MustangList.com Blog

Listed below are the latest Federal CAN-SPAM rulings. There is not really anything new; it’s mostly clarification for things that were formerly grey areas.

• The physical address can now include a PO box or Mail Stop, as long as the USPS recognizes it.
• In CAN-SPAM speak, “person” is now defined not just as a human, it can also be a corporation, non-profit, etc. This is who is responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance when sending a commercial email. Business entities (as well as individuals) are now responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance in regards to all commercial email they send. (For the most part, businesses have been treating CAN-SPAM as if this were the case all along.)
• Even if your name is in the From Line, you must also have your company name in the actual email with a link to your website. If not, your partners and/or your advertisers will be responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance. This mainly applies to companies that send emails or coupons to their list on behalf of their partners. For example, if company A sends an email to their list on behalf of company B, company A has to not only have their name in the From Line, but also have their name and information about their company and a link or web address to their own site in the email. If not, Company B is responsible for CAN-SPAM compliance. If you are Company B in this example, make sure you follow-up with the company sending email on your behalf to ensure they’re up to date with CAN-SPAM so you’re not responsible for their compliance.
• The process of unsubscribing cannot require a purchase, taking a survey, or be complicated. You can only ask for the email address and user’s email preferences (i.e. do they want to receive email or not).

CAN SPAM reiterates:

• that all commercial emails must have a working reply-to address or other conspicuous web-based opt-out mechanism for the company listed in the From Line
• emails can’t be false or misleading
• email subject lines can’t be deceptive
• emails must comply with the “sexually explicit” label where applicable

You sent your email an hour ago, satisfied everything was hunky-dory. Then you get an email from the product department—the price for the featured bag is wrong. Or, in the case of some industries, like the airline industry, the prices have changed. We’ve all sent an email with mistakes at some time or another. Of course you can use spell-check and have the email proofread by a couple of people and significantly decrease the chance of sending an email with a mistake, but eventually it will happen.

So, what do you do? Do you send the correct version? How do you explain what was wrong with the first email? Do you draw attention to the mistake? Or do you let it slide…maybe your readers won’t notice. Well, it depends on the mistake.

• If it was just a spelling typo or grammatical error, don’t send the email again (just use Mustang List’s built-in spell-check feature next time). If the typo was on the price of something (or if you just made a mistake with the price), you should resend the email. If the incorrect price was too high, you could lose sales (not the point of the email, I’m sure). If the price was too low, you could lose money or, at best, you could have some customer service issues on your hands.
• If there is an incorrect link, whether to resend would depend on the importance of the link in the email. Is the link the main call to action, or a link among many? Is the link the focus or purpose of the email (like you sent an email about an online survey for your readers to fill-out but you gave out the wrong link)? Can your readers accomplish the desired task despite the link being wrong—are there other links to the same place in the email? If the email ends up meaningless and your readers will not be able do what you want them to do (i.e., there are no other links to the survey, or the hot deal you want them to check out) you need to resend with the correct link—just put a little note at the top of the email noting the correction of the error. Use humor when and where you can, but keep things concise; you don’t want to waste your readers’ time.
• If the malfunctioning link is the unsubscribe link, resend and explain the link in the new email works. The readers who want to unsubscribe need to be able to do so. Although it might seem a bit much to resend the whole email, the people who wanted to unsubscribe will be able to and those who weren’t planning on unsubscribing will be relatively unaffected.
• If your email contained the wrong date, you should resend—you might lose customers who decide they can’t go (and so don’t click the link) based on the date in the email; and you’ll confuse the ones who click and find the date on the website different from the one in the email. It’s worth clearing up this potential confusion.
• If you omitted or made an error in your From Name, you should resend if the error will prevent recipients from knowing who sent the email.
• If your error was that you sent the email to the wrong list or group of people, decide on the impact. If the email is going to be totally irrelevant to the recipients, or if it’s going to be confusing and elicit calls to your customer service line (i.e., you confirm attendance to a seminar or event to a group who hasn’t been invited to attend the event), you should resend the email. If it’s merely a matter of targeting to the wrong group, and the email won’t be completely irrelevant or meaningless, you can let it go—there’s no need to clear something up that wasn’t confusing in the first place.

You want to start sending targeted emails, but don’t have a complete plan yet? Have an idea of an email to send to a specific region, but not the other regions? Have a category you want to send a special email to, but don’t know what to send the other categories?

Start by doing what you can. There’s nothing wrong with emailing a targeted message to a small part of your list and a generic newsletter to the rest—you’ve got to start somewhere and there’s no better time than now.

You can start targeting by using a category, or a region, such as state. Begin by making sure you have email addresses added to the category to which you’d like to send the targeted email. If you will be sending the email to a specific region, ensure you have some addresses to mail to in that region.

Let’s say you run a non-profit organization and you send out a monthly email newsletter. For your July newsletter, you realize you could target a message to your donors in the Chicago area. First, we’re assuming that you’ve been collecting city and state as well as other information. You either import this information with the email addresses, or you collect the information on your sign up form.

Create your regular generic email newsletter and create the newsletter for your Chicago recipients. Test each email by sending it to your personal email address(es).  When it’s time to send your message, send the targeted message first. From the Send Message screen, you’ll want to show the Advanced Sending Options. For this example, we’ll target the list by region by selecting IL or Illinois (or both) from the drop down list for state. It’s a little broader in reach than Chicago, but it’s considerably more narrowed down than sending to your whole list. Send your message. It will go only to the members on your selected list that have the state IL in their profile.

How do you send the generic message to the rest of the list? From the send message screen show the Advanced Sending Options. This time you want to choose all states except IL. An easy way to do this is to CTRL click or Shift click to select all states and then CTRL click on IL to “de-select” it. Ensure that every state except the state(s) you already mailed to (IL) is selected. Because your subscribers can only have one state in their profile, you don’t need to worry about the message going to the recipients who received the first message. This message will only go to everyone that you selected and not to the recipients of your first message—the subscribers with IL in their profile.

Or, say you have a Category set up for people interested in donating their time to your organization. Set up the generic email and the email targeted to the subscribers interested in volunteering. When sending the message, show the Advanced Sending Options. Send the targeted message first and select the category that you want to include (the category for volunteers). Send the message. To send the generic message, you exclude the subscribers who got the first message by excluding the volunteer category—click the category for volunteers under the heading Exclude these Categories. This way, subscribers receiving the first message (those in the volunteer category) are excluded and won’t get the second message, but everyone else on your list will.

Even this very simple targeting can be a great enhancement to your email program. The important thing is to just start—get your feet wet and more targeting ideas will come forth in no time. Also, watch your open rates and click rates to the targeted groups rise—seeing real, tangible results might give you just the boost you need to think of more ways to target your subscribers.

Your customers have many common expectations of your business that you must manage and fulfill. One basic expectation is that you will ask permission to email them. These days, very few people expect to be automatically added to an email list. Most consumers are savvy enough to understand that though you can email them to confirm a purchase and give them their shipment tracking information, they will not receive marketing emails from you unless they explicitly signed up to receive emails of that kind.

Consider this: Many websites have Contact Us pages with a form users can fill out for more information or to make a comment. In addition to having a field for the comments or inquiry, there is a field for the email address of the person making the inquiry/comment so that you can respond. When people enter their email address on a contact form such as this they are not expecting to be added to your email list. They are offering their email address so that you can reach them; but nothing in the interaction implies they are interested in receiving communication from you other than a response to their inquiry/comment.

When you take this email address and sign them up to your list, it’s tantamount to spam. And more importantly, you’ve failed to manage your customer’s expectations in filling out the form. If you want add their email address to your list, provide a tick box where they can explicitly opt-in to receive marketing email or your newsletter. Or tell them clearly on the page that by contacting you, they can expect to be added to your email list.

What other common expectations do your customers have when they interact with your business?

You will be respectful.

• You will ask for permission.
• You will not email them “a lot.” Yes, that’s vague and in the eye of the beholder. You should be very clear about how frequently you intend to email them when they sign up—and then stick to it.
• You will send them what they signed up for. If they signed up for a “hot deal” email, they are not going to get a weekly newsletter with articles and tips.
• You will let them unsubscribe.

You will be transparent:

• You won’t share their email address with other companies unless you explicitly state you will and get their explicit permission to do so. This pertains to third parties as well as other business groups within your company.
• You will email them as the company name/brand they signed up with.
• If you ask for a birthdate, they expect that you’ll be using it for something. If it’s just for your own demographics, then you should consider sending a Happy Birthday email to fulfill your customers’ expectation that you’ll use the information (in some way that benefits them).
• Same goes for other personal information: your customers want to know why you want the information that you’re asking for and how you intend to use it.

You will not be complicated.

• Customers expect to be able to change their email address, subscribe, and unsubscribe easily and quickly at any time.
• You will confirm a signup, unsubscribe, and other actions by an on-screen confirmation message or via email.
• Your email will open and be legible in their email client or browser.

APIs are the secret to automating many manual tasks and streamlining your work flow. API stands for “application programming interface” and is a method by which one process or program can pass information to another process or program. If you have access to a programmer, they could use Mustang List’s APIs to write little programs to automate your system and integrate it with Mustang List.

Here are some things you can do using APIs:

• Put a sign-up box on your homepage and have the email sign-ups go directly to Mustang List
• Deploy a welcome message instantly upon sign up
• Create a Customer Preference Center where customers to subscribe to and unsubscribe from multiple newsletters
• Maintain a CRM database and sync it with Mustang List for sending emails
• Integrate third party software systems to Mustang List (for example, you can intake an email address at the point of sale on your POS system and have the email address sent to Mustang List automatically—no need to manually export the addresses and import them to Mustang List)

You can use your own programmers to integrate your systems with Mustang List using the APIs, or you can use Mustang List’s custom programming services to customize your site to talk to Mustang List via the API.

I’ve been trying to unsubscribe to Easy Jet’s emails for the past year. Every time I go to unsubscribe I’m reminded why I’m still getting their emails: it’s not working.

The process goes something like this: I click the link to unsubscribe. I’m taken to a log-in page. It’s very clear that if I want to “sign up for or unsubscribe from eOffers” I need to enter my email address. I enter the address, but I can’t remember the password. Of course I don’t remember it. I must’ve been forced to set it up to make a purchase over a year and a half ago. There’s a link “I have forgotten my password.” Great, I click the link. I’m now on a page where I enter my “registered” email address again and they’ll email me my password. A message comes back to me saying  “Sorry, but the email address you entered does not appear to be registered. Please go back and check your typing carefully.” Of course the email address is registered, that’s why I’m getting these emails.

Why is the unsubscribe behind a password? Well, the sign up and unsubscribe are rolled up into the member profile which includes active bookings, profile information, etc. Log-in and you can view and change flights and make other profile changes. There is a certain logic and convenience to this. You register for the site and decide whether or not you want to sign up for email all on one page.

The problem is that the unsubscribe process is more than just a click or two away; at best, unsubscribing can become tedious, at worst, impossible. Obviously it’s just a glitch in the system, no big deal, right? But glitches happen. And they certainly shouldn’t prevent a customer from stopping unwanted mail. At the very least there must be another way to allow the unsubscribe take place without logging in. Maybe do it old-school and allow a response email with Unsubscribe in the subject? Or create a page where the log-in isn’t required; one need only retype the email address receiving the unwanted emails and the unsubscribe can be processed.

Mustang List has an easy to access unsubscribe page that does not require a password. But if you use the Mustang List APIs, you can create your own subscription center. When you do, carefully consider whether or not you want to make such a page password protected and the impact it will have on your customers and subscribers if you do.

A couple of months ago I ordered a part from a cooking website. Today I found out that I was added to their email-marketing list by virtue of the fact I ordered with them. I clicked the link at the bottom of the email so I could unsubscribe. I landed on a “Subscription Center” page, not unlike the kind you can set up in Mustang List. But the page had some glaring problems.

First of all there were anchor links at the top of the page for the items “On This Page.” I don’t understand why, as you could do only two things on the page: Change Subscriptions or Unsubscribe. Except that the unsubscribe option was almost pushed out of view by the (pointless) anchor links, you could see both of these options fairly clearly without scrolling. These links took up space, did not help clarify the purpose the page, and were visually distracting.

The other problem on the page was under the “Available Publications.” There was a list for All Shoppers—this is the list I was a part of and why I know I was added to the list as a “shopper.” The name is not a very public friendly name—it’s clearly the internal point of reference for the list. There was a list for in-store events, which I’d guess is the “real” opt-in email list. And the final list was a Test List. Test List? Yes, I could’ve subscribed to the company’s test list and received whatever and how many drafts they send out for each email blast.

What impression does all of this leave me with? No one has looked at the page. It’s a system-generated page, and it appears that a system-generated link goes into the emails that are sent. Even the anchor links seem to be auto-generated. After all the time spent in creating an email and checking it twice (or twenty times) how could someone neglect to simply click on the unsubscribe link (to make sure it works) and check out the page?

Mustang List users should remember they can enable a link to appear in emails that goes to a Subscriber Update page similar to the one described above (click Subscriber Change Link under Advanced when sending). But before you enable that link, be sure and set the Subscriber Update Options—this page will let you control what will and won’t appear on your Subscriber Update page. You can control whether or not categories appear on the page; but when you allow categories to appear, you allow them all to appear. If your categories are for internal you only and you don’t have them appear on your Subscriber Update page, you have nothing to worry about. But if you’d like to have a Test Group, and you also have categories that you want to appear on the Subscriber Update page for your customers to edit, you’ll need to create a separate list in Mustang List for this Test Group. Otherwise, your test group will appear among the other groups/categories in your list and your page will look sloppy, too.

Double check everything and pay careful attention not just to your emails, but to your supporting pages as well: subscription pages, thank you pages, unsubscribe pages, etc. I know if the person in charge of the email program saw the page I saw today, the Test List would be removed immediately. No one wants that to appear to customers on a Subscriber Update Page.

In the last blog we discussed how to use alt tags to optimize your email for when images are turned off in different email services. Here are a few more tips:

• Don’t create Image-Only emails. Include some text copy. Emails that are comprised only of images (or that have very little text) often get tagged for junk mail. This is partly because the spam filters can’t “read” the content and protect the recipient by automatically sending the email to the junk folder. A ratio of 30/70 text to images is a good balance to keep in mind. Plus, when images are turned off, there’s some text in the email to go along with your alt tags so content of the message comes across more clearly.
• Add the height and width to all images to ensure that the size of the blank placeholder images doesn’t throw off your design.
• Make sure the offer is above the fold. If you use a big image, it can push any copy below the image further down the email. Your readers will be looking at a large empty space where the image is blocked. So be sure to use Alt Tags, and consider putting some copy above the image. Also test your email design in a Preview Pane.
• Make sure your images are clickable. People expect to go somewhere by clicking an image: fulfill this expectation. When images are turned off, your alt tag will be clickable, so make sure the image, the alt tag, and the landing page all make sense together.
• Consider your background color. If you make an image clickable, but that image is turned off, the alt tag will be clickable. And if you use a background color, you have to be careful that the hyperlinked alt tag will show up against this background color. If it’s hard to read, your subscribers miss your message and you’ll have wasted your time writing alt tags.
• Alt tag product names and prices. If your email features images of products, don’t forget to alt tag the brand, the name, and the price of products. If images are turned off, this will make the product more clickable. And when images are turned on, it’s great for readers to see the name and price of a product when they hover their mouse over the image.

Have you considered what your email looks like when it arrives in a Gmail account with Images turned Off? Or when images are blocked in Hotmail? Did you know that the default view in Gmail is to have Images turned off—even if your email address is added to the customer’s address book? Sure, recipients can turn the Images On, but what if they don’t? Make sure that your emails look good whether images are on or off by using Alt Tags.

When you mouse over an image text pops up for the image: this is an alt tag. And when images are turned off, the alt tag appears as text in place of the image. It’s basically a text description of your image. But using alt tags effectively means reinforcing the image’s purpose or message, not merely describing what the image looks like. For example, the company logo that appears in an email could have an alt tag of “MustangList logo.” But the more effective alt tag would be “MustangList—Easy and Cost Effective Email List Management.” When the images are off, this reinforces the company sending the email, and it reads well to the subscriber—it doesn’t look like some weird back-end of things meant for the designers.

Because it’s this text description that displays when images are turned off, you can use the alt tag to reinforce the message or the call to action of the image. Say you have an email promoting a big Memorial Day sale, and the email is comprised mainly of graphic banners. In the banners you convey the details of the sale (where, when, what, why). You could have alt tags that say “MemDay Sale image1,” “MemDay Sale image2,” etc. Or you could choose some of the more important images and use alt tags to describe the details of the sale: “Huge Memorial Day Sale: Save 20% on all items with this promo code: memday08.” You can choose just one image’s alt tag in which to convey this information, or choose a few images and separate the information among different alt tags.

Be sure to consider the placement of the text when the images are turned off: if you provide alt tags for every image in the email, the text could be redundant and difficult to read. Based on the location of the images within the email, carefully choose which images you will leave blank and which images have the best placement for displaying and reading the alt tag text when the images are turned off. And if the images are more ornamental and don’t convey important information, then leave the alt tag blank— there’s no reason to make an alt tag that’s purely descriptive (“girl reading a book”). In this case you’ll have adequate text copy in the email to get your point across and it will be safe to leave the alt tag blank.

By making sure the alt tags are very descriptive and contain all the information communicated in the images, you can ensure the message of your email comes across even with images off.

No, not offer testing, or testing new design—though you should do that, too—the testing we’re referring to here is basic nuts and bolts testing. Why? To make sure the email you’re sending is perfect, of course. But you Previewed the message, isn’t that enough? No, not really—it helps to see and interact with the email again in your inbox; and not everything appears in the actual email as it does in Preview (i.e. personalization tags). You really can’t test enough when, for example, a bad or forgotten link can easily cost you sales and cause the failure of your campaign. Testing is grueling work, but it has to get done every time you send an email.

Here are some things to look for when testing:

Test appearance.

• Make sure it looks ok in the email client your company uses. This is important because this is where many of your coworkers and supervisors will see the email.
• If you can, also check the rendering in different email clients. How much trouble you go through to do this will depend on the likelihood of your customers receiving email in these different clients—i.e. Microsoft’s Outlook, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, and Apple’s Mail.
• Test the appearance of your email in different Web-based email services. Sign up for a few different free email addresses with Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. so that you can see how the email renders/looks in these different webmail providers. You can get a picture of the webmail providers you should prioritize testing by reviewing your email list for the domains the majority of your customers’ emails are with.
• Check these web-based email accounts in different browsers if you can (i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari)
• Ensure any personalization code you’ve used resolves.
• See how your subject line appears—can you view the whole thing, or is it cut off? If it’s cut off, is the break acceptable or do you need to rewrite it to make more sense?

Test functionality.

• Make sure all your links work.
• Make sure the links go to the desired landing page.
• Double check open-tracking and link-tracking.

Double-check for errors.

• Make sure the From address and From name are correct.
• Check once again for design errors and typos. Seeing the email actually in your inbox can give you fresh eyes to look at it yet again and catch any mistakes.
• Ensure the footer info like company address, unsubscribe links, etc. are displayed correctly and that they work.

You’ll probably find you need to test the email more than once. For the final round of testing (or for what you hope will be the final round) you might consider setting up a “test group” (or Category in Mustang List) of test email addresses you’ve created with different email service providers. Then you can send the email once, but receive it at several different accounts and quickly check the email’s appearance. You’ll also be able to see the email as your subscribers will see it when it’s sent “for real.” For example, when you send yourself a test email by entering your email address in the Test Address Field, you will not see the personalization your subscribers will see—you’ll still see the code. To see the code populated with data, you must send the actual email to your list or to a category of the list.

Consider including in this “test group” the email addresses for supervisors and co-workers who need to sign off on the email. Since this email will be the closest to the version subscribers will receive—with any/all code populated with data—sending a test email to a test group in the system is a great way to get internal approval on the final version.