3:27 pm admin

IMPORTANT: Even if you're using a 3rd party service for email marketing, email blocks are still affecting your business.

If you're using the self-hosted email marketing solution, then it's important to understand email blocks and, consequently, what to do if your emails DO get blocked for any number of reasons.

This is also important because if you're ISP is blocked by Comcast, for instance, and you have customer support or regular email communications going out through your company email name (bob@CompanyDomainName.com), then NOBODY that you are emailing at a Comcast address is receiving your emails.

This includes customers, vendors, business partners, personal communications... anyone that has a Comcast address (in this example),

Needless to say, this can be frustrating at the least and costly in the bigger picture. Again, even if you're sending your marketing communications through a 3rd party company, it's important to be able to manage your deliverability from a customer service standpoint as well as an overall communication standpoint.

When you get blocked by an email provider (i.e. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), they will send a notification via a bounced message indicating what the problem is. As a result, you’ll be able to take the necessary action to clear up the problem.

You’ll almost never get blocked without getting some sort of notification from the provider, especially the large, reputable companies. Occasionally, some of the smaller companies may be somewhat more obscure, but you're mainly concerned about overall deliverability to the companies that have the majority of customers. You're probably not going to spend too much time trying to resolve an issue on ABC-ISP.com if you've got one subscriber.

It's important to pay attention to those "obscure" bounce messages that you receive (that most of us simply send to the trash because it's a bunch of gobbledygook!).

For example, if Yahoo sends back a bounce message to you letting you know you’ve been blocked for spam and you simply delete it, there’s nobody else that’s going to catch that for you and your emails won’t make it through to Yahoo recipients until you’ve resolved the issue.

The good news is that if you’re blocked from any ISP, they send a message back to you informing you that there’s a problem!

More good news is that if you are aware that there’s a problem, it can often be resolved in a matter of days provided you follow the steps and are running your email marketing properly, which we cover in great detail on this site and comprehensively in the Email Deliverability Bible!

In some cases, you can even resolve it within minutes if you know what to do and have access to the right tools to do so.

When it comes to managing this process, you ultimately have 2 choices:

1. Monitor it in-house
2. Outsource to a 3rd party

Author: Heather Seitz

Attention Readers, Publishers, Editors, Bloggers, and Marketers: You may republish or syndicate this article without any charge. The only thing I ask is that you keep the newsletters, article, or blog post exactly as it was written and formatted, with no changes. You must also include full publication attribution and back links as indicated.

This information has been provided by http://www.EmailDelivered.com and written by Heather Seitz. To find out more about email block notifications, visit http://www.emaildelivered.com/email-delivered/email-block-notifications/. Don’t forget to sign up for the EmailDelivered Pulse newsletter for articles, tips, and recommended resources related to email marketing and email deliverability.

 

January 27, 2011