Email Lists

Options for sending bulk email to your users

[GoNC]

We recently partnered with a message board site that had closed down a year or so ago, but they still had the email list of their old subscribers.

After we rebuilt the site and re-launched it, we used Vertical Response to send an email to let them know that the site was back online. The list had roughly 3,500 addresses.

I made a point not to use ANY links in the email, other than the one that they stick in the "unsubscribe" message in the footer. I sent it in plain text, and only referred to the site by name, not by link (eg, WebmasterWorld.com instead of http://www.webmasterworld.com ).

Even so, when the email came to my Gmail address, it was filtered as spam. And even though we sent to 3,500 emails (with bounces in the low double-digits), we only had 60 new site visitors. This makes me strongly suspect that the wide majority of the emails filtered it as spam, even though it wasn't.

Can you guys suggest a better option for sending out this announcement?

[edited by: phranque at 10:24 am (utc) on Jan 9, 2014]
[edit reason] unlinked url for clarity [/edit]

[piatkow]

Gmail bounced or went to the junk mail folder?

The major webmail providers have very agressive filtering and false positives are a regular problem. One hosting provider had a lot of very upset customers in 2012 when Yahoo didn't deliver the announcement of a critical ToS change even though their regular newsletters went through OK.

There are all sorts of issues depending on exactly how the email was configured and sent. Also how many of those subscribers were active in the board's last days? I must say that if you had posted before doing this I would have guessed at a sub 5% success rate.

[GoNC]

As far as I can tell, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Embarq (my home internet provider) all filtered it as spam. Very few bounces (around 28), just filtered.

Vertical Response has a system that any time you make a link in the email, it changes it to have their tracking code, and I thought that would be the spam trigger. Like:

<a href="http://cts.vresp.com/u?123456789/abcdefghi/jklmno">http://www.webmasterworld.com</a>

But I avoided links entirely for this email, and it still triggered :-(

I suspect that the required CAN-SPAM message at the bottom must have been the trigger. Which is ironic; you try to obey the laws, and you're punished, but if I HADN'T done that, it might have gone through.

Here was the CAN-SPAM message I used:

****

This is a one-time announcement, but if you would like to be
permanently removed from our list then simply reply with "Remove Me" in the subject line, or click on the following link:

<a href="http://cts.vresp.com/u?123456789/abcdefghi/jklmno">http://cts.vresp.com/u?123456789/abcdefghi/jklmno</a>

****

(Note that the link isn't disguised)

The list I used, though, was for people that had made 2 or more posts in the last 6 months. So, active, but not necessarily super-users.