Created by Mailchimp.com this eBook takes you through what you need to know to undertake a professional email marketing campaign. You don’t have to be a professional web designer to use this guide, but a little HTML knowledge will help. First, we’ll cover all the basics, like how HTML email works (and why it always seems to break when you try to send it yourself). Then we’ll get into the technical stuff, like how to design and code your HTML email. Finally, we’ll run through email-marketing best practices for list management, deliverability and measuring performance. (PDF file, 22 pages, 4,137 KB)

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Unformated preview of the document: 'A Field Guide to Email Marketing' (Part 14):

gimme every prospect you've ever
talked to, so I can blast our newsletter to them."
"But this list was really, really expensive."
A creative agency purchased a list of email addresses from a leading resource
for advertising professionals. The people in that list were members
who voluntarily submitted their contact information, just for networking
purposes. Not for receiving emails from third parties. By the way, this is
almost always the case when you buy email lists—those people never gave
their permission to have their info resold to you. Buyer beware. Anyway,
this creative agency used MailChimp to send a portfolio email to that list.
But one of the email addresses on that list was a sales@ address, which
means it got forwarded to every single sales employee at a pretty big,
well-known company. A pretty big, well-known anti-spam company, to
be exact. That customer was shut down immediately, and they got a very
good lecture. Fortunately, the leader of the anti-spam group forgave that
company, and we were able to reinstate their account. They learned their
lesson: Never send mass, unsolicited emails to a whole list.
"But I'm sending for the government."
We had an organization that basically published scientific research papers
online, into a searchable database. Where'd they get the research papers?
Apparently, from the U.S. government. So where'd they get their email
addresses? Apparently they were taking author names and guessing at
what their email addresses would be. They'd send emails like, "Congratulations,
Professor John Smith! We've published your research paper at
XYZ website!" Problem was, they sent to the wrong Professor John Smith.
Professors from universities all over America were reporting them to us for
spamming. Not sure how they did it, but we had to shut them down.
"They ordered something 10 years ago."
One of our users sent a software update email to his list of about 20,000
customers. These were people who had downloaded and purchased his
software. 10 years ago.
To his credit, he had a very good, "Hey, remember me, from 10 years
ago?" introduction paragraph, and he even merged in each recipient's
order information: Full name, how much they paid, order ID#, etc. He
really went all out with the details. Unfortunately, 10 years is a long time
to wait to send email updates. Almost none of those emails were even
valid anymore. And some had no doubt been converted into spam traps
(Microsoft does that with old, expired email addresses sometimes). As
soon as he sent his campaign, one of MailChimp's IPs got blacklisted
by Hotmail and MSN. We had to reroute outgoing emails from those IPs
and work with Microsoft to explain the situation. Luckily, the sender had
overwhelming evidence in his campaign that they were his customers,
and we got delisted.
"It came from my Outlook Address Book."
A nice woman from a small town in North Carolina sent out an email
campaign for her local beauty salon. It invited women to "come in and
get a manicure." After she sent her campaign, we got an email from a
very, very angry man about how "this woman is using MailChimp to spam
me." We investigated the man's email domain, and noticed it was from
an ISP located in the same small town as the sender. That's too much
of a coincidence for us. We asked him, "any chance your wife signed
up for this newsletter?" Nope. No wife. No kids. And nobody who would
ever have access to his computer. "She obviously purchased an email list
from somewhere," he said. Now, if some local business owner sends an
email to 3,000,000 recipients, that idiot bought a list. But this woman
sent to a couple dozen people, with no other complaints. Hmm. He also
tells us that his email address has been dormant for years, and he was
shocked to even be receiving any messages to it. After many hours of
back-and-forth conversations with the sender and the complainer, we
figured it out. She dumped her entire Outlook Address book into her
email list. She figured the only people in her address book were her clients,
since that was her business computer. So how did he end up in her
address book? He used to be the tech-support admin for her ISP, before
they were bought out by a bigger ISP. You really shouldn't dump contacts
from your address book into a newsletter list. Those people might be

Unformated preview of the document: 'A Field Guide to Email Marketing':  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19