, however: if promotional content is accepted in a transactional email, it is still necessary to keep the transaction at the center of the message. Otherwise, you risk making the consumer feel deceived.

The right message at the right time

This is one of the basic rules of direct marketing! Providing the consumer with the right offer just when he needs it. With transactional emails, all the elements come together to fully achieve this goal. With the transactional information, it is possible to automatically generate related offers and take advantage of a moment of maximum attention from the consumer.

Utilizing the information from the transaction

The promotional offer naturally arises from this content. For example, a flight confirmation effortlessly lends itself to the promotion of a car rental or a hotel stay. Confirming an appliance purchase can also be the perfect opportunity to offer a warranty extension on the product.

But it isn’t necessary to have sold something to make a promotion. A transaction related to a subscription or profile update can be a great occasion to push promotional content.

Some ideas for promotional content related to the transaction:

• Extended Warranty
• Related Products
• Related Services
• Loyalty Points

Remarketing

Remarketing is a marketing technique involving retargeting a consumer after he has completed an action on a website. For example, if you happened to look at a product on an ecommerce site, a banner will later appear on a partner site to remind you of it.

In email, remarketing is also used, but mainly as a customer acquisition technique. It is entirely possible to also use remarketing in transactional emails. For example, when making a purchase, a consumer may have placed two products in his shopping cart, but in the end only purchased one. In the purchase confirmation email, this is the perfect opportunity to remind him of the second product or to promote other similar ones.

The only limit is your imagination

As we can see, the transactional email offers many opportunities for generating additional sales! During your brainstorming sessions on the subject, do not hesitate to integrate ideas from different departments of your business (technical, sales, marketing…). This is a good way to push your creativity even further.

Deliverability Tip: Identity behind a sending domain name

Some folks create a domain name (dedicated to email campaigns) linked to a non-functional, non-existent website. A good example is when an individual clicks on mynewsletter.ext and it doesn’t take you to an actual website (yet the email address noreply@mynewsletter.ext is still used as a sender address), but the user arrives at a blank page (or a 404 error page, etc).

Good news, this practice is very bad for at least 3 strong reasons:

• a domain name without a website is a characteristic which portrays suspicious anomalous behaviour - normally used by spammers & phishers;
• this affects the legitimacy of your email, which makes it harder to be verified by a recipient’s servers
• anti-spam filters & the average internet user may perceive your email as phish

Solution

• Create an easy-to-understand website with clear information that explains more about you/your entity
• Ensure that the sending domain’s whois records are public, and identify your business. Stay away from publishing private whois information.
• Add an extra layer of “trust” by implementing at least SPF & DKIM email authentication techniques to validate your identity. SPF curbs domain spoofing, while DKIM prevents spammers from forging source addresses.

Conclusion: Always distinguish yourself from spammers by ensuring that the domain name you use in your emails allows user to verify your identity.

Photo Credit : Vagawi - Creative Commons

Email Press Review #3: 5 posts to read this week!

Stay up to date about email with our press review. Here are the posts we’ve picked up especially for you this week!

1) Email Subject Line Delivrability
“Free iPad!” “Bajillions of dollars are waiting to be claimed, grab yours now!”. We’ve all seen the subject lines from our inbox screaming “SPAM!” at us.

2) Email Messages That Work for Mobile: Things to Keep in Mind
Email is one of the easiest things for a person to check while on-the-go, so you want to make sure yours is one that gets read instead of one that gets nothing but a big “X.”

3) 5 Tactics to Ignite Your Email List Growth
If you seek quantity over quality in list growth, you’re practically inviting the ISPs to block your entire opt-in mailing list. Here are 5 tried-and-true methods to ignite your email list growth, in a safe, permission-based way.

4) Routing transactional emails :  the 2 classic mistakes to avoid
Transactional emails yield a 50% open rate and a 20% click rate! Despite these impressive figures, transactional messages are often managed improperly. Here are two classic mistakes to be avoided.

5) The first 4 lifecycle email campaigns to grow your business 
How to structure the program and optimize the communications? Here are the top 4 lifecycle triggered emails you should set up to help optimize your channel.

See you next week!

Mailjet European Tour!

One of the greatest ways to meet amazing people, share ideas and brainstorm great topics is by attending events. Mailjet’s team wants to take the opportunity of meeting our clients, partners and friends personally in Lyon, Berlin, Amsterdam and London.  Are you in the area? Join us for a drink! 

Lyon the 22 & 23 April

The Realtime conf, as the name implies, is a real melting-pot conference for realtime technologies. The speakers are very interesting : Tristan Nitot, Founder of Mozilla Europe and Arnout Kazmier, Founder of Observe.it, for exemple. The con takes literally place on the Rhône river: it’s on a boat, La Plateforme. Don’t have your tickets yet? Get them here and meet Julien, our CEO and Florian, our Dev Evangelist!

Berlin on the 22, 23 & 24 April

Mailjet’s crew is in town! Quentin (deputy CEO), Thibaud (co-founder of Mailjet and Founder of Fotolia), Nicolas (Dev Evangelist) & Elie (Head of Marketing) will be in Berlin for 3 days!

Two great events to meet us at Betahaus on Monday, April 22nd! At 6pm, how about a fireside chat with Julia & Kevin Hartz (co-Founders of Eventbrite)? Get your ticket for free! Winding down the night still at Betahaus, go to Drinks & Demo Night and share a drink with us and other Startuppers from Berlin. There are no ticket available anymore, hope you grabbed yours already!

That’s not all! The next day, Mailjet is sponsoring the Ecommhack Conference in Berlin on April 23rd (and 24th)! The event is about the vision of API driven ecommerce future.  We love their idea and we are proud to be one of the sponsors! Join us! Admission is free!

Mailjet Berlin trip ends at NextBerlin! The NEXT conference serves as a great meeting place for European digital industry! Are you attending? Let us know on Twitter and see you at Berliner Congress Center! 

Amsterdam on the 25 & 26 April

The Next Web conference will take place at the Venise of North! :) Its two-tracks program includes the interventions of amazing speakers, such as Loïc Le Meur, co-Founder of LeWeb, Kevin Hartz, the CEO of Eventbrite and Jordan Casey, the 13 year old CEO of Casey Games !

The conference will be held at Gashouder, Klönneplein 1, Amsterdam. You can still get your ticket, but as these words are being written, there are just 182 passes left! Are you going? Great! Say hi to Elie, (Head of Marketing) and Nicolas (dev evangelist), they will be over there.

London on the 27 and 28 April

London’s top developers and entrepreneurs will gather together to compete for the chance to bring their concept to reality.

The Angelhack will take place at Bloomberg Space. If you didn’t get your tickets yet, you can purchase them here. Nicolas and Florian, our Dev Evangelists, are attending to go. Ping them and enjoy a drink with them.


See you soon!

15 Tips For Optimizing Your Transactional Emails

Recently, I received an email in my inbox from “noreply” with the subject “Email confirmation of receipt of your message.” If the sender had at least revealed his identity from the beginning, I would have known that it was referring to a message I had sent a few hours before to the customer service of a chain of filling stations.

Luckily, there was no harm done as they didn’t require any action on my part. But it could have been disastrous! For example, if the email had requested that I validate the email by clicking on a link…I probably wouldn’t have!

To avoid this type of error, here are a series of tips, which can also be viewed as a sort of checklist:

Identification

• Sender: Use a clear sender name and address; you should be able to be identified by your recipients at first glance.
• Subjectline: Mention the content of the transaction in the email’s subjectline, for example: “Order confirmation - Apple MacBook Air” and not simply “Order Confirmation.”
• Explanation: Clearly explain the reason why your recipient is receiving the email in the first few lines, even if it seems obvious. For example: “You have received this email in reponse to your message on our site www.mycompany.com.”

Content

• Main content: Make sure the transaction is the central content of your email. Ideally, it should be visible in the first 300 pixels of your email.
• Verification: If your email is a confirmation, be sure to include enough information so that your client can verify one last time that everything is in order: details, place of delivery, time of appointment, event address…
• Tools: Give a link in the email to the tools available on your site to manage the transaction. For example: modification, cancellation, delivery tracking…
• Marketing: Take advantage of your transactional emails to push other offers. But be discreet! In no event should promotional offers become more important than the transaction.

Technical Aspects

• Real-time: You need to assess on a case by case basis whether to send transactional emails in “real-time.” In the case of a confirmation, it is absolutely necessary, but for a notification or alert, not necessarily.
• Email Server: Do not allow your web server to send automated emails! They deserve as much (if not more) attention and professionalism as your marketing emails.
• Priority: Use an email sending platform that allows you to set the priority level of your emails. This is important to ensure that the most urgent message arrive first.
• Domain Name: Use the domain name of your website (or a subdomain) to generate tracking links to your transactional emails.
• HTML: In some cases, delivery of your transactional email is so critical that you should consider the possibility of sending in text mode. This is a way to optimize deliverability a little more.

Tracking

• Replies: Don’t use a “noreply” email address. The ideal would be to use a sender address that is linked to your customer service.
• Performance: Don’t forget to measure the performance of your transactional emails, opens and clicks, so that you can optimize them for your next campaign.
• Monitoring: Put alerts in place to verify that transactional emails are always sent!

Photo Credit: Eastern Telegraph Company Limited - Public Domain

Email Press Review #2

Stay up to date about email with our press review. Here are the posts we’ve picked up especially for you this week!

1) 3 Ways to Grow Your Email Newsletter Database
It’s important to keep adding to and refreshing your database so your business’s email marketing campaigns are more successful and are reaching the right people. 

2) 4 Ways to Get Customers to Open Your Emails
It’s essential that subscribers open your messages. After all, if your audience isn’t opening your emails, it’s impossible for them to take action, such as clicking through to your website or making a purchase.

3) 5 Tips for Effective Email Copy
Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, the easiest way to improve your email marketing, and in turn generate more leads and revenue, is to improve your copy. 

4) Ask the Content Marketing Know-It-All
Various Q&A about online Marketing such as : Is there a content formula? How can I get to know my audience? Is authenticity the key to online marketing success ? »

5) [Infographic] Over 60% of email marketers admit they could do better
A survey of over 1,300 marketers found that 61 per cent admit that their performance is ‘poor’ or ‘average’

6) 10 Common Email Marketing mistakes

How to make the most of email marketing opportunity by avoiding the most common mistakes.

See you next thursday for another email press review!

OXFORD - Don’t Miss the jQuery 2013!

After the Bacon conference, another key con will be held on the banks of the Thames.

The first European jQuery conference.

The jQuery 2013 is a single track conference with ten speakers. Among them, the creator of Javascript and CTO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich and some web engineers from Google, Etsy and jQuery, of course.

WWH : Where, when and how?

The conference will take place at the King’s Centre of Oxford on April 19. If you didn’t get your ticket yet, there are still some places available.

Agrandir le plan