Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Best practices for Gmail’s new and improved email filters

Posted by Unknown at 1:25 pm Labels: , , , , ,
Having had a rude awakening during the past three weeks, email newsletter marketers have seen the effects of Gmail implementing its new, stricter rules for spam identification.

Their latest effort in the battle against bad-mail has already caused much frustration amongst users and may show greater challenges ahead in the effort to ensure reliable email deliverability. With significantly more severe screening measures, suddenly you are going to see a larger percentage of sends canned as spam than ever before

In an attempt to appease users and lower complaint levels; Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo have all been amping-up their algorithms recently. Unless you are spam-agnostic and couldn't care less, it's probable that their overbearing approach is having an undesired effect on your email newsletter marketing campaign.
Life would be much easier if the Gmail techs were to change their algorithm to tip the balance in a more email friendly direction, since it would be considerably less effort to flag the occasional spam emails dropping into our inbox rather than needing to sift through lists of questionable messages to find the important ones. Anyone who has ever used bulk email marketing will know that spam filtering is not simple and the same is true for being filter-conscious while creating a campaign.

Mainly taking into account areas relating to ISP reputation, the new security protocols place an extreme amount of focus on content. Thereby seeking to stop senders from recycling the precise same copy to large volumes of recipients. But that's what we've always been saying; it’s a good habit to customise your content and provide several versions of the same text to begin with, and now things are changing so that your deliverability could be riding on this.

As for those on the receiving end, there's no escaping that you will now need to more routinely run through their spam folder to find the info that they care about seeing, but that may have overshot their inbox. The extra email house-keeping might become a big point of contention for users, the advantage for direct email marketers is that those who publish, quality content, uniquely written, will make it to the trusted sender zone. Having tighter filters means that fewer potential email marketing competitors will be sharing the same attention-space and that customers can afford to take that little extra time in examining your emails, giving you better influence.

“All big ESPs are now including reputation filters. This is not limited to sending IP and sending domain reputation. From address (friendly from) and from domain reputation is also becoming a very important factor in getting your mail out to your recipients.” - Shaun Swanepoel, GraphicMail Network Administrator

Making use of a reputable ESP and simply not spamming is, as always, the best advice for working around filters
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Thursday, 7 April 2011

It will take more than a spoon to crack this egg!

Posted by Unknown at 10:20 am Labels: , ,
Whether you’ve had your Paypal abused, credit details stolen, logged into Facebook only to see a few naughty statements made in your name or whether you’ve electronically been pronounced dead sixteen times - we’ve all been touched by cybercrime.

We hear about it all the time: Online retailer Play.com recently reported that some of their customers’ personal data may have been compromised, and that their users might be sent spam e-mails containing harmful links. TripAdvisor users’ email accounts have been hacked in to during March. Millions of people were at an increased risk of email phishing after a giant security breach at Epsilon, which is having an effect on some of the USA’s largest concerns, such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Walgreens.

Our lives are becoming entwined with technology. Often we are forfeiting security and placing our privacy in jeopardy, all for the sake of speed and convenience. Electronic villains have had a rampant turkey-shoot at online users, almost nearly all the way back to the days of the abacus.

As long as there is a channel and a means, there will always be a certain amount of associated illicit behaviour: more or less guaranteeing that your granny will consistently be on the back foot, shielding her life savings from a kid learning how to hack mailing lists from knitting sites out of his room in Vodka-oozing Vladivostok.

But some brave companies are standing strong. GraphicMail, a web-hosted self-service email marketing provider dedicated to helping small businesses and organizations, has tightened its security once again, after serious new breaches in the email industry. The first quarter of 2011 has seen a surge of severe electronic security breaches via email marketing, and only the best measurements possible will stave off these consumer assaults.

With an infrastructure that is designed to protect clients’ sensitive personal data, all efforts are made to ensure that no person or entity other than the owner of the data can access it.

Speaking passionately about this cringing subject, Ernie Retief, CTO at GraphicMail says: “By using SQL server security together with IP restricted access, our data is secure. What this means is even if you have all the information about our setup, with all the database passwords, you won’t have access if you’re not on the correct IP address. “

This is accomplished by their top of the range Cisco routers and firewalls. Cisco is the industry leader in network speed, security and reliability. So all the holes are covered by Cisco-certified superheroes.

CTO Ernie elaborates: “Our application is also written with malicious attacks in mind. We use external companies to conduct monthly attacks on our code to look for any loopholes. We also undergo a network audit every few months to make sure our security is in order.”
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Thursday, 24 February 2011

GraphicMail exhibits at the TFM&A event 2011

Posted by Unknown at 10:24 am Labels:

GraphicMail will be exhibiting at this years TFM&A in Earls Court London.
TFM&A is the UK's only truly integrated marketing, and advertising, event, with an attendance of over 10,000 (ABC Audited).
TFM&A delivers the latest industry insight, trends and developments as well as leading suppliers of digital, direct, data and CRM solutions. Add to this, unrivalled networking opportunities for marketing, advertising & media professionals
GraphicMail is the main sponsor of the Exhibition guide and can be found on Stand F18
If you are in the area why not pop in and put a face to the username!
PLEASE NOTE: 
Due to exhibiting at TFM&A support will be running on skeleton staff from Monday 28th Feb to Friday 4th. Emails sent to support will be answered within the usual 24 hours during this period however telephone and the live support chat will be unfortunately unavailable
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause
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Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Who “likes” your email-marketing newsletter?

Posted by Unknown at 11:04 am Labels: , ,
We’re making it possible!

Who “likes” your email-marketing newsletter?
We’ve now made it possible for you to insert a “like” button in the header of your email newsletter.  So now, when one of your readers clicks on the displayed button, your newsletter will automatically appear in their Facebook news feed – which will tell all their friends that they “liked” it too!  And because (of course), their friends will also be able to click on the link and read your newsletter, you achieve the perfect addition to ( or the first step on the ladder to ) your viral marketing campaign - and your email marketing.

You’ll find this in your account under >> Setup and Options located in the  >> Header/footer settings.
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Monday, 13 December 2010

Synchronise between your Outlook contacts with your GraphicMail account

Posted by Unknown at 11:06 am Labels: , , ,
Check out our new plug-in ! See how easy you can synchronise your GraphicMail contacts with your Outlook mailing lists and vice versa. 

How does it work ?
When you add a new contact or edit an existing one in Outlook or your Graphicmail Account, the other will be automatically updated to reflect the same changes.  ( You will be able to synchronise all of your contacts in one sweep, but remember that recipients have to opt in to your email marketing emails, so it’s important to keep a separate email marketing contact list as well as your general contact list in Outlook.)

So, if you’ve been using Outlook to do your email marketing and you’ve decided to sign up with GraphicMail to achieve a more professional approach with your email campaigns, you can now convert your existing list into your GraphicMail account very easily, with no need to do it manually. 

What do I need to do?
Because it works just like any other program on Windows XP/Vista or Windows 7, downloading and installing the plug-in is simple -and it can synchronise with Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010. You can download the plug-in from http://www.graphicmail.co.uk/downloads/outlooksync.zip

If this weren’t enough excitement for one email…….. you can also synchronise your Gmail or Hotmail contacts to your GraphicMail account.
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Tuesday, 23 November 2010

New Addressbook arriving on 25th November

Posted by Unknown at 11:09 am Labels: , ,
It may be thanksgiving in America on 25th November but we are hoping you'll also be thankful for our changes to the Addressbook that are due to go live on the same day.

With all the lists, datasets, addressbooks, contacts, records, segmentation etc it may be that it all gets confusing and some may lose track of what does what and where to upload what, where and how - and what is the difference between a mailing list and a dataset anyway??

Well we've decided to simplify the whole process and improve the look, feel and navigation of the addressbook
 

So what have we done? In a nutshell we have simplified the way that the Mailing list and address books work. We've combined them both into one section within your account. This new section will be called "Lists and Contact" and you will be able to manage all you mailing lists and subscriber details from this single section within your account

We've also added a default dataset that will be extremely easy to use and will be pre-populated with the most commonly used fields, like Name, Job title, company etc. However if you are one of many advanced users you will still have the ability to tailor-make one or more datasets to your specific needs.

Why have we done it? To make it easier to mange, manipulate and navigate all your lists and contacts
What does it all mean? Mailing lists + address Book = "Lists and Contacts"
What do I need to do? Nothing!
When will I see these changes? Thursday 25th November
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Nobody likes receiving Spam - especially at Christmas! Here's a gift from GraphicMail - Email Christmas templates and free credits

Posted by Unknown at 11:08 am Labels: , , , ,
Jeff realized the hard way that he should have gone with GraphicMail

Ready to unwrap?

Grab the sensational images!

Our designer Elves have been busy again in the run up to this Festive season and have created a complementary template especially for our GraphicMail clients.  What could be better than a free template? The fact that it also comes with a range of custom images.  So, you select the template and then get to choose which of our seasonal images you’d like to insert in the image placeholders.  You can take a sneaky peek at all the available images here.
Simply copy the code or the URL of the image and insert it into the template.  How simple is that?.

If you are a new user of GraphicMail we'd like to give you a little something special this festive season, Sorry there's no virtual mince pies and sherry but how about...

Double credits this season!

GraphicMail trial users get double credits if they upgrade to a subscription account by 24 December 2010.*  So if you are considering signing up with one of the World's Leading newsletter software packages now is the time to do it! Check out our subscription options and low cost pricing.

*This offer is not valid for trial users who sign up to a Reseller or Corporate account and only valid when paid by credit card.
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