With most ISP’s, you have to have established mailing history for at least 30 days before you can apply for a whitelist. During these 30 days, it is essential that you have feedback loops in place (if the ISP has them available) before you can apply. In this chapter, I will give you step-by-step instructions on how to apply for a whitelist with each ISP.

AOL

To get whitelisted with AOL, you must have had a feedback loop in place for at least 30 days before you can apply. After 30 days of building history while having a feedback loop in place, you are safe to apply. Please note: If you are denied whitelist status, you will have to wait at least another 30 days before you can reapply again.

Start the application by going here: http://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/whitelist_guides.html

1 – Check and click ‘accept guidelines’ at the bottom of the page.
2 – Enter a FBL email address. So if your domain is domain.com, you email address for feedback loop should be feedback@domain.com. Make sure you have access to this email address.
3 – Choose the email address you want to receive your confirmation in. You will have to check this email shortly to confirm your request.
4- Fill in all your information on the next page. Where asked ‘Please let us know what kind of mail is being sent from this IP:’ just enter that you are sending newsletters to your double-opt in members (which is what should be the case).
5- You’re done! You will receive a confirmation email to the email address you provided. MAKE SURE you click the link in that email to confirm in a timely manner. Failure to click the confirmation will make your request void. Once the email is confirmed, it should take 24-48 hours to hear the result. If you get denied for reasoning, they usually give you a reason and that reason usually has to do with high spam complaints. If you do get denied, you have to wait 30 days before you can reapply again.

YAHOO

Yahoo has been getting more difficult to get whitelisting status with lately, but once you have it, its usually yours to keep unless you do serious damage.

Fill out the form here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html

MSN

Chapter – Managing Your Reputation
Managing your reputation, controlling spam complaints and keeping up with whitelisting status is a full-time job on its own. As big of a hassle as this may seem, you have to be on top of this. Just because you have great deliverability one day, doesn’t mean you can relax and let your guard down. I have witnessed firsthand how a server was getting great deliverability one day and the next day the IP’s were blacklisted and the server went down resulting in nothing good!
Your reputation can be affected by many factors including:
- Sending too many emails or too often),
- High spam complaints.

Monitor spam complaints and check to see if your IP’s are on any blacklists.

Here are some sites where you can check the current reputation of your IP’s. It’s good to check the health of your IP’s ever so often. It’s important to remove this blocks as soon as you get them.

Spamhaus: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso
CBL Lookup: http://cbl.abuseat.org/lookup.cgi

Feedback loops are the very first thing you have to apply for before beginning any mailing to a new list or with a new server. Mailing to ISP’s that require feedback loops without having them in place will put you at risk of ruining your IP reputation. As a result of this, your mailings can be banned from getting into members inboxes of that IP. In this chapter, I’ll disclose how to establish feedback loops with each of the companies that have them available which includes AOL, Yahoo, MSN and Roadrunner.

AOL

Form can be found here: http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/fbl.pl

1- Enter a FBL email address. So if your domain is domain.com, you email address for feedback loop should be feedback@domain.com. Make sure you have access to this email address.
2 – Choose the email address you want to receive your confirmation in. You will have to check this email shortly to confirm your request.
3- Fill in all your information on the next page.

Form Guideline:
Name: Your name
Email: email address provided above (same as confirmation email)
Phone: your phone number
Domain: Same domain as feedback loop and associated IP
IP Addresses: Enter associated IP of domain and only that domain*

Additional information: These IP and Domain are the exclusive property of (company name).

4- You’re done! You will receive a confirmation email to the email address you provided. MAKE SURE you click the link in that email to confirm in a timely manner. Failure to click the confirmation will make your request void. Once the email is confirmed, it should take 24-48 hours to hear the result.

*Please note that you must submit a new form for EACH domain you have. You cannot submit one for 2 or more domains.

Yahoo

1- Create a yahoo email address dedicated for these feedback loops. (Make sure you activate it afterwards).
2- Go to the form: http://feedbackloop.yahoo.net/
Click ‘sign in through yahoo’ and log in with the yahoo account you created, and then hit ‘Agree.’
3- Enter the application information (domain, selector, feedback loop destination,
and confirmation email); this should be done for all IP’s all servers

Domain: domain.com
Selector: choose the “any selector” box i.e. “mail”
FBL address: feedback@domain.com
For confirmation: postmaster@domain.com
* Make sure to click on the approval (+) for each of domains.

MSN

MSN’s feedback loop system is called: MSN Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program. It is imperative to join this program before you send out any mail to MSN emails. Once you get blacklisted with MSN, it is difficult to go back and undo the damage.

1- Fill in the information requested on their site: https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts
2- For MSN you also need to provide proof that the IP belongs to YOU. To do this, your server/ISP needs to send MSN an email confirming this. The letter below is a sample of what can be sent to the ISP requesting documentation which they have to send to MSN directly.

To: support@serverprovidercompany.com
cc:
From:

Hi. I am contacting you since we purchased a server with you to fulfill the mailing requirements. We have just applied for the MSN Feedback Loop Program. However, in order for one to be enrolled in such a program, MSN requires a statement from the ISP acknowledging that we have exclusive sending rights over those IP’s. Otherwise we cannot get into the program.

MSN responded asking for you, the ISP for this server, to provide such a document. In this case, the required information would have to assert that [Client Company Name, or brand name] has exclusive sending rights over [Enter your IP’s] and that this is a dedicated server. In order to provide such a document, you would have to email it to JMRP@css.one.microsoft.com and “Cc” [same email address provided above]. Please put [Confirmation ID] as the subject line of the email. We appreciate and thank you for your help in advance and hope you can provide such documentation soon enough.

“How big is your list?” I always get asked by advertisers. I suppose it is a fair enough question to ask to get an idea of what kind of traffic your list can drive. However, I know of people mailing to a list containing millions, as well as people with a list containing a mere couple of thousand and the former is not necessarily the one who will get more opens, clicks, sales or whatever measure of success you use.

Targeting- Segment lists to get better results. The more you make a reader feel the message is made especially for them, the more likely and interested they will be in reading your messages. PERSONALIZE!

Cleaning and monitoring mailing lists – Make sure you are mailing to those who want to see your mailings. I always recommend removing people who haven’t opened your mailings in over 90 days. This will not only lower your mailing costs, but will also keep your IP reputation in a better place.

You hear the term ‘canspam compliant’ being thrown a lot around, but what exactly is it? Canspam laws are different in each country and provide an ethical code of honor to follow when composing and sending out your mailings.  If your emails are not compliant with these laws, you might find yourself facing some serious repercussions such as fines, ending up on blacklists, as well as having your server host company terminate your servers.

Some important can-spam laws:

- Optin data – Each person you email must have opt-ed in to received your emails…meaning they had to physically check a box that they agree to receiving your messages. If you are mailing to people who never opted to receive your emails, you can get into some trouble.

- Unsubscribe links – Each and every email you send must have two methods to unsubscribe. An unsubscribe link as well as a physical address a person can send mail to in order to be removed from your database. Also, unsubscribe requests should be honored within 10  days and preferably within 24 hours, if possible.

- Subject lines – Subject lines have to give people a clear idea of what your message contains and cannot be deceptive. For example, a subject line beginning with ‘re:’ is not allowed since you are clearly not replying to a mailing and this can deceive users to think it is some sort of a response.

After deciding on your subject line, the next step is your email body or what we call creative.

Some important points to keep in mind when working on your creative:

A.      Give incentive to readers

B.      Establishing recognition: Email branding – As I mentioned earlier, my favorite mode of creative is text within an html template. It is important for your users to recognize your emails. Branding each email you send out can get you some great results. Not only is the email more clean and professional looking, but readers will trust your content more if they know who its coming from.

C.      A/B Testing- When setting up an email campaign, it’s always good to do some testing. Certain creatives perform better than others, some subject lines generate more opens than others, etc. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, you have 3 types of creative: text, html and a combination of text within html. Play around with your email. For instance, if you’re going to try 2 different subject lines, keep the email body/creative constant and vice versa if you want to try out two different creatives. You have no idea how big of an impact one may have over the other. Monitoring and researching what your database responds to can help improve your metrics in future mailings.

D.      Subscriber options – Readers like to have options and control. Make sure your email has several actions for them to perform, for example: unsubscribe links, an option to forward the email to a friend, and links back to your site or to more content.

One of the most important things to consider in email marketing is how to structure your emails. I have been approached many times with this question: Do text or html creatives tend to perform better? The answer is: it varies. Both have its pros and cons to consider. Let’s deliberate on each of the two.

HTML:

- Pros: You can have words, symbols and phrases in an html email that would otherwise be picked up by ISP’s spam filters. For example, you have a high chance of ending up in the junk folder if you have a message body that says something like “Enter to get a FREE gift card worth $50.” With html, the text is masked.

- Cons: HTML creative is made up of multiple images. Too many images in an email can be flagged down for spam, or a particular URL link may be on a blacklist causing your whole email to be considered spam. Another negative is that html may not show up the same way in all email providers.

Text:

- Pros: The beauty of text creative is that it is most likely to appear in all emails, whether a user is checking his or her email in Outlook, in Gmail or on his mobile device.

- Cons: Spam filters can pick up on the words in a text email. Hence why all those vicodine, Viagra, etc emails end up in your mailbox.

My Pick: My favorite option is to do a combination of an html with freestanding text in it. One reason for this is if images are disabled, they will not show up in certain users ISP, they still see some part of the message (the text). Another reason why I like the combination, is because you can use a template with your brand (html) to bring about more brand awareness. The good part about being able to change the text within the html is that you can target better. For instance, you can have a template with your company’s logo and in the message body start out with “Dear (firstname),”

Important Note: See how your email looks in different inboxes of ISPs as well as on mobile devices. Every ISP reads emails differently. Your message may appear one way in Outlook, but a different way in Yahoo or hotmail. My suggestion is to create a ‘seed list’ for which you send your message to prior to launching to the full database. A seed list should contain one email address per IP. So you can make (yourcompanyname@aol.com), (yourcompanyname@Yahoo.com), (YourCompanyName@Gmail.com), and etc. You get the drift. I’m not saying you should do this for every single email you send out, but if you create a branded template that you are planning to reuse a lot, it might be a good idea to see how all your users view it.