Every successful business fills some type of need. This is a useful thing to keep in mind when it comes to marketing your products and services, because you will be much more likely to make the sale if your potential clients clearly understand why they need to have what you’re offering. If they think your product is something that would be nice, but is ultimately unnecessary, how likely do you think they will be to open up their wallets at a time of economic crisis? In order to succeed, you need to show them why the benefits of your product are absolutely indispensable to them.

Now the reason we say that something is a “need” is because there are strong consequences if the need is not met. You need to eat, because if you don’t eat then you won’t survive. You need to sleep, because if you don’t sleep then a lot of very bad things will happen to you. So in order to demonstrate that your product is not just desirable but necessary, you have to figure out what will happen to a person who fails to buy it from you.

It might sound like an impossible task, making your product sound as essential as food or rest. In fact, you really don’t have to go to that kind of extreme. And if you were to try, it would be pretty difficult to sound convincing. But the scary part is that our world is full of twists and turns, and we’ve all had the experience of thinking we had something completely taken care of, only to find out that we had missed some crucial ingredient.

Here’s a great example: everybody eats because they know they have to, and they even enjoy it. But up until a few years ago no one had ever heard of Omega 3 fatty acids. Your brain is made of them, and your mood and immune system go wonky if you don’t get enough of them, but nobody ever knew the difference. Until suddenly, some ingenious vitamin marketer caught wind of the discovery and went around explaining to journalists and magazine writers that the food everyone had been eating wasn’t enough. We all needed more of these mysterious and elusive Omega 3s that we’d never heard of before. We call this creating a market.

And what happened as a consequence of this publicity? Supplements like Omega 3 fats are now driving the continued growth of a 25 billion dollar a year industry, even while the rest of the economy is tanking! So you see, the real meat and potatoes of remaining profitable is explaining what is missing from the meat and potatoes that people already have.

All of this is leading up to the real practical application, and that has to do with email marketing. If you set your mind to it, email marketing can be a really outstanding way to spread just the right kind of fear. In fact, if you do it right, your likely to increase your subscribers’ level of engagement with your newsletter. Because every company has some handy dandy product or service that would make life easier, and most of them send out “newsletters”full of product updates and sales information and the like. But very few of them ever contain any real “news.” And, coincidentally, very few of them ever get read.

Think about it: what kinds of things do you see on the front page of a newspaper? Mostly scary things. And why do you see them there? Because they sell newspapers! People are always drawn to scary information, because we know that we have this tendency to overlook things. I was sure something was missing from my diet, and so I listened when all the bloggers and TV doctors started telling me I needed Omega 3s. And I’m still listening! I’m waiting for someone to tell me what else I’m overlooking. Everyone is. And we’ve got 25 billion dollars to spend just on supplements that we never knew we needed before!

So if you’re sending sending out a newsletter, why not make it less about your product and more about the “news.” Point out some recent tragedy that could have been cleverly avoided through the judicious use of your product. Highlight some failing market that is plagued by a dramatic underuse of your product. Share a case study about some customer who almost didn’t make it because they weren’t using your product. Create your market.

And if you’re not sending out a regular email newsletter, in this economy? Good luck!

In my last post I discussed some ways that you can use email marketing to build up positive feelings so that people will look forward to receiving your messages and feel relieved when they arrive. Rewards, even small rewards, play a huge role in shaping our motivation and determining the types of actions we will take in the future.

However, as important as positive reinforcements are for successful marketing, they are only a part of what it takes to motivate people to take action. And this is doubly true when you are trying to market your products or build your brand during a slow economy. When fragile markets and shrinking budgets are making people more and more hesitant to invest their resources, you have to develop an understanding of their hesitation.

People hesitate because they are afraid of making the wrong decision. They are afraid of wasting their time, their money, and their manpower, and they are ultimately afraid of failing. There are two ways that you can work with this fear: by defusing it, or by turning it to your advantage.

Email marketing offers an ideal platform for defusing fear, because it allows you to portray your company as a solid and reliable performer. You can emphasize your commitment by developing a regular schedule of mailing that go out just like clockwork. Over a long period of time, you become as familiar and comfortable as an old pair of sneakers. People come to feel at ease relying on you because they find that you stay with them in good times and in bad times.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being old faithful. But there are plenty of ways that you implicitly and explicity build the perception of reliability into your mailings. If you’ve been around a long time, you can celebrate the anniversaries of important dates in your company’s history. But if you haven’t, you can build the sense of reliability into the very fabric of your company by sending out company timelines that stretch out years into the future.

Above all, you want to position yourself as someone who can help with the problems that your potential clients are inevitably experiencing. And the best way to do that is to talk knowledgeably about those problems. Try building your newsletter around the idea that you are in the business of solving the problems that your clients experience.  Then your actual product or service is reframed–it is just another way that you’ve come up with to help people overcome the problems that you seem to know so much about. There’s something very comforting about that.

In my next post, I’ll explore the flipside of this equation: ways that you can turn your clients’ fears to your advantage, by placing the emphasis on what will happen if they fail to fully utilize your products and services.

If you’re like me, you probably check your e-mail right after you sit down at your desk. If there are no new messages, you probably go ahead and hit the button again “just to be sure.”

You probably interrupt your work every 10 minutes or so to check for new messages, even though you are completely aware that the computer will tell you as soon as a new message has arrived. You might leave the window open in the background for a while, so that the next time you have to check for mail it will take less time to load.

And if you do decide to close the window, you probably click the refresh button just one more time before you do.

My name is David, and I’m an Email Addict.

Most of the time, I just can’t seem to help myself. The good news is that this is now pretty much normal. Nearly everyone you know is doing the same thing, compulsively checking their e-mail every few minutes.

Now that we’re all getting smart phones, we can take our e-mail addiction with us everywhere we go. Got a free minute in between point A and point B? Time enough for a quick e-mail check. The other day I saw someone checking his Blackberry in a public restroom.

Most of the e-mails we receive aren’t even anything good. Most of them get deleted right away, and half of the time we decide to mark the messages unread and “save them for later.” So why should we be so obsessed with checking to see if there are any new messages?

Because sometimes you get one that’s really good.

Like a lab rat, you hit the button over and over and over again until you get a reward. And, like a lab rat, the conditioning is most effective when you don’t always get the reward.

Behavioral psychologists refer to this process as operant conditioning. When you receive a reward (or “reinforcement,”) you become more likely to repeat the behavior that got you the reward. But if you receive a reward every single time you enact the behavior, then you either get tired of the reward, or you give up as soon as the reward stops. So the most effective conditioning takes place when you are only rewarded intermittently.

While many are understandably looking for ways to become less addicted to the technologies they use, business owners and marketers can make it work to their advantage. Because when you understand that everyone is as addicted to their e-mail as you are, and that everyone is waiting for that one rewarding e-mail that will let them stop checking their e-mail for 15 minutes, then there is really only one question to ask:

How can I make my own email campaigns feel like a reward?

That’s the one question that can get your messages opened, read, and enjoyed again and again. It is easy to think about what you stand to gain by sending out a mass mailing, but often more difficult to think of reasons why your clients might want to open up another newsletter pitching your same old tired products and services.

What would you send out if your entire goal was to make the recipient look forward to your next message? Would you send them an amusing or inspirational story? A link to an obscure but hilarious YouTube video? Some kind of special gift just for being a subscriber?

Why not give it a try? The next time you launch an email marketing campaign, why not begin with an e-mail whose sole purpose is to make the reader feel rewarded, so that they’ll look forward to your next message? Or throw in something just for fun, a little treat just to let them know you care and to share a little of your personality and warmth.

A sender’s reputation can follow not only an IP address but a brand and a sending domain.   A holistic approach is necessary when considering a sender’s reputation as no one factor alone determines what that reputation is.  Reputation can be broadly defined as the opinion of a community toward an object.  Knowing what the community looks for when determining a reputation will allow you to maximize your delivery rates.

Spamtraps

We first eluded to spamtraps when we discussed Paid Subscriber Lists. A spamtrap is an email address that appears to be valid but is in fact used by ISPs to catch spammers. You will sometimes hear these referred to as “honey pots.”  Spammers use harvesting programs which scan millions of web pages looking for email addresses.  These email addresses may come from old email addresses which are recycled by ISPs in order to catch commercial emailers that use old, rented, or paid subscriber lists.  Some sites bury email addresses in their source code so that they are picked up by harvesting programs.  The company where the email originated is then alerted to any incoming emails that go to that address at which time they contact your web host and file a spam complaint.  Spam traps are bad news.   Its been reported that your delivery rate can drop as many as 20 points drop with one spam trap hit.   Spamtraps are one of many factors that ISPs look at when calculating your sender reputation.   Not only is your delirability affected but they can result in temporary or long term blocks.

Good list maintenance is necessary for avoiding spam traps.   Here are some things you will need to avoid:

• Poor List Sources -  This includes avoiding paid subscriber lists as mentioned previously
• List Poisoning – Using confirmation Opt-In mailings will reduce the chances that you will receive invalid email addresses
• List Aging -  Because spam traps are often used by recycling old email addresses use bounce management to remove any old email addresses and also remove any inactive addresses from your list.

Sender Authentication

This is used to prevent domain forgery and spoofing and provides a framework for helping ISPs to distinguish between legitimate email senders and spammers.  ISPs Identifying and verifying a claimed domain name has been authenticated or authorized for sending from a MTA makes it possible to treat suspected forgeries with suspician,  reject known forgeries, and block email addresses from known spamming domains.

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF) – a record that allows you to determine which computers can send emails on behalf of your domain.  Adding an SPF record to your domain name’s TXT entry, while not required, can help improve email delivery rates by reducing the chance that the emails you send will be seen as spam.  It can also help prevent others from sending spam and using your domain name.  This is used by Bellsouth, AOL, Gmail, and MSN/Hotmail.
• Sender ID – is very similar to SPF record except this extends the verification process to include the purported responsible address included in the header.  Used by MSN/Hotmail
• Domain Keys – an authentication standard that is designed to verify the DNS domain of email sender and the message integrity.  All outgoing emails are digitally signed with a private encryption key to match a public key that is published in the sender’s DNS record.   Used by Gmail, Yahoo, SBCGlobal, British Telecom, Rogers Cable, Rocket Mail, etc.
• DKIM – an enhanced authentication standard that allows a person to verify that a message comes from the domain that it claims that it came from.

Getting Technical

Your system admin should be able to assist you with ensuring that the following technical configurations are in line as they can improve or harm your sender reputation.

• IP Address – because email originates from this address you need to establish a low history of spam complaints, spamtrap hits, and low bounce rates in order to have a positive reputation that will affect your long term deliverability.   If you wish to qualify for whitelists, feedback loops, and reputation services, your IP address must have low spam complaints, unsubscription management, and proper setup for the domain associated with it.
• Sending Domain or Subdomain – Domain registration and domain age are two factors for establishing a positive reputation.  Newly registered domains are regarded with suspicion as spammers often hop from domain to domain.  If a sending domain has a bad online reputation it will result in low deliverability rates.
• RFC Compliance – these are information documents used as governing standards for internet traffic.   RFC 2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and RFC 282: Internet Message Formatare relate to email reputation.
• Reverse DNS – used to identify the domain name associated with an IP address.  The IP address is the only data that can not be forged and not having this enabled is in violation of RFC standards and a requirement for many ISPs.  If this is not enabled or is configured improperly you must immediately contact your server admin.
• Bounce Management – An email address is considered dead and should be removed from your list if it bounces 3 consecutive times or if the time between the most recent consecutive delivery rejection is in excess of 15 days.

Where to Go From Here

The final way to improve your deliverability is to get certified or accredited by a reputable organization.   There are three different types of ways to get yourself certified!  The first gets your emails automatically whitelisted or delivered to ISPs and companies that are working with the relevent program.  Another audits your email practices so that you can display a seal of approval next to your sign up form.   Another allows you to display an icon next to your email in your inbox that indicates that your email passed a quality test.  We will focus on whitelisting programs here:

• Goodmail Systems -  ISPs supporting this program ensure delivery with a “certified” icon attached.  This accreditation is supported by Yahoo and AOL.
• Sender Score Certified – Acceptance in this program puts you on the whitelist that includes 240 email address as well as MSN/Hotmail and Roadrunner.
• Habeas – requires business processes and email practices.   Their safelist is support by many email receivers including AOL, Earthlink, Google, and MSN
• SuretyMail – While not technically a whitelist a large number of ISPs, spam filters, and mail servers take this accreditation into account when making delivery decisions.  Senders with this accreditation will see improved delivery.

If you are concerned about whether you have already been blacklisted you can go here.

Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Marketing 101 is familiar with the 4 P’s of Mixed Marketing.  Marketing decisions being made using a recipe was posited by James Culliton in 1948.  ‘Marketing-Mix’ was coined by Neil Borton in 1953.  Move ahead to 1960 where E Jerome McCarthy first proposes the 4 P classification system and it later finds its current mainstream acceptance in Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing in 1967.

Considered the traditional elements of marketing the 4 Ps are:

• Product -  Goods or services.
• Price-  What the customer pays for your product.
• Placement – The distribution channel for the product
• Promotion -  All Communications such as advertising with the customer

Collectively these ingredients represent a company centric worldview where the company establishes the terms upon which the client is acted on.   This was establishment thinking at a time when products were mass produced, prices set on profitability,  distribution limited to one way channels, and clients targeted by one way promotions.   Promoting products required having mass appeal and often grabbed people’s attention in ways that were disruptive.  People were interrupted from programs on television with commercials. They listened to commercials on the radio because that was the only place to go for new music.

Its been estimated that there are 162 million web sites and 1.4 billion users on the web and this has fundamentally shifted the marketplace.  Along with the changing times have come changing attitudes.  Mixing ingredients and spoon feeding your clients with whatever you are selling is no longer a realistic approach to marketing. People receive information at a dizzying pace these days.  Technology has allowed the spread of ideas to flow to audiences faster than can be assimilated.  People have competing messages coming from all directions whether they come from blogs, user reviews, commenting, and forums.   They also have more options for tuning you out.  DVR,  On Demand, Podcasts, YouTube, and downloads are ways for people to tune in to what they want when they want it.

In order to compete with all these options marketers must win over the hearts and minds of their clients.  A client oriented culture is necessary in order to reach today’s audiences.  A new model of marketing that focuses on interactivity, building relationships, and keeping clients actively engaged is emerging as marketing’s new forward thinking. This new thinking acknowledges that audiences are more resistant to marketing speak and tend to be less impressionable to traditional forms of advertising.   In order to keep audience’s interest marketers must respond with more interactive forms of communication.

Newspapers are currently facing a yearly profit loss with a decline in circulation and an accompanying decline in dollars from advertising.  The Chicago Tribune recently declared bankruptcy and the economic picture for the New York Times is looking bleak.  Its been reported that they have a $400 million debt payment due in five months and a negative current net worth.

Yet it isn’t as if people have suddenly quit following the news.  Thanks to YouTube,  rssfeeds, and the popularity of blogs people have more options when it comes to where they want to get their news from.   Traditional media has been forced to adapt as a result.  Their focus has shifted toward giving people what they want and when they want it.  Streaming video, slide shows, rssfeeds, forums, and blogs are now standards on mainstream news sites.   This approach has lessened the bleeding.    Even as their newspapers continue to decrease in circulation The New York Times has emerged as one of the top ranked web sites.   The online domain nytimes.com attracts 180 million site visitors annually. The challenge now for newspapers is in inventing a model around this that can draw in more revenue.  Revenues from online advertising has given newspapers some hope but this still hasn’t been able to replace the profits they lost from print advertising.

Marketing is currently an evolving field in which the old rules no longer apply and fresh thinking is currently in demand.  Moving forward requires getting people’s attention by giving them what they want and when they want it.

You want to segment your subscriber list based on shared needs so that your subscribers respond similarly to your marketing strategy.   Ineffectiveness arises in email marketing when you do not address your subscribers’ needs or your subscribers become disenchanted with your products or services. Effective email marketing involves developing a relationship with your subscribers that is built around addressing their needs.  Through list segmentation you are able to differentiate between the different needs of your subscribers so that you can then send targeted mailings that your subscribers will respond to in a similar way.  Send messages that are irrelevant to your subscribers’ needs and you risk losing them.  The better you are able to segment your lists the higher your response rate.  Treat your subscribers as if you were in a relationship with them and they will respond to you more.  List segmentation should not be rigid or fixed.  If you are responsive to your subscribers they will be responsive to you. How you segment your subscribers will change over time as you learn more about them.

Sending out email surveys are a good way of collecting additional information about your subscribers.   This information can be used in addition to your subscriber fields to put you in a better position to segment your subscribers.  When using subscription forms you should only ask for critical information.  If you make your subscription form too long you may be creating a barrier for people that would otherwise be interested in signing up to your list.

Including a short survey link in an autoresponder you send out after a subscriber joins your list is a great way of collecting non critical information that can be used to more effectively segment your list. You do not need to ask your subscribers everything you ever wanted to know about them in one survey either.   A short questionnaire with only one or two relevant questions can be very effective.  Your subscriber will be more willing to participate especially if you explain to them that you are asking these questions so that you can send them information that is more relevant to them.  You can then send them more short surveys from time to time in order to collect additional information so that you can continuously segment your subscribers.

Another option would be to send out a survey when a subscriber purchases a product from your website.  You can use this survey to gather preference or opinion data that can be used to better segment your subscriber list.   You can learn how they feel about a particular brand or technology.  These are meaningful segments that allow you to send more relevant messages.   Are your subscribers brand loyal or do they look for the best deal irrespective of brand.    Are they purchasing a camera because they are a photographer or is it only out of necessity for a special occasion?  You can set this up by redirecting your subscriber to a page containing a survey embedded in an iframe after they purchase a product.

You are asking your subscribers about their needs, preferences, and behavioral patterns as part of your market research.   Your survey should ask questions related to the marketplace and an industry rather than focusing on a business.   This information is a good predictor of your subscribers’ future behavior and will form the basis of how they are segmented for truly targeted email marketing.

Many business owners fail to realize what an excellent opportunity email marketing provides for developing lasting relationships with customers and potential customers who you meet offline. In much the same way that regular mailings can keep visitors coming back to your web site, they can also keep visitors coming back to your brick & mortar location. Regular e-mail contact with offline customers also provides all the other benefits of email marketing to online clients: increased brand recognition, improved familiarity and trust, and an opportunity for you to expand the perceived usefulness of your products and services.

There are a near infinite variety of ways in which you can recruit mailing list subscribers offline, and the ways that are appropriate for your business will depend on the opportunities for interacting with clients that your business normally affords you. For example, if you run a retail business, it is both simple and highly effective to simply place a signup sheet on the counter. An even better tactic is to ask each customer if they would like to sign up for your e-mail list as they are checking out.

If you work with clients over longer-term projects or in a business-to-business setting, there are even more strategies you can employ to encourage contacts to sign up for your mailing list. One very simple way to do this is to advertise your newsletter on your business card. Just a few words describing the information you provide in the mailings and a URL to sign up at will draw more subscribers than you might expect, and they will tend to be very high-quality and high-converting subscribers.

These days it is standard practice to send a follow-up e-mail to a new contact, and this is a perfect opportunity to mention your newsletter in a way that can come across as more helpful than self-promoting. You should also very seriously consider adding a small advertisement for your newsletter to your e-mail signature and also onto your letterhead and invoices. This way everyone you come in contact with in a professional capacity will become aware of the additional information that you provide, which in turn will keep them aware of your products and services.

Any event at which you are speaking or presenting information is also a fantastic opportunity to build up your mailing list. Let your audience know what you provide through the list and why it will be helpful to them. Then simply pass around a signup sheet or collect business cards for people that would like to subscribe. These are methods of generating highly qualified leads that will pay off greatly in the long term. Follow this link for more email marketing tips.

Many people find the idea of building up a mailing list quite daunting. However, when you have built a successful web site with a steady stream of visitors, it is much easier than you might imagine to convert those visitors into mailing list subscribers. You only need to understand the reasons why people are visiting your site to begin with, and offer your newsletter to them as a way to get more of what you already know they’re looking for.

This means tailoring the content of your content to the audience of your site. Of course, the content you’ll want to include will vary widely depending on the type of business you run. Whatever your type of business, try to make sure that your newsletters are not simply ads for your products and services. Make sure to include useful information that is relevant for your customers. Remember, the best way to sell a product to someone is to teach them how to use it.

In addition to this, you need to make sure that visitors know about your mailing list and can sign up easily. This is why so many site owners are experiencing excellent results with pop-up windows. You simply add a pop-up on your site that displays for new visitors or for visitors who have not signed up for your mailing list already, and include a sign-up form and just a line or two about why signing up would be a good idea for them.

A great way to improve your sign-up rate is to offer something special to your users who do subscribe. What you offer should depend on what type of product or service you provide, but might include a free report on some relevant topic, or even a free e-mail course sent out over the course of a week or a month. Offering discounts or time-limited specials for newsletter subscribers is another very effective way of enticing people to sign up and maintaining great relationships with the subscribers you already have.

Of course, you will want to make sure that a sign-up form for your mailing list is visible on every page of your website. This not only makes it easier for people to find the sign-up form if they are looking for it, but also helps to build familiarity with the idea of joining your mailing list. The more pages your visitor views, and the more times he or she sees the sign-up form, the more comfortable and positive they will feel about the idea of signing up for your newsletter. This will tend to increase your sign-ups across the board.

Finally, word of mouth advertising is always the most effective form of advertising, so make sure to include a “Forward To Friend” link in every e-mail. Of course your subscribers could simply hit the “forward” button in their e-mail client, but adding in a special link for this purpose serves two functions. First, it allows you to track how many people are forwarding the message along. And second, it provides a subtle reminder to the reader that the newsletter can and should be shared with others who may find it valuable.

One of the keys to success in e-mail marketing is to reduce the number of spam complaints that you receive. Spam complaints can hurt your sender reputation with your ISP or hosting provider. They can even cause you to be blacklisted and  prevent your messages from being delivered to millions of users of popular web e-mail providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail. In spite of these potentially very significant consequences, many businesses that rely on e-mail marketing as a major part of their advertising efforts fail to understand the steps that you can take to prevent spam complaints from being submitted. Consequently, they suffer from low email marketing delivery rates.

The first and most important step you can take is to include an unsubscribe link in every message. Beyond this, the unsubscribe link should be two things: obvious and painless. It may seem counter intuitive to place a large and readily apparent unsubscribe link in your messages, but the fact is that people who enjoy your messages will ignore it anyway, and people who want to unsubscribe will do so quietly without causing you any grief. You also want a completely painless unsubscribe process. Ideally, a single click and it’s all done. The less complicated or frustrating this process is, the fewer spam complaints you are likely to get.

Another thing to keep in mind when you are sending out mailings is that the large mail providers use system-wide filters. This means that if a certain number of Hotmail users flag your messages as spam, it becomes more likely that your messages will be automatically routed to Hotmail users’ spam boxes. Most people never check their spam box for legitimate mail they might have missed, so your mailings will simply never be seen. This is why it’s very important to make your messages appear as legitimate as possible to your recipients.

The simplest way to do this is to optimize your subject headings. Each message’s subject line should make it exactly clear what the message contains, and in a professional manner. For our own newsletter, for example, we start each message’s subject with the text “ActiveCampaign News:” followed by a description of the individual newsletter, such as “Products Updates & New Services.” This makes it clear that you are receiving a newsletter from ActiveCampaign, and makes the recipient aware of the message’s purpose right away. There is much less chance that this will be mistaken for spam than if the message were titled something like “Great New Products!”

You can also help people to recognize your messages by using clear and predictable sender information, such as your company name, e-mail list name, or personal name, depending on what subscribers to your particular list would be likely to expect. Our company newsletter is addressed from “Company Name, Inc.” and is sent from the e-mail address info@ourdomainname.com, exactly as one might expect. If you maintain a mailing list called the “Dog Breeding Newsletter,” you would probably be better off using the list name as a From header rather than “XYZ Kennel” or “xyzkennel@somedomain.com”

Finally, you can avert many problems by simply reading and promptly replying to any complaints are requests that you receive by e-mail. If someone writes to you to ask that they be unsubscribed, it will be much better to simply remove them from the list rather than send them an unsubscribe link. You may also be able to retain a reader who otherwise may have unsubscribed by responding to concerns about mailing frequency, content, or other issues that may arise. By being responsive to your readers, you will build up profitable long-term relationships and benefit from their word of mouth.

One of our favorite mail transfer agents that we suggest is Qmail.  We find Qmail to be significantly faster than Sendmail (in most default scenarios) and quite easy for our clients to manage and optimize.

While there are numerous things you can do to improve sending speed of Qmail – one of the easiest is to adjust your concurrency settings.

There are a couple setting files that you will want to take a look at.  if you do not have these files you can try to create them.

• /var/qmail/control/concurrencyremote
  Usually is a default around 10 or 20. We suggest to increase this to 250 or above if your memory can handle it.   This is the file that you want to adjust.

• /var/qmail/control/concurrencylocal
  Usually is a default around 20 or 30.  You can increase this to a higher number. Please note however – when sending lots of mail (to users outside of your server) concurrencyremote will be the file you want to change.

The files should simply contain the number you wish to have for that concurrency type.  After you change the files (or create the files) you MUST restart the Qmail service on your server.  If you want to see the current settings that your Qmail is using you can run # /var/qmail/bin/qmail-showctl

There is a hard limit that is set when Qmail is built – so you do not want to go crazy with your concurrency settings.  Often you can push the concurrency up to 500 and in some default setups of Qmail you can go up to 1,000.  You should ensure that you have the memory/ram to back up your settings though.  If you set your concurrency remote to several hundred be prepared for Qmail to start using up more memory as you send.

As with all server changes your results and performance will be heavilly affected by a combination of your settings, server resources, and other server settings that can affect your services.  I suggest to make minor changes and then monitor your sending speeds and adjust as needed.

Check here for more email marketing tips.