First up is my WordPress, Website Security and Email Delivery site.

https://plus.google.com/b/113198487085205492763/

While I love G+ biz pages, I am looking forward to better marketing tools soon.

Cool page, but how do I convert followers there to where I really want to drive my traffic which is here?

http://emaildeliveryjedi.com/ … ?

There really needs to be some better conversion tools for these pages, don’t you think?

I do a lot of local speaking here in Phoenix where we have decided to settle for now.

So I get a lot of email from the MeetUp groups I participate in. But today one of my favorite MeetUps just really demonstrated with is wrong with most small emailers and I just have to share that with you for your own good.

If you are in the Phoenix area I highly recommend Club Entrepreneur. It is a great home for networking, the main floor holds up to 150 seats for public speaking, conference rooms and office space abounds as well. This is a great entrepreneurial setting for any business.

What they lack are Internet Marketing skills.

So here is the list of their mistakes. Are you making these bad moves too?

• Putting HTML in the text box…
• Putting text in the HTML box…
• Using a free email address in the from field
• Sending email from a social site that gets filtered easily
• Creating multiple social groups and double emailing
• Using digest emails with little focus
• All of the Above…

Here’s the details of the mistakes made by my friends at Club E (short for Club Entrepreneur).

Putting text in the HTML box…

I see major Internet marketers make this mistake all the time. In AWeber in the broadcast and the autoresponder interface there are two textareas that you can enter text in.

One is designated HTML and one is designated text. The HTML box is at the top of the AWeber interface, the text box is below that. Do not accidentally enter plain text in the HTML box by mistake. Your links will not be clickable in Outlook or other email clients as in my Outlook screen shot below.

You may not be catching this mistake if you are sending test emails to a web mail or free email browser account.

Solution: Always test your emails first both in a web client and always in Outlook.

Click image to see full size.

Using a free email address in the from field

It is the reply to field that is the problem here. Free email addresses set off spam filters, proven fact.

Set all your email distribution settings to the main account on your domain. That way you can set all accounts to one reply to address and control where replies are going to. Don’t spray replies to your emails all over the web on free accounts. You email replies are your best source of feedback, sales, clients and return traffic.

Either that or use the default for a social site like MeetUp, so the reply address is their domain. Never ever use a free email address as the reply to or from field. Why? Because it is what spammers do. Look at any spam you receive and it will almost always come from a free email address in the from field and or the reply to address.

Click image to see full size.

Sending email from a social site that gets filtered easily

Most users manage their lists thru MeetUp.com. The bad news is that most groups manage their email lists thru MeetUp.com. Tons of spam posts get posted to MeetUp boards and the default settings on any MeetUp group sends and email to the group members. So, I am guessing that the spam button gets clicked a lot.

Solution: Get members of MeetUp into your main site’s autoresponder. Howie Schwartz said it first and best: “Drag your followers on the social site out and into your own autoresponder”…

Creating multiple social groups and double mailing

My Friends at Club E have two different MeetUp groups. That means to mail all the members they have to double email. That creates confusion and double mailings at the members inbox many times within minutes of each other. Bad idea, avoid this at all costs.

Solution: Mail well in advance, and if you have multiple groups don’t mail them all on the same day within a few minutes of each other. Craft unique emails for each group and for your list.

Using digest emails dilutes the focus and lessens return

Lastly, if you look at the emails above, they are digest emails. Digest emails suck when it comes to getting your subscribers to do what you want. In fact, digest emails cause confusion, get caught in filters because spam many times has tons of links and usually perform poorly.

I suggest sending digest emails on the front end if you must, then send follow up emails that are focused on one action you want the members of your list to take.

All of the Above…

Let’s hope you are not making these kind of errors in your email marketing. If you are then you really need to learn how to “Get It To The Inbox” now more then ever.

What do you think? Tell us!

Let me know in the comments below. I want to hear from you, your best practices and what has failed and what has succeeded for you in the comments section below.

Links to your creatives are welcome below. Don’t be shy!

In a further effort to help legitimate businesses, here is how you can tell you have a Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 blocking your site issue.

I am going to do a series of articles on exact terms that someone that was in my position with a anti virus false positive phishing entry so you can hopefully find this article and begin to clear your name.

This is about the only way you will be able to tell that an anti virus is blocking your site. The real problem occurs when your listing in the AV database spreads to other major networks.

Google Analytics Saved my Butt

You can tell that Internet Explorer is blocking your site if you have goal conversions set up in Google analytics. Check to see if you are selling any products to visitors using Internet Explorer 7.

If you have some type of block in a database it will be possibly consumed by the IE 7 anti phishing filter database and you will have almost 0 sales occurring in Internet Explorer. At the same time you will have a way higher sales success rate in Firefox.

That is the only thing that saved me was finding that FF had a 14% sales success rate and IE had a 0.26% rate.

This is not guessing on my part. This is the findings of the Trend Micro investigation.

Sudden drops in newsletter subscribe rates, abandoned payments, email click thru rates and sales in general are all indicative of this kind of blocking.

The only reason I got a few emails delivered was that I was highly whitelisted in Gmail due to my Google social network friends list.

Please tell anyone you know to look into this so that this does not happen to them. If I can help anyone do not hesitate to call me.

Still alive and kicking,
- Chris Lang

Yes you really can be clicking the “This is Spam” button on yourself. It happens quite easily and you may have already done this yourself.

The problem is that an automated spam filter is simply unable to determine what is spam and what is a forward. Here’s a break down of the problem using Comcast as an example.

You setup an auto forwarder from your domain to your Comcast email account. This also occurs often when you forward email from your work email account.

You are forwarding mail from you@yourdomain.com to you@Comcast.com.

When your customers send emails to you@yourdomain.com the email gets forwarded to you@Comcast.com

One day you receive some spam at you@yourdomain.com, which was auto forwarded directly from you@Comcast.com.

You open your you@Comcast.com mail box and see the spam, so you click to “Mark it as SPAM” and add it to your Comcast spam filter . You have just entered a spam complaint against your own email server! Comcast’s spam filter does not register the originator of the email as the spammer – instead, it registers the last place the email came from as the Spammer and in this case and the last place the email came from is your email server which is the outgoing email server for hosts you@yourdomain.com.

Comcast will then blacklist the entire mail server so that no one can send email to any Comcast email accounts.

They will then contact your host and ask that your domain be deleted.

Until then Comcast will block all email from the outgoing SMTP servers associated with your server (thru reverse DNS).

Solution

What do I need to do you ask?

You need to login to your email admin on your domain and go through your email accounts and take off any forwarding that forwards email to any account or any other ISP.

Also check to make sure your email Alias is not forwarding to any email account or any other ISP.

Although it might be an inconvenience to many, I think this decision is necessary to protect our mail servers from being blacklisted by ISPs in this way.

Verizon, Comcast or AOL certainly do nothing to investigate the source of the spam and would rather shut down a server than take a minute to check it out.

Please note, this does not mean you cannot send emails to Verizon, Comcast, AOL or other ISP based email accounts. This simply means you should not set your email account to auto forward emails. You will still be able to compose your own email to ISP users, and you will be able to forward an email to those users from your mailbox manually.