As we near the general beta release of 5.0 we are have setup a 1-2-All Beta blog.  You can view screenshots, read about the new features, and let us know what you think.  The download will be available shortly as internal and alpha testing is nearly complete.

Click here to view the 1-2-All Beta Blog (Current 1-2-All clients only)

While all ISPs score a sender’s reputation by giving different weight to various factors you can be assured that all major ISPs are using some type of equation to determine your reputation.   How they calculate your sender reputation score determines whether your mailing is received in the inbox, the junk mail folder, or even delivered at all.

Email Filters

Its important to familiarize yourself with the following individual filtering methods.  In the past ISPs would block emails based solely on one of these filters but as weaknesses in this approach became inherent they can no longer rely on any one method.  Each of the following filtering methods play a role in your ISPs’ delivery decision:

• Content Filtering – Uses the email subject line and the body content to come up with a spam count score.  One of the most popular spam filtering packages is SpamAssassin which is used in EmailCheck.
• List Quality Filtering – A lot of spam lists particularly paid subscriber lists contain a lot of bogus email which results in high bounce rates.   ISPs use this to detect which lists contain bounces that exceed a certain quantity and then disallow all emails from this IP address or sending domain.
• Volume Filtering – Because spammers send bulk emails without regard to accuracy or volume this checks the number of simultaneous connections that are opened (known as threads) at any one time with your ISP.  The server may then reject all messages based on the number of open connections.  1-2-All Email Marketing uses a single thread sending method.
• IP Address Filtering – When an IP address is added to this filtering list the process is known as “blacklisting.”   Once blacklisted all emails from a particular IP address are disallowed.
• Domain and URL Filtering – Checks the email domain used to send a mailing as well as any URLs included in the message.

Legal Compliance

You need to be aware of regional laws aimed at curbing spam.   In order to ensure that your mailings are permission based it is good policy to ensure that an opt-in mechanism is in place before you begin email marketing.

Can Spam Act

• ensure that all mailings contain a functional unsubscribe mechanism
• all unsubscribe requests must be honored within 10 days
• commercial mailings must include the physical location of the sender
• criminal charges for fraudulent sender or deceptive subject lines

European Union E-Privacy Directive

Canada PIPEDA

Australia Spam Act of 2003

Whitelisting and Feedback Loops

Some ISPs provide whitelisting and compaint feedback loops as methods for improving deliverability.  Those that do typically require senders to have explicit opt in permissions for subscribers.

• Whitelists -The opposite of a blacklist where the ISP receives requests from legitimate companies to be added to a list of pre-authorized e-mail addresses from which mailings can be delivered regardless of spam filters
• Feedback Loops – A reporting mechanism whereby an ISP provides the sender with data including unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Spam Complaints

Most people have seen a “Report Spam” button on their email client.   When this is clicked on a spam complaint is logged at the ISP level or it is also relayed back to the sender if they are a part of a feedback loop.  If you receive too many spam complaints then you will damage your sender reputation.   A good way to reduce your spam complaints is to ensure that all of your subscribers are opt-in.

Spam complaints do not track the reason why recipients make a spam complaint.   It is possible that even if subscribers opt-in to your list they may forget they are subscribed or no longer find your mailing relevant.  If you receive a high number of spam complaints on a list where your subscribers have opt-in to then this is usually a good indicator that your mailings are either irrelevant or sent to frequently.

In general you can expect about 10% of your mailings are going to be reported as bounces. If your bounce rates are considerably higher than this then there are a few things you may want to look at. It could be that your mail server is rejecting mailings from being sent due to the content in your messages or you have been blacklisted. Another explanation for why your email delivery failure may be high is that the mail server you are using is either temporarily down or it is unreachable. High bounce rates impact your campaign not only because the sender’s reputation suffers but the delivery rate to valid email addresses is slowed. For this reason it is very important to keep your subscriber lists clean.

Bounces generally fall into one of two categories, hard bounces and soft bounces. What is typically referred to as a hard bounce is a mailing that was returned by a recipient mail server. This could be because the address is either invalid or the domain name doesn’t exist or is not recognized.

Examples of hard bounces which are defined by bounce codes in Email Marketing include:

5.0.0 – Hard – Address does not exist
5.1.1 – Hard – Bad destination mailbox address
5.1.6 – Hard – Mailbox has moved
5.1.7 – Hard – Bad sender’s mailbox address syntax
5.1.8 – Hard – Bad sender’s system address
5.3.2 Hard System not accepting network messages
5.2.3 Hard Message length exceeds administrative limit

In general a soft bounce is returned because of a temporary problem having to do with the email address or the recipient’s email server. For example, even if the email address you are sending to is valid the message could still bounce if the recipient’s mailbox is full.

Examples of soft bounces which are defined by bounce codes in Email Marketing include:

5.2.0 Soft Other or undefined mailbox status
5.3.1 Soft Mail system full
5.5.3 Soft Too many recipients

You can reduce the number of bounces in your lists by including unsubscription links in your mailings, you can have Email Marketing add an unsubscribe link to your mailings automatically or through a personalization tag. Another thing you can do is add an update profile link to your mailing, Email Marketing includes an update your profile personalization tag which you can also easily insert into your mailing. Another way to decrease bounces is to have addresses removed through setting up bounce management. In Email Marketing you can set up a cron job, cron_bounce.php that will cycle through your list and remove hard and soft bounces after a set number of times. Unless you set up this cron job you will need to manually run the bounce check until Email Marketing cycles through all your mailings and removes addresses after they bounce a set number of times. Bounces will not show up in statistics unless bounce management is set up using a POP account for bounces and if no bounce management is selected all bounces will be sent to the From sender’s address.

Another good idea is to include custom fields for phone or address so that you can use the phone or mail to update the address of those subscribers that bounce. Follow this link for more email marketing tips.

For a limited time we are now offering our 10 Template bundle of email templates for only $97!

We released the EmailCheck add-on in June 2006 yet we still get asked questions about how you would use it and more importantly why. The EmailCheck add-on is vital for serious email marketing. Using this add-on you can find out how spam filters will analyze your messages and adjust accordingly. This will help you to improve email deliverability and avoid being added to email blacklists.

It has now been a number of weeks since we first released the Email Marketing Sending Engine beta and the response has been great. Overall we are finding increased sending speed (more than double the speed in many cases) and few problems.

The couple minor problems found have been worked out and we are now ready to release the first release candidate. If all goes well we should be rolling this into the general distribution in the near future as the default sending engine.

To use the release candidate sending engine:

1. Upgrade to the latest version of Email Marketing
2. Open your /12all/admin/engine.inc.php file
3. Put the following code in a new line right above the line that has “?>”
   $GLOBALS[”useBETAengine”]=1;
4. Your Email Marketing installation is now using the beta sending engine.

You can also find some article to help you make sure your messages are delivered here: email deliverability. Let us know if you have any comments!

It’s new, it’s improved, it’s faster than ever…The new Email Marketing sending engine is now available for beta testing in version 4.54.6. Details to turn on the beta engine are below.

With the new sending engine you will see faster sending speeds. Below you will see a comparison for sending speed:

To use the beta sending engine:

1. Open your /12all/admin/engine.inc.php file
2. Put the following code in a new line right above the line that has “?>”
   $GLOBALS["useBETAengine"]=1;
3. Your 1-2-All installation is now using the beta sending engine.

Remember, there are also other factors that go into email deliverability. The email sending speed only relates to what is happening on your own server, not the recipient server.

Today we released a new add-on for ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Software.

This add-on allows you to perform a/b split testing as part of your email campaigns. Email Marketing will automatically distribute the two messages evenly between two randomly assigned groups within a single mailing list. You are then offered full statistical data for each version of the message to help you determine which strategies are most effective for your mailing list.

Here are some screenshots:

EmailCheck, A new add-on to 1-2-All, has been released today. EmailCheck is the new add-on that interacts with the EmailCheck web service.

When you install the EmailCheck add-on you will see a new button labeled “check spam filters”

When you click on that button a report will display with your spam count and suggestions on what should be changed.

This will help you to ensure that you maintain a high level of email deliverability in your email campaigns.

In June 2002, around the same time an asteroid barely missed hitting the earth [ ? ], the first version of 1-2-All was released. In January 2003, 1-2-All became a part of ActiveCampaign, Inc and has prospered ever since as the company’s flagship product. Four years to the date of the first incarnation of 1-2-All we look back at the evolution of this product, to put the past into perspective, and celebrate the anniversary of our most popular software product to date. 1-2-All Broadcast E-Mail, as it was exclusively referred to back then, began with a simple, colorful, and easy to use interface. There was nothing terribly distinguishing about this version, just a good mailing list manager at a low price. A commitment to adding more features with enhanced usability allowed 1-2-All to evolve into a much more dynamic application with a friendlier interface.

In August of 2003, a new user interface was implemented along with a scheduled mailing feature that required the setup of cron jobs. In February of 2004, version 3.82 introduced time sensitive auto-responder features, allowing you the ability to set auto responders for each list. A new branding file allowed you to easily modify brand settings by opening a single file. Around the same time a US federal appeals court gave scientists the right to study the 9, 300 year old remains of Kennewick Man, denying the request of American Indian Tribes who sought immediate burial. Also, scientists found what is believed to be the fossilized head of a 400 million year old fly, making it the oldest known insect. [ ? ] Following the release of 1-2-All, development was ongoing and client feedback was expressly used in the product direction. Updates were frequent and the list of features for 1-2-All Email Marketing continued to grow.

1-2-All once again underwent a face lift with version 4.0 which was released in January of 2005. This new version featured an improved sending engine, enhanced subscriber viewing page, enhanced administrative control, and more error checking. As far as the file structure was concerned the admin files were now separated from the public file (you had to go 12all/admin to access the control panels whereas before you just had to go to 12all). The biggest improvement in this new version, in terms of usability, was the introduction of the advanced importer. In previous versions there were quite a few people who ran into problems when trying to import a .CSV file because their format was rejected. 1-2-All Email Marketing now had a user friendly import interface that made it easy for anyone to import .CSV files. Many people upgraded to 4.0 solely for the advanced importer.

In May 2006, ActiveCampaign Email Marketing as it is referred to these days, underwent its most dramatic stage of evolution. The new version’s extensive list of added features and improvements include: restructured code; central authentication format; new language file format; smarty template system; attachment, sending filter, send to a friend, web version, and multi format options for auto responders; unlimited options for sending filters; new reporting options; reason for unsubscribing option added; subscriber, forward to a friend, and auto responder statistical tracking; enhanced custom redirects; branding settings editable from browser; more message personalization options; subscriber notifications that include subscriber field data; better email design capability; and much more. Elsewhere in the world, a 1,500 year old tattooed mummy of a woman in her late 20s is found near Trujillo, Peru. [ ? ]

Its been an amazing four years. Email Marketing has prospered because of its commitment to enhanced functionality and usability. There is no telling what ActiveCampaign Email Marketing will look like in another four years. That’s pretty exciting.