Email Campaign Timing

Did you know that the timing of your email campaign has a big difference on how the emails are viewed? Depending on the audience you are reaching, you should time sending your email campaigns when you feel that the recipients are on the computer. When a user first logs onto his computer and checks email they will get a list of emails since the last time they were on. Usually they view the emails from the most recent emails to the oldest. If your email is one of the oldest n the list the user may have already grown tired of reading emails and may just glance over yours. There are exceptions, but if your recipients are business oriented, try sending your campaign just after noon, and if they are mostly home users, send them just after they get home from work. With varied time zones and sending speed it may be hard to time exactly but these are just general rules to more effective email campaigns.

If you have any questions on this subject please email us at sales@arialsoftware.com

Campaign Enterprise is a scaleable enterprise-level email distribution system that runs on your own in-house computers connecting directly to your database or CRM in real-time, and using your own mail server. Visit http://www.arialsoftware.com for more information.

Blacklisting

Here are Arial we get many instances where clients send email perfectly for long time and then bamm! things start falling apart. Many times a software is, like ours, is blamed for the issues because it is a logical thing to look at first. The truth of the matter is that Campaign Enterprise, Email Marketing Director, or any other emailing software does not change...but the circumstances around it do. Sometimes a dreaded OS update happens overnight and introduce new "support files" that your emailing software requires that causes a difference in functionality than before. You might have a corruption of some of the email software files, but this is rare.

The #1 culprit of these "it just started happening" scenarios is Blacklisting. The internet is a dynamic place. New technologies to protect the general public from SPAMers, Phishers and the like come online unknowingly and what was working great before all of a sudden just falls apart. Email distribution management is not a noun but a verb. It is an active thing that requires monitoring and maintenance. Part of your maintenance schedule to make sure everything is working well should include a scan to see if your SMTP server system is on any blacklists. We recommend using a website called http://mxtoolbox.com. With using this website, you can find out in an instant if you are being blacklisted by many blacklist sites. It only take a few problems with your SMTP server or a few complaints from cranky recipients to be blacklisted so check it at least weekly or before you send out any major email blasts.

As email distribution professionals, we need to play by the rules and be good internet citizens even if the rules changes. Remember, it is not IF the rules change, it is WHEN, so stay diligent.

Also, with visiting a free analysis tool like MXToolBox, be sure to visit a few of their advertiser and support their effort.

If you have any questions on this subject please email us at sales@arialsoftware.com

Campaign Enterprise is a scaleable enterprise-level email distribution system that runs on your own in-house computers connecting directly to your database or CRM in real-time, and using your own mail server. Visit http://www.arialsoftware.com for more information.

Images in Email: Embedded vs. Referenced

One of the greatest things about email is that you can present your information to a targeted audience and you can spend time on making the emails attractive enough to capture attention. One of the elements in these email is graphics, and these elements can be an awesome addition or they can be the death of your email. As in all things, there is a balance, and we will discuss some of them.

Number of Images - When embedding images, each image in the email becomes an attachment to the email. Because of this, each email will have to be read from the disk, encoded, then appended onto the email message and this adds to the email's overall size too. If you have 10 images, then it has to do this 10 times. I have seen some emails with 100 embedded images in them. Creating the email with lots of embedded images is one thing, but the people receiving the emails will have to able to read them too and they might have limitations themselves. I tell people if you start exceeding 20 embedded images in emails then you are pushing it. Yes, the technology at both ends will handle it, but it is a matter of practicality.

Size of Images - We have had some clients call and say their emails are going out so slow. After analyzing it we will find they included a single embedded image that was 4 megabytes. Now it is possible to send and receive this size of email, but as the email size goes up, the amount of time its takes to send increases too. Other things to consider is the recipient's email system may reject these email sizes, or the recipient may still be on a dial-up or slow DSL and will not appreciate your email taking 30 minutes to load. This is a huge consideration especially for international email lists. So, consider this, you may have an image that is 4 megabytes because it is super high resolution. For an email, you are not going to need that resolution or size, so open the image in an image editor and reduce its size so it fits in the email space nicely. You will find these images will reduce in the the 10-90KB range and now that is a good size to send.

All Email Clients Not Created Equal - There are several email clients that will just not show embedded images. May portable devices are like that. When you create your email, test it will several different email clients like gmail, yahoo, and hotmail. Also, check portable devices like Androids, iPhones, and iPad to make sure the email looks like you intended.

Having to post images to website- An alternative to embedding images it to post the images to a website somewhere and reference these images in the email. The advantages to this is that your email is very small and will deliver quickly. Images from webservers load very quickly, much faster than an email system. The disadvantages of this is that your email is not a complete unit on it's own and the recipient will have to be on the internet to see the entire content of the message. This is usually not a problem though because you are usually on the internet when reading email anyway. Also, you will have to coordinate the availability of the images being on the website for the email's use.

If you have any questions on this subject please email us at sales@arialsoftware.com

Campaign Enterprise is a scaleable enterprise-level email distribution system that runs on your own in-house computers connecting directly to your database or CRM in real-time, and using your own mail server. Visit http://www.arialsoftware.com for more information.