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By: Chris Lewis
When the first Arial Software products were create the database language of SQL was thought of to be too hard to use and just for programmers. Many of the database operations that were done using our program were simple field/column updates, like incrementing a number in a record if the email was sent. The program was set up so that the field to be updated was in a selection box and the only operation you could do is increment the field by one. This functionality still exists today even in version 11, but as many have seen this simple operation is not sufficient. Because of this we added the ability to run an SQL statement when an even happens in Campaign Enterprise, like when a record is sent, when an email is unsubscribed, or a click through occurs. This feature can be turned on in the administration area which then causes the program to show this new SQL statement box on each even configuration screen. Some have opted to, instead of incrementing a record, to insert a new record recording the event into a table that can be used for later reporting. And example of this, say for an unsubscribe operation would be: INSERT INTO tblUnsubscribes (CampaignID,UniqueID,EventDateTime) values ({CAMPAIGNID},{UNIQUEID},GetDate()); So, when a unsubscribe event happens for a particular email that was sent, this statement is sent to the database you are using and the values within the braces { } are replaced with real values. The resulting statement that is actually sent to your database would look like this: INSERT INTO tblUnsubscribes (CampaignID,UniqueID,EventDateTime) values (14,43456,GetDate()); After the operation is done, you will have a new record in the tblUnusubscribes table recording this event. This data can now be used for filtering and/or reporting purposes later. The advantage of this method is that it records the specific date and time of the event, and the data is separate from the original record. Using this method is required when the original data cannot be modified due to security or database structure. You can use any legal SQL statement you want for these events. You could opt to update a record instead of inserting, or you could run a stored procedure to trigger other events. More information is available on this subject on this website or by request.
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By: Chris Lewis
From time to time we get questions concerning email address verification. Though many SMTP servers allow the verification of email addresses there are probably just as many that don't allow it. So, email verification at it's best is about 50% accuracy using the method the internet RFC guru's designed. Thanks to SPAMers this built in verification system is not very usable, especially with the big email providers. Campaign Enterprise and Email Marketing Director do not have this email verification capability mainly because doing mass email verification can cause your SMTP server to become blacklisted. Many SPAMers use this technique with fabricated email lists in hope of getting valid email addresses (ie: jim@arialsoftware.com, dave@arialsoftware.com,...). So while it is an important thing to keep your list clean it should be done as if you were a normal one-at-a-time emailer that gets a bounce when the email is bad, then you don't send to it again. When you send out the first email campaign on a new list you will receive bounces if the email addresses are not valid. It is important to receive these emails and mark them as bounces to not send to them again. There are two reasons for this: First, you don't want your campaign to waste time sending to these addresses again. If your list is small, this may not matter, but if your list is big, or you are paying for each email sent out through a service, it is especially important. Second, if you keep sending emails that bounce your SMTP server will acquire a bad reputation will eventually get blacklisted. There are verifications services that specialize in the field of email list cleaning that have good internet reputations, are known for being good citizens of the internet, and are allowed mass verifications of lists. One of them we recommend is http://freshaddress.com. You send them a list and they will make sure each address is usable, and they also do other services like email forwarding if the email address has changed. If you use sending services like SMTP.C Taking the time or spending the money to get your list clean will have many benefits over the cost. If you try to save money here and do it marginally you may end up spending a great deal more in time and money trying to get your SMTP server off blacklists. By: Chris Lewis
When you send out an email and something goes wrong with it being delivered it is usually returned to you or "bounced". Bounced emails can happen for various reasons, some of them being permanent and some of them being temporary. Hard Bounces - Hard bounces happen when any of the SMTP servers down that the email address you used to send will just never work. One of the first reasons an email will not reach it's destination is that the domain name does not exist. The second reason is that the mailbox on the mail server for that domain just does not exist. Hard bounces are usually characterized by a 500-series error. When an email is returned with a 500 series error inside, Campaign Enterprise and Email Marketing Director will categorize these as hard bounces. Usually when a hard bounce like this occurs, you mark a hard bounce field in the corresponding database record, and then when you send using that list again you filter out any email records that have this hard bounce field marked. Since it is a permanent failure, there is no reason to try sending to that address again. Aside from other information you want to keep in that record, the email address is virtually useless. Soft Bounces - When a returned email not a 500-series return code, it is assumed to be a temporary or soft bounce. These types of bounces usually mean the domain is good and the email box is valid but for some reason the email server is not accepting any emails for this address at the present time. The reasons can range from the mail box is full, the server is too busy, or the person has marked his account as being on holiday. In the case of soft bounces, it is ok to try again the next time you send using that list. There will come a time though when maybe too many soft bounces really means a hard bounce...where an email box is always full (maybe not in use). In this case, you many not want to filter soft bounces out until a certain point, say, you get 20 soft bounces for that email address. In that case, you can filter the email list to exclude any records that have over 20 soft bounces. Now this is very arbitrary so you will have to set the number of times a record can soft bounce before you remove it from the list. Many times, sending emails to these addresses over and over is ok because the destination mail server does see the email box as valid, just not reachable, and that is not a bad mark on you. So, for many, they just worry about hard bounces because those are the ones they can get in trouble with concerning the big mail providers. I would recommend just ignoring the soft bounce recording but it is up to your companies conventions. BTW: Hotmail just got transformed to a new mail service called OUTLOOK.COM. We will be following this change to see how it affects our customer's deliver ability so check back over the next few weeks. By: Chris Lewis
Email bounces that occur when you send out email from any email software sending program can occur in two different way: An Error During Sending - During sending, if your SMTP server deems a certain email address as permanently undeliverable, then your SMTP server will return a 500-series error code which tells Campaign Enterprise or Email Marketing Director to hard bounce that email immediately. These kind of immediate hard bounces usually only occur for two reasons: The email address was malformed or the mail system you are sending through has "authority" over the domain of the email being sent and can just right on the spot if the email address is good or not. We see this happen a lot with Exchange servers where you both you the Exchange Server for receiving and sending emails. If your company domain is hosted on the Exchange server then the SMTP server of the Exchange server will only allow valid email addresses to be sent with those domains. Returned Email - This is the most common way bounces are recorded because most of the time your SMTP server does not have the immediate authority to say whether or not an email address is valid. In this scenario your SMTP server simply relays the email message you sent to the SMTP server that has authority for the domain (from the MX record). When your SMTP server is talking to the target SMTP server, the target SMTP server might say "that email box does not exist" which is a 500 series error. This triggers your SMTP server to send the email back to you (or your bounce account). This can take seconds to hours to happen. So, overall, bounces are somewhat difficult to deal with since they may happen from several different source, and since there is no standard for the formatting of bounces, it become the task of our software to decipher a bounced email which may have all or just part of the original message. In the next article, we will discuss the different ways to deal with the returned emails. By: Jim Kinkade
To keep email deliverability high, it is very important to be aware of the possibility of getting blacklisted. By following good email marketing practices and being diligent in keeping your list clean and up to date you can lessen the chance of getting on a blacklist. Being aware and understanding behaviors that can get you listed on a blacklist is the first step to getting your email into the inbox and out of the junk or bulk mail folder as well. Here are some things to consider when sending marketing email, if you want to stay in good standing, and off of the "spam cop" block lists. No email software program can keep your mail server and domain from getting blacklisted if you not following good practices. There are features built into our programs that will help you stay in compliance with the CAN SPAM law and even help with keeping on the good side of the "spam cops". But to really understand how this all works it is important to know that the CAN SPAM law and the spam cops are not the same thing. The CAN SPAM law is a US law and is a legal entity, non-compliance can get you fined or arrested, although this happens rarely and only when the offender is a true "spammer". Spam cops are more like self-appointed "cops" or vigilantes who watch and report behaviors that are considered to be "spam" like. Because so many ISP's use the information provided by the spam cops to police the emails coming into their servers; it is important, if not imperative, to comply with the "unwritten laws" of email. Complying with "best practices" as well as making sure you are complying with the actual CAN SPAM law is your best defense against getting blacklisted. We recommend using a "home grown" list, if possible, but renting and buying lists are also common practices. Renting or buying a list can pose problems. The quality of the list is the primary concern. Your list is only as good as the list broker who sells it. It is important if you ever rent or buy a list, that you ask certain questions of the broker. The best list is a list that you have compiled from customers either coming to you and making a purchase or at least signing up with you and requesting information. When someone makes a purchase or requests to be added to your list you will want to respond promptly. An email sent very soon after their request or purchase makes it less likely that they will forget your company or organization and possibly mark your message as spam as they delete it. Send them an email quickly so that it imprints with them that you are a known company, one that they want to receive information from. Also asking your customers to whitelist you or add you as a contact will help too. But in cases where you or your client wants to use a rented or purchased list these questions (at least) should be asked of the list broker before purchase of the list has been made. Even when the answers to these questions are positive, proceed slowly. That way if there is an issue you will know after sending 1000 emails rather than after sending 20,000.
Again, when configured properly our program can track hard bounces and mark them in the list so that you do not send to them again It is extremely important to track and filter out any hard bounces of your list. Hard bounces in your sent can hurt your deliverability. While this is not a law, it is one of the things the spam cops watch. Also the incoming mail servers look closely at your hard bounce rate, if they see a send coming from your mail servers with a high percentage of the emails being hard bounces (and that can be 10 % or less) they may look more closely at your message before delivering it, deliver it to the junk folder, or even not deliver it at all. Spam cops also track high hard bounce sends and having a lot of hard bounces in your send can get you into trouble with them. Our software does have the ability to throttle the sends (limit how many get sent to your server per hour). Sometimes sending very fast is not the best option There are times you may want to throttle your send, especially when sending to certain domains such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, AOL and many others. Targeted throttling for specific domains may be a function available on your SMTP server. One of the biggest factors in getting on a blacklist is the list you use. There are many things spam cops track with relation to your list. Is your list rented or purchased? That can count against you because when you use rented lists the receivers are more likely to mark your message as spam. If very many people do that, you can get blacklisted. If you list contains lots of older email addresses, that can get you into trouble because it will likely result in a higher hard bounce rate which spam cops also track. Also, if your list ever contains email address that have been "harvested", (and the spam cops have lots of traps out there to track that) you almost certainly will get blacklisted. And finally, if your list has people who are not opt-ins (asked for information from your company) they are more likely to mark your message as spam as they delete it and that is not good, the isp's track this and may report this to spam cops or are at least likely to send your message to the junk folder if they deliver it at all. Any mail server that has smtp enabled is fine to use with our software. Make sure that your client adds the mail server they are going to use to their domain registration, so that the reverse dns checks out. Many of our customers use either PowerMTA by Port 25, Ironport or Ispwitch for their mail servers. You are eligible for free upgrades when you maintain an active support plan. Updates are free whether you have support or not. To recap, Campaign Enterprise:
While Campaign Enterprise does contain a de-dupe (de-duplication) email address feature in the Datasource Tab when you edit a campaign, it’s best to take care of duplicate entries permanently on the source database table. Here is how to do that with Microsoft Access. You can use this query to delete records with duplicate email addresses, however, the Access table must have an autonumber type of field as the unique identifier. Here are the steps:
One of the biggest complaints about Campaign Enterprise is the fact that you must set up a separate bounce email account for every table or record set to which you are connected. If you have multiple campaigns pointing to the same table, you can configure one of your campaigns to process the bounces. Regardless of which campaign sent the email, that campaign can find the record in the table and update it accordingly. Should you connect to separate tables, managing bounces becomes more problematic and you have to have multiple campaigns monitoring multiple accounts, increasing the pop processing load.
Now, you can change all that in Campaign Enterprise Version 11. With the introduction of variable envelope return paths (VERPs) you only need one bounce email account to monitor all of your campaigns, regardless of the source table. Here is how it works:
Variable envelope return path (VERP) is a technique used by some electronic mailing list software to enable automatic detection and removal of undeliverable e-mail addresses. It works by using a different return path (also called "envelope sender") for each recipient of a message.
Any long-lived mailing list is going to eventually contain addresses that can't be reached. Addresses that were once valid can become unusable because the person receiving the mail there has switched to a different provider (possibly as a result of changing jobs or schools). In another scenario, the address may still exist but be abandoned, with unread mail accumulating until there is not enough room left to accept any more. When a message is sent to a mailing list, the mailing list software re-sends it to all of the addresses on the list. The presence of invalid addresses in the list results in bounce messages being sent to the owner of the list. If the mailing list is small, the owner can read the bounce messages and manually remove the invalid addresses from the list. With a larger mailing list, this is a tedious, unpleasant job, so it is desirable to automate the process. Unfortunately, most bounce messages have historically been designed to be read by human users, not automatically handled by software. They all convey the same basic idea (the message from X to Y could not be delivered because of reason Z) but with so many variations that it would be nearly impossible to write a program to reliably interpret the meaning of every bounce message. RFC 1894 (obsoleted by RFC 3464) defines a standard format to fix this problem, but support for the standard is far from universal. Microsoft Exchange can sometimes bounce a message without providing any indication of the address to which the original message was sent. When Exchange knows the intended recipient, but is not willing to accept email for him, it omits his address. If a message is sent to joe@example.com and the server knows that this is Joe User, it will bounce the message saying that the message to Joe User could not be delivered, leaving out the joe@example.com address altogether. VERP is the only viable way of being able to handle such bounces correctly. The hard part of bounce handling is matching up a bounce message with the undeliverable address which caused the bounce. If the mailing list software can see that a bounce resulted from an attempt to send a message to user@example.com then it doesn't need to understand the rest of the information in the bounce. It can simply count how many messages were recently sent to user@example.com, and how many bounces resulted, and if the proportion of bounced messages is too high, the address is removed from the list. While bounce message formats in general vary wildly, there is one aspect of a bounce message that is highly predictable: the address to which it will be sent. VERP takes full advantage of this. In a mailing list that uses VERP, a different sender address is used for each recipient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_envelope_return_path In previous versions of Campaign Enterprise, each subscriber list had to have its own POP or IMAP account to collect the bounced emails which could then be removed from that list. This was very inefficient and difficult to manage especially when using a lot of accounts. With the traditional method, the subscriber's email address is difficult to harvest from these emails, with about 70% accuracy at best. How To Implement Using VERPs, you can have one email account to handle all your bounce handling needs (if capacity is sufficient and your mail server allows variables). For the "bounced email address" setting on the Message tab in Campaign Enterprise you would entered something like this: Sales{VERPS}@arialsoftware.com When sending, this will case the Campaign Enterprise system to replace the {VERPS} merge field here with encoded information concerning the campaign and the unique ID used for the subscriber. The result may look like this: Sales--000120E0F14512@arialsoftware.com As you can see, this is not a very readable email address, but it is something you and the recipient never see and it has all the information the Campaign Enterprise system needs to be 100% accurate in remove the bounce. So, to use this new ability, you will need to create an email account that has a "catch-all" ability. The purpose of this type of account is so that any emails that come in to a certain domain that cannot be matched up to a specific POP account will be dropped into this "catch-all" account. For instances, say an address like johnsmith@arialsoftware.com did not have a pop account associated with it on the arialsoftware.com domain. Then this message would be dropped into the "catch-all" account. Some email systems will allow you to set up multiple "catch-all" accounts based on a wild card. For instance, you could create an account like john*@arialsoftware.com and any emails that did not have a specific POP account but started with John would be send to this pop account. On the Bounce tab in Campaign Enterprise, you will need to specify the POP account you have set up for bounces. You may only have already set up this bounce account for other campaigns so it will only be a matter of selected the account from the list. That's it! Now, one issue VERPs does not address is determining if a bounce is hard (500 series error) or soft (400 or less series error). What the current system does is examine the bounced email for any indications of error numbers, and if not found, then keywords are searched for. As stated above, formats for bounced emails vary wildly and as many formats as possible are examined. -- Arial Software |
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