Bronto Blog

Almost a year ago, I blogged about Bacn - “email that you want, just not right now.”  The determination of whether or not something is considered bacn is made at the individual (user/consumer/subscriber) level. The consumer chooses to delete, ignore, or mark that “irrelevant” email as spam.

However, often an email can land in the junk folder without the individual doing anything at all. As marketers, this can be very frustrating. Sometimes marketers send out “the perfect email” and it still lands in the bulk folder. Recently, a Bronto Blog subscriber posted an “Ask the Expert” question (abridged version below):

“I have just coded my first HTML email…but when I tested it on Outlook 2007 on a computer in my office, it went straight to the junk folder, stripped to plain text, etc…I read somewhere that if there are links to too many different URL’s it can be interpreted as spam. How many is too many? What other filter criteria might be affecting my email? I was careful not to include “spammy” language.”

That brings us to the $1,000,000 question:

Why do “good” emails sometimes get marked as “bad?” Read the rest of this entry »

Bronto recently gave the old blog a facelift. One of the new features we added was a left navigation bar that included an “Ask the Expert” section (look to your left). Over the past two months, we’ve received many inquiries. Occasionally, we’ll pick one of the questions and dedicate a short blog post to answer it. Today is one such occasion.

An excerpt from a recent “Ask the Expert” question:

“How does this rate compare with that of my peers?”

The short answer is, “It depends.” When I provide clients with this answer, I pause, count to 3 in my head, and wait for their reply. It usually goes something like this: “Yeah, but…I mean…what are the averages?”

So, why does it depend?
Let’s say that your organization sends out 3 distinct campaigns per month (promotional, informational, educational). Would you expect the metrics to be the same for the 3 communications? What if they were targeted to 3 diverse demographic groups? Each message has a different goal, with different expectations; therefore, it’s unreasonable to assume that the metrics will be the same.

Read the rest of this entry »