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Red Door Interactive's Kelly Abbott tells you how to get around the IT team to test your website and how to make sure your emails aren't blacklisted.
iMedia Connection
Kelly Abbott
In a column I wrote last month, I described how marketing can go after the lowest hanging fruit in optimizing their websites without completely relying on IT to get it done.
This time, I'm going to look at tactics that are a little touchier. I'll give you the tools to help second-guess feedback you're getting from IT, and a few ways to determine the accuracy of their statements when you're not satisfied with the answers.
We all know that people can be volatile when shaken. So please handle these tips with care.
Scenario One: is something wrong with my site?
Your site's going down. You're losing customers. You are certain of this. But your IT department insists it that the site is performing just fine. You want to take matters into your own hands.
What you need is a third-party website monitoring service. What's that?
The best way I can describe a third-party website monitoring service is like this: imagine that you have 40 or 50 friends around the world on the internet 24 hours each day and going to your site every five minutes. Now, imagine that they will call you, email you and text you if they have any trouble getting your home page (or sub-pages) to load. Now imagine that the cost for having these friends is less than $100/month and it can be set up entirely over the phone.
It's nice to have friends.
You don't have to be a geek to validate whether or not your site is up 24 hours per day. All you have to do is Google "website monitoring" and you'll get plenty of options. There are free and for-pay services, with the level of detail provided contingent on the price.
What you want to make sure of is that the reporting features are geared to your level of understanding. Some services are geared toward IT professionals and assume that you already know what "ping" and "traceroute" mean. If I were in your shoes, I would spend the majority of my time looking at each provider to assess how intuitive their service console is and how idiot-proof their reports are.
I'm not saying that you're an idiot. Rather, I'm saying that your IT team will have no excuses when you put those idiot-proof reports in front of them as proof.
Scenario Two: what happened to my email open rates?
My email campaigns used to work quite well. But open rates are dismal all of the sudden. I am almost certain we got blacklisted.
Email is a tough business. You have to have thick skin and a strong gut to do it well. The reason is that email is, in a lot of ways, more personal than any other part of your internet presence.
Many people have their very identity revealed in their email address. We take that fact for granted. Because it is so personal, it is a great target for abuse.
Yes, I'm talking about spam. And if you're an ethical email marketer then you will want to make sure that your email is getting to its destination without unnecessary impediment.
The two biggest tips I can give you for sending bulk email are:
First, if you're not already doing so, contact a third party email provider and have them take over the delivery of your email. You can still do the creative in-house. But sending them via a third-party will help assure you're not spinning your wheels. A good third-party vendor has relationships with the major email providers (MSN, Google, AOL, and Yahoo!) and will allow you to piggy-back on their trusted relationships with those providers. They will also offer guaranteed performance and more bells and whistles than your IT can department could possibly hope to deliver.
Second, do periodic checks of your domain for blacklisting. Most corporate networks (i.e. those not accounted for by the major email providers listed above) use heuristics-based spam filters.
That is, they rely on rules of thumb that make assumptions about the content of your email based on things like font size, image content, text content and sender origination. Your bulk email provider will be able to help you with all of the above. But you will also want to make sure your domain, which they cannot validate, is not on any blacklist service that these spam filters use for reference.
In order to find a good bulk email provider, I suggest picking up a copy of a buyers guide like this one. (Editor's note: you can also check out iMedia's Resource Connection for email provider recommendations).
There are also plenty of free services out there, including this one from MX Toolbox. Click that link and you'll see how reddoor.biz fares on blacklists. Not too bad. And definitely good to know either way.
Armed with this knowledge, use it wisely. In the event that you need to take action on the information that you're uncovering, you'll necessarily be ruffling feathers. It'll be a battle.
That said, "have fun storming the castle!"
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