Mailjet

Thresholds: A wealth of ideas to create new transactional campaigns

jlmailjet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:08:50 +0100

Transactions emails are generally limited to welcome emails, confirmations, and reactivations. But to restrict oneself to only these categories of messages would be a shame!

Ok, but what other paths are there to follow?

In any case, there is one that can provide you with many ideas. This is the use of “thresholds.” But what is a threshold? A threshold is a limit beyond which an event occurs. In the case of transactional email, the event is obviously sending an email. The two most common uses are anniversary dates (registration, first purchase, …) and the number of points achieved on a loyalty card.

The use of transactional email thresholds can attract the recipient’s attention to an event that he himself generated and around which it is possible to build a strong story. It is strong because it implies an intimate sender and receiver interaction.

Examples:

In the context of an airline company, a threshold could be when a passenger surpasses 12,742 kilometers, the circumference of the Earth. In this example, the email might be: “Jonathan, did you know that we’ve circled the world together?” This is an excellent example to suggest something to the client, such as to join a VIPs-only membership program.

Another example could be, if you encourage your clients to share your information on social networks, you could reward them after a certain number of shares. For the subject of the email, you could say, for example “Thank you. It is because of you that we are here!”

The use of thresholds can be applied to almost any field! Think about the core of your business, the services you deliver to your clients, and it won’t be long before you find some inspiration!

Deliverability Advice: Test the rendering of your emails!

jlmailjet — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:09:55 +0100

Ask what an HTML coder thinks of email…the response is rarely complimentary! In fact, HTML integration for email is a complex art. While in classic web development it is necessary to test and retest with each different browser, the problem is even more complicated with email. Indeed, it is not uncommon that your email campaigns will be opened using over a dozen different email clients. Each has their own variable HTML standards…old memories might be resurfacing here. It is often said that to code a good email, you should code the HTML as you would have in 1999 (even if I don’t agree with this idea entirely)!

Despite this complexity, it is essential to ensure that all email sent is correctly displayed. Otherwise, you may damage your sender reputation.

Luckily, there are tools to make your life easier!

Inbox preview platforms! These platforms allow you to generate sceenshots in different email clients and webmails!

How does it work? In general, email preview tools simply consist of sending a test email to the platform. Within a few minutes, you can see the different screenshots. Certain platforms also offer the integration of their services via an API.

The two most common inbox preview platforms are Litmus and Returnpath (a Mailjet partner), but there are many other players in this market.

Conclusion: In order to guarantee a maximum level of interaction, your emails must be perfect! And as each email client has their own bugs and display tricks, it is absolutely necessary to test each of them.

Why Mailjet's Email Delivery Service Is Not Concerned by #Prism

elie-chevignard — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:01:00 +0100

We never communicated directly to the public about this (except when asked) but due to the recent Prism leak, we feel that it is worth sharing with our community (almost 15,000 active clients in 129 countries - including the US, which is our 2nd biggest market) that our service is not concerned by Prism nor the Patriot Act.

Email data integrity is strategic for your business

From the contact lists to the content transmitted via transactional emails, this channel needs first-rate privacy, just like any other basic communication tool. This has been a part of our core strategy from day one.

We host our servers in countries where data privacy management aims to be transparent, reliable and stable. If we are to communicate data to a government authority upon their request, standard rule of law must always apply: a warrant should be needed and issued only after a judge takes an independent look at the situation, sets certain restrictions and deems it necessary to issue a warrant.

“Nobody cares about the Patriot Act, anyways.” Are you still sure about this?

When European cloud companies pointed out the distrust in the way the US government was handling data privacy, the response was almost immediate. Some studies were funded to demonstrate that your data was in fact safer in the US, with the first line being: “Other countries also can obtain personal data stored in the cloud, an international law firm found.”

Sure they can, but again, there is always an intermediate independent step where a judge is needed to assess the request and issue a warrant. A third party is involved to control how the data is obtained. This is no longer standard practice in the US, hence the Prism scandal and open access to all of your data - sensitive or not.

“I have nothing to hide.” So your data assets are public knowledge?

Good developers know how valuable the data they are manipulating is. The real problem isn’t whether or not you have anything to hide, it is the fact that a government can access any information (sensitive or not) without any proper control measures.

If no judges are involved nor an independent assessment of the situation is carried out, who can guarantee that the data snooping stops just at one specific email? Who can guarantee that the agent pulling out the information is not leveraging it for his personal interest? No one.

Best of both worlds: Mailjet has servers in Europe AND Canada!

With Mailjet’s close relationship with OVH (the #1 hosting service in Europe who recently raised $180 million to finance their expansion into North America via Canada), we were privileged to be one of the firsts to use their new Canadian servers. This will not only give us the ability to provide a very high quality of service and speed for our numerous US-based clients, but also protect their interests and trust in our service.

Don’t hesitate if you have questions about all this :)

Why should you invest in your transactional email?

jlmailjet — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:49:22 +0100

Transactional email receives reaction rates (opens and clicks) far greater than those you will obtain with a newsletter or promotional email. Yet, it is one of the least exploited opportunities used by marketers!

Why this lack of consideration? Most likely because the transactional email is rarely managed by marketing teams and is often sent from the company’s CMS and not by an infrastructure dedicated to email marketing.

However, when it is showcased, transactional email can become a source of additional income and a catalyst for your deliverability.

In addition to generating additional sales and its competitive advantage regarding deliverability, transactional email offers other advantages:

Reduce customer support’s workload

Providing information and useful tools in your transactional emails can drastically reduce the number of appeals to your customer service. This is probably the most powerful benefit of quality transactional emailing. This fact alone may justify a complete overhaul of your transactional strategy.

Reinforce the brand image

Every interaction with your consumers is a chance to strengthen your brand image. Transactional email is a chance to obtain above average open and click rates, but it can also be a foundation of your business (payment confirmation, subscription confirmation, delivery notices, etc.). It is thus necessary to treat them with care: your brand identity and stylization should be perfect.

Consolidation of the user experience

Your clients’ satisfaction is an everyday struggle! More and more, it is also an element of differentiation over your competitors. This satisfaction is important throughout the buying process, but also afterwards. By offering helpful tools and a hierarchy of useful information (See “Structure of transactional emails”), it is possible to significantly improve your user experience during transactions.

Photo Credit : West Midlands Police - Creative Commons

dotScale in Paris on June 7th with Mailjet

camillejourdainmailjet — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:58:00 +0100

Event Introduction

dotScale is a conference dealing with the Cloud, Big Data, and DevOp development. The day’s objective is to help developers understand the technological choices behind the platforms they use, in order to help them build their own applications and make them scalable. The dotScale conference took place on Friday, June 7th at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. The event was held in English, more than 500 visitors attended, and it was followed by workshops on Saturday, June 8th 2013.

Why was Mailjet present at dotScale? Simply because Mailjet uses and contributes to the Cloud. Julien Tartarin (CEO), Marc Pertron (CTO), Elie Chevignard (Marketing) and Florian Le Goff (Dev Evangelist) attended dotScale on Friday.

Photo credit: François Tancré

dotScale’s Key Stakeholders

Doug Cutting – Creator of Hadoop, President of the Apache Foundation
Joshua McKenty – Co-creator of OpenStack
Shay Banon – Creator of ElasticSearch
Solomon Hykes – Founder of dotCloud
Brad Fitzpatrick - Creator de memcached, OpenID, LiveJournal
Noah Zoschke - Lead runtime at Heroku
Thomas Stocking – CEO of Gandi.net US
Jonathan Weiss – Founder of Scalarium, now acquired by AWS OpsWorks

The event in tweets with the “dotScale” hashtag

Tweets concernant “#dotscale”

Other European “tech” events Mailjet gave a presentation on the main “tech” events in Europe.

10 European Tech Events That YOU Should Attend

elie-chevignard — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:52:00 +0100

For once, I won’t talk about email in my blog post! As a startup, you really want to know if events are worth it. This Top 10 should be of great help if you are wondering which events you should attend in Europe. I would have been happy to have this material to fix my own agenda! If people find it useful, we will try to make it more exhaustive in the future. Just thought it was a great idea to share this kind of feedback with the community. Enjoy.

Our criteria, when we go to an event, we want to:

1- Meet our network: fellow entrepreneurs, investors, partners, clients, etc.
2- Meet new people: prospects, partners, journalists, VCs, etc.
3- Hear about new ideas: some talks are useless, but others are truly inspiring.

Mailjet loves its clients! Tuto.com Interview: “a technical tool that’s very easy to implement”

jlmailjet — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:57:31 +0100

At Mailjet, we closely follow the news concerning our clients, and often, it does us well! We asked Nicolas Chaunu, founder of Tuto.com (in French) but also a former Mailjet shareholder, a few questions.

Could you describe Tuto.com’s business model in a few words ?

Tuto.com is an e-learning marketplace dedicated to learning about computing. Anyone can come to train themselves or to sell their own videos related to the following themes: digital photography and editing, office automation, programming, 3D and special effects, video editing, emarketing and ecommerce… In short, if you want to learn how to develop a PHP or edit a photo in Photoshop, you will certainly find what you are looking for among the 32,000 videos available on Tuto.com (there are even a handful about Mailjet ^^).

What types of emails do you send with Mailjet? Marketing or Transactional?

Both, from the beginning. Subscription confirmation, alerts about new features, shopping cart abandonment, password reminders, newsletters, etc. Everything goes through Mailjet.

Have you met a particular challenge that made you change email providers?

We went through different providers (including Emailvision, and several others) and each time, we met restrictive problems daily: deliverability, setup costs, paid option, closed 3 year contracts, and even a paid API (if that even exists!).

Why did you choose Mailjet? What has Mailjet brought you?

I was one of the project’s shareholders at the beginning, just because Mailjet brought an answer to all the problems I encountered as an e-business person, all with a very aggressive pricing policy. Therefore, to me, the project had it all.

Could you tell us in a few words, from a technical point of view, how you have implemented Mailjet?

We have complete implementation of Mailjet’s tools. We work directly with the API and created newsletter generation and automated transactional email tools directly in our backoffice. I’m rarely on the Mailjet interface because we adapted the tool to our needs, without leaving our backoffice.

What benefits has Mailjet brought to your business?

This implementation allows me to generate a newsletter in 2 minutes flat (including test) and therein lies my benefit: more time! As mentioned above, we now have better deliverability, even with a volume of one million emails.

Last thing: if you found yourself facing someone who was looking for a new email management solution, how would you describe Mailjet?

As a technical tool that is very easy to implement. The tool is adaptive; you can quickly send your first emails and campaigns from Mailjet, and all this in a few clicks; but as soon as you dig a little, you and your team can really customize it to your exact liking. You can finally focus on your transactional email scenarios (no matter how complex they are) without having to ask the questions of cost and feasibility.

But who is this JL who is writing articles on Mailjet’s blog?

jlmailjet — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:09:16 +0100

For several weeks, you may have noticed a certain JL signing about two articles per week on the blog. JL is actually Jonathan Loriaux, who you may know through his blog badsender.com (in French). Interview time!

Jonathan, could you introduce yourself in a few words?

One could say that I fell into email when I was little! From the beginning of my career, I have always had a function in connection with my employers’ email marketing strategy. Firstly, on the advertiser side for an international ecommerce website and then for five years at Bisnode group, not to mention a brief stint in an agency.

When browsing through your CV, it is difficult to tell if you are a technician or… something else!

It’s true! I started on the technical side for lack of qualification. I have always been a sort of “jack of all trades,” and between the Debian web server (a GNU/Linux distribution) installed in my parents’ library when I was a teenager and my interest in online marketing, I finally have a coherent path.

I started my career as a webmaster, then became a specialist in email integration, before moving toward the sales side at Bisnode, and finally, I found myself as a product manager on the marketing side. All that was coated with a layer of consultancy and articles about email marketing on my blog (www.badsender.com).

As an emailing specialist, what is your role at Mailjet?

My role is primarily to create content around Mailjet’s two specialties, namely transactional email and deliverability. The content is posted as articles on this blog, but also as guides, white papers, etc….

Isn’t it complicated to find inspiration on these two subjects?

Not really! One might think that you can say everything in a few articles, but this really isn’t the case. For example, regarding deliverability, we made a list of subjects to be developed and if we did one article per week, it would last over 10 months!

As for transactional email, variations on this theme are also very numerous; we do not manage transactions in the same way on an ecommerce website as for an online newspaper. In the same vein, transactional email isn’t limited to purchase confirmations!

After two months of collaborating with Mailjet, what has impressed you the most?

Mailjet is a UFO (yes, there is a bad play on words in this sentence). With collaborators all over Europe (as well as Canada and the US), reactivity time and dynamism are really remarkable.

But what impressed me most is the focus! While some email platforms seek to enter all areas of the market, Mailjet keeps a simple and well-defined position: Delivering your transactional emails in the best conditions while offering all the necessary tools (APIs, SMTP relay, plugins, libraries…).

AngelHack in Tel-Aviv the 24th and 25th of May with Mailjet

camillejourdainmailjet — Tue, 28 May 2013 08:53:00 +0100

Event presentation

AngelHack is a collection of 30 hackathons taking place around the world. The hackathons bring together designers, developers, sales people and in general, anyone who wants to materialize a complete project in record time. This is a good opportunity to meet people interested in the world of entrepreneurship and to take the first steps in the production of a technical project.

AngelHack’s principle is simple: Participants have 24 hours to materialize an idea before presenting a prototype of their product to the jury, in the hopes of flying off to San Francisco. The winners from each city will have the opportunity to join AngelHack’s acceleration program, which lasts for 12 weeks before leaving for Silicon Valley.

A real community is created around AngelHack. In 2013, dozens of hackathons will be held in over 30 cities and 6000 hackers will find themselves there.

Mailjet’s presence

Mailjet wants to become closer to its European users by going out to meet them. After London, Paris and Berlin and before Kiev, Mailjet is in Tel Aviv for the AngelHack hackathon the 24th and 25th of May.

It’s been already a month that the Mailjet team is traveling around Europe to attend hackathons and we can say that AngelHack Tel-Aviv was a great event. The event went smoothly and there was a great crowd of hackers. We were very happy to meet the Israeli hacker scene for our first. It was great to see that some teams were embracing the “hackathon spirit” and stayed up all night to code their project. We won’t reveal pictures but Google campus was great and comfy for that.

On Saturday it was time for the teams to showcase their demo to judges and sponsors. There were quite interesting projects. Couple of them used Mailjet API to send emails.

Instafeed

We noticed Instafeed, an app for Wix platform that let event organizer display images posted on Instagram filtered by localization and hashtag. They used our API to send a digest to the site owner and notify him anytime a new photo was added, so he could moderate the feed.

CyberQueue

We also really liked CyberQueue’s team and project. They were solving a problem that seems very common in Israel : lines in public services. Imagine going to the Post Office and have to wait hours in line to post something. You could do so much things with this time ! With CyberQueue you “check-in” when your are in line and then you can leave to do shopping, you will be notified by email when it’s your turn.

We loved the team and the project so we selected them to win the special Mailjet prize : a “startup trip” to Paris.

Our “startup trip” pack includes flights for 2 team members to Paris, a personal guided tour of Paris Tech Ecosystem with Elie Chevignard and a meeting with Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia).

So we will be flying teams from London, Berlin and Tel-Aviv, sounds exciting isn’t it ?

Deliverability Advice: Avoid image-only Emails

jlmailjet — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:10:57 +0100

Building an email consisting solely of images is a tempting practice; it can greatly reduce development time … and in some cases, it can increase the open rate of an email campaign (insofar as it is calculated when the images are displayed).

However, as you may already know, many email clients and webmails block images by default. So, if your email contains only images, neither the message nor call-to-action will be displayed, so you have drastically reduced the effectiveness of your actions.

In addition, spammers have long used images in order to conceal certain keywords.

To summarize, creating emails consisting solely of images is a bad idea because:

This is what spammers do;
It does not help the immediate comprehension of the email’s content;

Conclusion: images in your emails should never represent more than 50% of the email’s surface. The ideal is to stay below 30%.

How To Measure The Performance Of Your Transactional Emails?

jlmailjet — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:41:47 +0100

To measure a newsletter’s performance and compare it to previous campaigns is clearly a beneficial practice. On the other hand, broaching the subject in regards to transaction emails is…less obvious.

This is less evident because transactional emails are typically sent from a system that does not support tracking (CMS or others). But also, it often stems from a lack of interest, as no one concerns themselves with their performance.

Nevertheless, by measuring the effectiveness of your transactions, it is possible to optimize your transactional emails and generate additional sales. If optimization is a topic for another article, let us consider the different measurement points for transactional emails.

Measuring Points

Number of emails sent: Much more than a newsletter, the number of emails sent is an indispensible metric since it depends on the number of transactions generated. This is a key indicator of the level of activity of your business.
Opening Rate: This is the most obvious measure when it comes to confirmation emails. But beware, the opening rate is measured only when the images are displayed in the email. The results shown are consistently below the actual number.
Click Rate: Depending on the type of transaction analyzed, the click rate will be very different. It is interesting to categorize the different types of links in order to distinguish the clicks related to the transaction, clicks for promotions and clicks for product recommendations. In this way, you can distinguish the performance of your different calls-to-action.
Return on investment: This is a measure that is very rarely done with transactional email. And yet, if you add value to them with recommendations or promotions, it is essential to evaluate their performances.

Data representation

As we have seen, the different measuring points for transactional emails are the same as those used for analyzing marketing emails. When you send a newsletter, you are able to view the results after a week. For transactional emails, it’s very different. Indeed, as they are sent continuously, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions based on the results. The analysis should be done on a different basis.

It is particularly interesting to study the seasonality of transactional email to detect factors influencing the analyzed results. To analyze this seasonality, it may be beneficial to visualize the results on a graph aggregating data each week. This weekly data will then be compared to various factors that can influence campaign performances (specific actions, vacation, holidays…).

In conclusion, the main focus of statistical analysis of transactional emails lies in the performance variations between different types of emails and the level of response (opens, clicks…), but also across a period of time.

Photo Credit: Meggar - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Towards a Return to Customized Email Solutions?

jlmailjet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:48:07 +0100

Ten or so years ago, many advertisers used in-house solutions (developed internally) to send their email campaigns.This was prehistoric email marketing. It was then that numerous email sending solutions first appeared: AWeber in 1998, Emailvision in 1999, Exacttarget in 2000, Mailchimp in 2001, …

Over time, as the market became more professional, turnkey solutions became the norm. With it, problems of deliverabilty also appeared to reinforce this trend.

In spite of this, there was always a segment of the email market that avoided this logic: notification and transactional emails (see “The different types of email”)

The emergence of cloud emailing to reinforce transactional strategies

In the past several years, email marketing players became aware of the enormous potential of notification and transactional emails. Traditionally, transactional emissions were always linked to information management and mainly to CMS platforms.

But recently, several platforms like Mailjet have arrived to shatter the monotony of the transactional email market. These cloud email platforms offer a measure of professionalism in the management of deliverability, as well as greater flexibility in the integration of email (whether marketing or transactional) in different business systems.

Another advantage of cloud email platforms is that it isn’t necessary to share the bulk of one’s information with third parties. The problems of consumer information theft are regularly reported on. Cloud emailing allows you to keep your information internally and to manage its security yourself.

The return of internal solutions… with deliverability services in the cloud.

Cloud emailing is thus an opportunity to return to customized email solutions, which have the advantage of adapting to needs that are, at times, very specific, all while integrating the most modern tools in terms of deliverability:

Priority management of email sending;
Statistical analysis of opens, clicks…;
Geolocation;
Reputation monitoring;
Processing of bounces;
…

For more information on the functionalities of Mailjet’s API, read our documentation.

Photo Credit: Edwin Levick - Public Domain

Email Press Review #6: 4 Posts to Read this Week!

moomlight — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:55:34 +0100

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

1) Deliverability: Warming Up Your IP Address in Four Steps
Just like you have to break in the engine of a new car, you also have to warm up IP addresses first. Email providers don’t know you yet, and you have to gradually work on the email reputation of your new IP address to gain their trust.

2) 10 things that will destroy an email marketing program
Your consumers are empowered by their choices, with their devices, and have the ability to leave you with a click of a button. Here are 10 things that concern them and can force them off your list.

3) 10 Tips on How to Identify a Phishing or Spoofing Email
Two single dollar bills is all it costs for a hacker to create an email pretending to be from your trusted retailer or bank, asking for your login details, and instantaneously obtaining your confidential information.

4) Did You Know 144.8 Billion Emails Are Sent Every Day
We all send and receive a lot of email. In fact, a report earlier this year indicated that workers spend 28% of their time in their inbox.

See you soon!

What Types of Transactional Emails Should You Develop First?

jlmailjet — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:26:10 +0100

While attempting to create a list of all the types of notification and transactional emails that might exist…I was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of possibilities! Just as the marketing segment of email often takes the form of newsletters or promotional emails, transactional emails can also take many different forms.

It is impossible to tell you which types are more advantageous or more important than others…Nevertheless, one can name two which should absolutely be developed before all others:

Subscription Confirmation

In order to keep their clients, ISPs and webmail services are making their email inboxes more and more intelligent. This not only allows them to filter spam, but also to detect email that will interest the consumer. This is, for example, Gmail’s Priority Inbox, which sorts email by order of importance, or Outlook.com filters, which automatically classifies emails in folders such as Groups, Newsletters, Social Updates…

Subscription confirmation being the first point of contact with your subscribers, this initial communication is essential for the success of your future actions. With the development of intelligent email inboxes, the earlier you succeed in engaging the relationship, the better your chances of reaching the consumer’s main inbox with a high priority level.

It is absolutely essential to inititate engagement from the first interactions by placing attractive and, of course, relevant content in your subscription confirmation emails!

Reactivation Emails

This, along with the subscription confirmation, is one of the automated emails that should be implemented by all businesses that use email to communicate with their clients!

Every business faces subscribers who, over time, become less and less interested by the information sent to them or who stop visiting your website. In these cases, it is a good idea to take some time to build an automated reactivation program. This program may take various forms:

A survey to understand why the subscriber lost interest in your activities and how he might be enticed to reactivate through his responses;
A series of ultra-personalized emails demonstrating your service’s relevance to the consumer;
…

There is a solution for every situation imaginable! Keep in mind that it is always less expensive to reactivate an old client than to acquire a new one.

Only two examples?

We are trying to be brief here! There is a third type that seems rather obvious, which is the type of confirmation email that…makes your business profitable. If you manage an e-commerce website, it’s the purchase confirmation, if you run a service activity, it’s the payment confirmation, etc.

This type of confirmation email is indispensable…indeed, it is vital for your business! With it, your customer will feel reassured by the seamless execution of his order.

Photo Credit: Public Domain - George Grantham Bain collection

Email Throttling : Why You Should Optimize Sending Speed?

jlmailjet — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:21:00 +0100

Email throttling is one of the minor components of email deliverability. This is a technique that consists of carefully adjusting the speed of email/campaign sendings - which will in turn respect the filters of major ISP & receivers across the globe.

The average ISP/receiver utilizes unique thresholds which allows them control email flow and filter out bad email - which is rarely published. As often is the case with email deliverability, it is a great idea to surround one’s self with experienced folks who can redefine delivery speed to various ISPs and receivers.

How it works technically

The technique involves configuring several different parameters:

The number of emails sent per minute or hour
The number of smtp connections per minute or hour
The number of emails sent by each connection

According to ISPs and webmails, these parameters are to be used simultaneously or separately. Depending on the email platform you use, you may not always have the opportunity to set these parameters yourself (which could be a good thing). Here are some scenarios:

The email sending platform allows you to configure the parameters yourself;
It is impossible to optimize the parameters; they are configured by default;
The paramenters adjust automatically according to sending conditions.

Reputation and volume

For some ISPs and webmails, the number of accepted connections and the email volume limit may vary depending on your reputation and the number of emails you send. For example, if you suddenly increase the number of emails sent, certain ISPs and webmails will block a portion of your emails.

To detect this type of temporary blockage, if your provider does not do it for you, you must analyze the SMTP error messages like: “Too many connections from your host.”

And with Mailjet?

Mailjet adapts sending speed and the number of simultaneous connections to optimize the deliverability of your emails in real time. In this way, you do not have to worry about this aspect of your email campaigns and you benefit from the experience of our deliverability team.

Photo Credit : Rainer Ebert - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Email Press Review #5: 4 Posts to Read this Week!

moomlight — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:42:56 +0100

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

1) Creating an Interactive Conversation thru Email and Social Media
An “engaged” consumer is a connected consumer. So if you grab your recipients’ attention when they are interested in your brand and you can carry on the conversation further — you will excel!

2) Don’t Close the Doors on Email Marketing
Although it has become fashionable to promote businesses with social media and text messages, email remains an effective option.

3) 3 Obsolete Email Practices
It’s time to scrap three all-too-common email programs.

4) The 10-Step Content Marketing Checklist
Everyone knows that content marketing is the “new” marketing approach that all the cool kids are supposed to be doing.

See you next week !

Deliverability: Benefits And Risks of Transactional Email

jlmailjet — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:12:49 +0100

The issue of deliverability as related to transactional emailing has two disctinct facets. On the one hand, thanks to its high reactivity rates, the transactional email enjoys a significant advantage in terms of deliverability. On the other hand, however, a transactional email that lands in your recipient’s spam folder could potentially spell disaster for your business.

An advantage related to reactivity level

For the past several years, anti-spam filters have analyzed the reactivity rates of emails sent by a publisher (opens, clicks, deletes…) to define their reputation score. This reputation score influences whether an email is identified as spam or not. The reactivity rates of transactional emails being extremely high, they are at an advantage as compared to marketing campaigns.

How to avoid bad delivery of your transactional emails?

Unfortunately, it is not the case that because the transactional email has many advantages in terms of deliverability, your email will always arrive in your recipient’s mailbox. Imagine that all your double opt-in emails land in the spam folder! This represents a significant loss in terms of revenue.

Luckily, it is possible to avoid this pitfall:

By separating the sender IP addresses of your transactional emails and your marketing campaigns.
By properly configuring your email platform (SPF, DKIM, …).
By using the same IP address and the same domain name for your transactional emails.
By increasing interactions through an intriguing subject line and calls to action in the email.
By using a specialized platform… like Mailjet, for example ;-)
In keeping with the set of good practices related to deliverability (a complete checklist to come in Mailjet’s documentation).

Photo Credit : Paulus - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Deliverability Advice: Personalize the Sender Domain Name

jlmailjet — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:31:33 +0100

Have you ever heard of identity theft? These people will steal someone’s identity in order to subscribe to various services, such as an application for credit or mobile phone subscriptions.

Is this practice acceptable? The answer is obviously no!

In the world of email marketing, it’s the same thing. Why should an email service or ISP agree to receive emails sent from the address igor3333@gamail.com if all the links in your email go directly to the website www.mycompany.ext?

A question of consistency

One of the criteria used to classify your email as spam or not is the consistency of your communication. If your identity as a sender is not consistent, you will receive a negative rating, which will be added to other criteria used to measure your reputation.

Conclusion: Use your website’s domain name in your sender email address.

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

moomlight — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:57:00 +0100

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

1) 7 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Program May Fail
Let’s look at some common problems and if these hit close to home - do something about them.

2) 3 New Ways To Measure Email Campaign Effectiveness
Almost 70% of all messages in people’s inboxes are non-personal. This is both good news and bad news for marketers.

3) Email as a patient communications tool? Read before you hit ‘send’
Before you decide to open the lines to an email conversation, you may want to take a good look at the pros and cons of doing so.

4) Effective, proven strategies to use subject lines
The subject line of your email is critical in driving engagement after the email reaches your consumers in-box.

See you next week!

Transactional Email Structure: What Is the Most Crucial Information?

jlmailjet — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:24:20 +0100

In a transactional email, as well as a newsletter or promotional email, the hierarchy of information is essential. Whether your email is an alert, notification or confirmation, the information it contains is extremely valuable to your recipient.

Thus, it is critical to structure this information and highlight that which has the highest value. Similarly, your email should also offer all the tools related to this information: it should be possible for them to learn more, to cancel an action, or to change it.

Below, we attempt to analyze and comment on the structure of a transactional email example:

The sender: It is crucial that the sender is immediately identifiable.
Reply to: To offer the recipient the chance to ask a question in reponse to the email.
Email subject: This should contain the most important information regarding the transaction.
Header: This should reinforce the sender’s identity, but should not take up too much space so that there is room for the main email content.
Main information: This should be highlighted (font size, bold…) and placed in the upper part of the email.
Detailed information: This should be situated in a less prominent position as the main information, but should still be complete enough to reassure the recipient.
Tools related to the transaction: The most frequently used actions (modification, cancellation…) should be easily found directly in the email.
Marketing or promotional content: This content should be located below the information related to the transaction and should have its own link. Certain specialists recommend that marketing content should not exceed 20% of the transactional email.
Contact information: Especially if the email confirms a purchase, don’t forget to supply contact information so that the client can reach you.
Private information: As in all communication, the client should feel comfortable with your use of his/her information.