Tweet

Are Yahoo Hotmail and AOL Blocking Your Marketing Message

Written by: Sherice Jacob

Article Overview: If you run an e-mail marketing campaign or newsletter, chances are the majority of your subscribers are likely using Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL e-mail addresses. But did you know that these "Big Three" free e-mail providers could also not be delivering your mails to subscribers? Here's how to find out and make sure your message gets through.

Are Yahoo Hotmail and AOL Blocking Your Marketing Message

If you run an e-mail marketing campaign or newsletter, chances are the majority of your subscribers are likely using Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL e-mail addresses. But did you know that these "Big Three" free e-mail providers could also not be delivering your mails to subscribers? Here's how to find out and make sure your message gets through.

All major ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and free e-mail services like Hotmail use a set of criteria to check if you're sending spam (junk) mail - or if your message is legitimate. While the criteria differs between them, you can be sure that each one checks for the following:

1. A Recognizable "From" Name: This is the number one way your readers determine if they should even open your e-mail.

In this day and age, with viruses, spyware and other nasty programs being sent by e-mail, if someone doesn't recognize the sender's name, they'll delete it without even thinking.

The ISPs realize this and check to make sure the sender's name (or company name) appears on the outgoing newsletter.


2. Is it Relevant to the Audience? You can help ensure your readers don't mistakenly click the "This is Junk Mail" button when they download your message by writing a relevant and interesting subject line.

Yes, even though they've signed up to receive your message, a subscriber may consider your message spam and let their ISP or email provider know about it.

Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo all track how many times your subscribers have alerted them that your message is spam - so make sure your message is real and relevant - and not just a sales pitch every time.

3. Is the List Clean and Up-to-Date? If you don't clean your list often - removing e-mail addresses that no longer exist and removing subscribers that have chosen to unsubscribe - the ISPs know about it. The good news is that you can do this automatically - see below for details.

4. Are You Whitelisted? Many of the main internet providers offer a program that lets you notify them that you want to be "whitelisted" or known as a legitimate sender.

This kind of authentication helps you get on the internet providers "Good" list. To ensure your mails are authenticated, contact your mailing list management company or keep reading for the one we recommend - which will take care of this for you automatically.

5. Are Your Subscribers Verified? This is done through a process known as a double opt-in. What happens is that once a subscriber signs up for your e-mail list, they are sent a message with a link that they must click in order to "verify" that they want to receive your mails. They can still unsubscribe at any time.

Not going through this seemingly innocent "extra step" could put you in violation of the (ironically-named) U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.

To have most of these features automatically handled for you, we recommend signing up for a free autoresponder service such as aWeber, GetResponse or ConstantContact.

Using one of these e-mail marketing list services, you can be certain that your subscribers are fully verified and that your e-mails are completely authenticated with all major internet providers.

Related Articles
  Viral Marketing Explained
  Viral Marketing
  Viral Marketing – Give your Advertising a Life of its Own!
  Viral Marketing Overview
  Email Protection: As Important as Password Protection

Article Tags: aol, audience, checks, e mail addresses, e mail marketing, e mail providers, e mail services, email provider, free e mail, internet providers, internet service providers, isp, isps, junk mail, mail button, marketing campaign, subject line, subscriber, subscribers, time 3
Referred by: http://www.successful-realestateagent.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: Let’s talk about the ways of marketing your products, servic - I agree with some of the others who responded it depends on what your selling... but to answer your questions here are some of the methods I use. Forum Marketing Yahoo Answers (I need to use more of) SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Bum Marketing or Article marketing P-P-C (Pay Per Click) Marketing Online Directories Hope this helps.
Yahoo traffic - Hi Louis, Yahoo has been one nut that I've been trying to crack for a while. We rank very well in Google and get some MSN traffic but Yahoo does not send anything my way. I thought signing up for the paid directory would help but it has just been a waste of money to date. If anyone has had success with Yahoo and has a suggestion, let me know!
Re: Website Ranking #1 in all Search Engines - To get ranking on Yahoo and Bing you need to have correct Meta Tags as proper optimization is something Yahoo and Bing prefers. Apart from that try to create backward links from Yahoo answers, Wiki answers, Associated content, Flickr. Yahoo prefers these sites and even nofollow links.
Forums Speed Issues - If you've been on the forums in the past few days you may have noticed a significant lag in the time it took to load the posts. After checking the logs it seems that Yahoo!'s Slurp web crawler has been hammering my entire site (including the forums). It's great that Yahoo! is on the site but considering Google sends us over 80% of our traffic, it's not worth having the site performance go way down so Yahoo! can find more posts. Yahoo! suggests putting a delay on the queries it makes to your site so we've changed it to 30 seconds between Slurp requests. You can do this by editing your robots file. Ours now includes: User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 30 Thank you to everyone for your patience and hopefully this resolves the issue!
Yahoo keyword tool - Hi Benny, As far as I know Yahoo doesn't have a similar tool. The Overture system was based on Yahoo but they shut down their free tools. If you're targeting the North American market though, Google is the main game in town.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Four Secrets to Earning Income as an Author

What Makes an Extraordinary Business Consultant?

2011 Global Brand Trends Letter

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.