www.ehygienics.com - Email marketing can either be a blessing or a curse depending on how you approach it. Gone are the days of buying a list and setting up a server with software. Email marketers are now focusing on targeted lists that are optin, and to improve their ROI, they inform the list of who they are and how they got their email. If you are going to get into this game, there are some pitfalls you may want to avoid:

1. Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing can either be a blessing
or a curse depending on how you
approach it. Gone are the days of buying
a list and setting up a server with
software. Email marketers are now
focusing on targeted lists that are optin,
and to improve their ROI, they inform
the list of who they are and how they got
their email.

2. If you are going to get into this
game, there are some pitfalls you
may want to avoid:
•Buying a list
•Buying email software
•Buying email servers
•Adding IP’s

3. Buying a list of emails, regardless if it has optin
information or not, is too risky. The real question
should be, “Why is the list owner selling?” If the
list is responsive, it’s worth its weight not to be
sold. Most lists for sale have already been traded
and/or sold at least 20 times before it gets into
your hot little hands and prior to them selling it,
many have seeded it just to watch how many
hands it arrives in. All lists are seeded with traps
or list owner emails, so buying a list is just too
risky.

4. If you do not have a list and you decided to do
gorilla marketing (which 90% of startups do),
then you would be better off riding the coat tails
of a similar company (someone in the industry
but not direct competition). Pay them to send
your ad to their own list. Better yet, ask if they
would lease their list to you. This way, their logo
can be on your ad and their lists will know
where the ad is coming from. There are many
other ideas and options you can choose from.
The best advice would be to get as far away
from unfamiliar lists as you possibly can.

5. So, let’s say you have a list that is fully optin all from your
own marketing website(s), thus you decide to save money by
buying email software. Any easy search in Google will find
you in the web of $250 email marketing programs with
promises of major rewards. “This will cut my costs of
marketing by 90%!” you say to yourself, but the software you
are buying (unbeknownst to you) is honestly old and
outdated. Most were programmed by a few intelligent
Ukrainians about 10 years ago and ISPs recognize their
signature within the first 10 emails being sent. Email
software and add-ins (plugins to email clients) do not get you
into the inbox anymore unless you know how to take it apart
and fix their flaws. You’re better off paying companies like
MailChimp or Aweber because they are completely
whitelisted and ISPs give them VIP treatment (more on that
later).

6. Ok, so after serious consideration of the above and your
budget being tight, you stick with your $250 email
software and decide that buying email servers is the next
logical step because hey, you won’t know until you try it
right? Email servers or virtual desktops come with IP’s
that have already been listed and delisted at least a
dozen times or more and a lot of blacklists keep those
IP’s on warning. The minute your server IP approaches a
threshold within a large free email service provider like
Hotmail, the quicker it is to be blocked. Server admins
monitor their traffic and have excellent systems that alert
them of possible spam. You are likely to get blocked
within 3,000 emails from one IP at any given 24 hour
period of time.

7. Let’s say you figure that out real quick when your
open and click rates drops by half, so you decide that
adding more IP’s will fix the problem. This shotgun
approach would have worked well 10 years ago, but
ISP’s recognize this snowshoe spam and can block an
entire range just as fast as they can one IP. Unless you
purchase hundreds or thousands of IPs that are
unrelated to each other along with the same number
of domains (scatter/tunnel affect) you will be stuck
with the same problem as before. Even if you find a
provider who can sell IP’s in such fashion, your
machine can still be blocked (more on that later, too).

8. Finally, you get smart and decide to go the honest
approach. Wise choice. I have found that if you
contact large email service providers and be
completely honest with them about your list, where
you got it and what you plan on doing with it, they
usually will work with you to clean it up, somewhat.
You shouldn’t just upload a list and expect them to
accept it without any communication between the
two of you. Some programs allow you to send to the
entire list the first time, which is risky on their end,
but you will soon find out that you are banned from
using them if you hit a trap or exceed a high
threshold of bounces.

9. Honesty will go a long way and large email service
providers truly want your repeated business so
contacting them via the phone (yes, by using your
mouth) and building a relationship will pay off big
in the end because their IP’s are solid and get into
the inbox. I have heard of many instances where
emailers will setup multiple small accounts into
several large email service providers and keep it
small in order to send big, but this approach is
tedious, malicious and can bite you in the ass if
you’re not careful. It’s not worth it.

10. There are over 30,000 Internet Service Providers
worldwide and all of them share a common problem
between them, which is spam. Every year, a new idea
is shared among them all on how to avoid spam
spilling into their networks and they are constantly
spending millions to make sure their users receive a
minimal amount of spam in their inboxes. They frown
upon spam, yet some profit on it and that is why there
is both white hat and black hat spam out there today.
Sure, you can save money by tricking them. But in the
long run, you can smear your company’s good name
and that, my friends, is just not worth it.

11. Thank You
For visiting our Presentation
About Ehygienics:
EHygienics is a professional email list hygiene company located in
beautiful downtown Bend, OR. Since 2003, eHygienics have been
removing bounces, threats, protestors, litigators and all other
perceivable threats from subscriber and old databases. eHygienics’
coveted platforms offer their clients the ability to self scrub, team
scrub and programmatically connect to several real time API
servers which are used daily by subscribers worldwide.
Contact US:
869 NE Wall Street, Suite 200,
Bend, OR 97701, USA
email: ehygienics@gmail.com
Phone: (888)462-2718