How to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails

How to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails? This is a question you asked yourself for sure. Well, welcome to the world of email marketing.

When launching MaxBulk Mailer you have seen that all you get is a blank document created automatically for you by the application, the place where your message is supposed to be composed.

I guess that at this very early stage you may feel a bit lost or overcome, especially when it comes to filling up that blank document and creating an e-mail marketing message for the very first time.

In this short tutorial, I will try to explain, in layman terms, how to pass this stage successfully and how to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails, like the one below, with MaxBulk Mailer.

With MaxBulk Mailer, you can actually send the same kind of messages you already receive from your favorite online shops and services. However you may send beautiful flyers or really ugly stuff, you are the designer, you are in charge, MaxBulk Mailer doesn’t care, it will send it anyway!

Above all MaxBulk Mailer is a bulk email software, its goal is to deliver your message to your subscribers as fast and efficiently as possible.

Here ‘efficiently’ means that MaxBulk Mailer will do everything to place your message on every recipient inbox folder, with all tags (if any) properly processed, all headers properly set and all tracking code properly inserted (if click-through tracking is activated).

It will also try to handle errors, recover from connection issues, and finish the delivery in a timely manner avoiding overloading the mail server.

What is the best message format?

Depending on the type of message you are composing you have the choice between several formats Plain Text, Styled Text, Text/HTML, HTML only and Web Page.

‘Plain Text’ is the basic format, what you see is what you get, text with no formatting.

With the ‘Styled Text’ format you can apply styles, font, color, size, bold, and so on. The message will be converted into HTML during the message delivery.

The other formats are also HTML based. HTML is the language that web designers use to create web pages.

The ‘Text/HTML’ has a plain text version of the message, ‘HTML Only’ is exclusively made of HTML, and the ‘Web Page’ format allows you to send a page by writing its URL.

Designing an HTML message

Even though you can write text messages and even apply styles, MaxBulk Mailer is not really a design tool.

Therefore, to create a good-looking HTML message, it is highly recommended to use a web editor software, especially a WYSIWYG HTML Editor (There are many available for both MS Windows and Mac OS X).

With such a tool you can graphically design your message without (almost) knowing anything about HTML coding.

The workflow you may follow is something like this:

1.- Upload the pictures used by the message to your web server with a FTP Client.
2.- Design the message using absolute links for all pictures and built-in CSS.

Once you are satisfied with your design:

3.- Copy the HTML code from the HTML editor.
4.- Paste it to the MaxBulk Mailer message field.
5.- Set the format to ‘HTML Only’.
6.- Click on the ‘Preview‘ tab. You should see how your message looks like.

Pictures are missing?

Well, as stated in point #1, you need to upload the pictures to your web site and update links. Remember, you will send a message through the internet to people that will use a mail reader application to read it. In other words, they only receive the HTML code, pictures will be fetched by their mail software.

However, this will work only if the picture URLs are absolute URLs. In the message we have taken as an example for this tutorial, every picture is referenced as located in the ‘pictures’ folder, on the computer hard drive.

That works locally but nobody except you has access to that folder so you have to move it to your server and update links. We have used the HTML Editor search/replace function to substitute this: "pictures/" with this: "https://www.maxprog.com/mailout/pictures/"That’s all.

The message formatting is different?

Check whether the CSS code is not missing in your HTML code. CSS code is what defines styles in your message. If the CSS code is missing your message will look like an ugly unformatted plain text message. The ugliest thing you have ever seen.

So, there are only two important things you have to take care about before transferring your code to MaxBulk Mailer, you should maintain the CSS code inside the HTML code and upload all the pictures to your web server and use absolute links. If you do that you will be fine.

What about compatibility? Designing a template VS using a free template

It may be a pain to make a given HTML message work properly everywhere. It mainly depends on the code complexity but you should remember that e-mail reader applications are not web browsers, many things are not supported like Javascript, Flash animations, or image maps, just to name a few. WebMail systems, even though working inside a web browser may also give compatibility problems, especially CSS conflicts.

It requires some testing until you can guarantee a message is fully compatible and safe to be sent. I believe the best approach is to design a template then spend as much time as needed to thoroughly test it with Apple Mail, Entourage, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. If you see differences try to adjust your code and test again. Once your message displays properly in Apple Mail, Entourage, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo then you have a good template you will be able to use again and again for quite a long time, just changing the text.

On the other hand, if you don’t have time or the skills to go through this process, you can just download and use a free template as we did to write this tutorial. There are lots of them on the Internet. Look for example at https://freemailtemplates.com/, it is a web that offers free templates.

They say on that page that the templates have been tested with Outlook, Apple Mail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Thunderbird, Hotmail, and Lotus Notes. This is a great time-saving!

There are actually lots of sites that offer free templates, this is a small list:

– http://www.emailtemplates.org
– https://themeforest.net/category/marketing/email-templates
– https://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates

or you can even search Google.

Related Live Event: Using free HTML email templates with MaxBulk Mailer

Enjoy!

How to add an unsubscribe link to your messages

How to add an unsubscribe link to your messages? MaxBulk Mailer allows you to add an unsubscribe link to your messages quite easily. Actually, there are several ways to do it. Choosing the best method mostly depends on the size of your list, the email delivery frequency, and how much of it you want to automate.

It turns out you can handle unsubscribe requests either manually or thru a script hosted on your website.

Handling unsubscribes manually is fine if you use small lists and you want to have full control over every single request. If you use a script you can automate the process though.

As said, it depends on your list size and if you have some time to spend installing and setting a script on your server.

Before entering the technical aspect of this matter, let’s go thru the basics.

Why should you provide an unsubscribe link?

Anybody that receives a message, including yourself, expects that this message provides a standard way to unsubscribe. Furthermore, in many countries, it is the law.

“The CAN-SPAM Act establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations”. That means all emails! For example, a message to former customers announcing a new product or service must comply with the law.

What about Cold Emails?

A cold email is an email that is sent without prior permission from the recipient. A cold email is generally sent to a qualified prospect, meaning that at least some research has been done on whether the recipient is a fit – and that email address has been confirmed.

There’s no difference in the eyes of the law in the US between a cold email and your newsletter. You still must have your mailing address and a way to unsubscribe.

What is the best unsubscribe link placement?

Usually, we expect the unsubscribe link to be visible at the bottom of the message. It has to be very clear and easy-to-find.

In the screenshot above you can see how we display the email address the message was sent to (#1), we explain why the recipient has received the message (#2) and we provide a clear unsubscribe link (#3).

How to add an unsubscribe link to your messages with MaxBulk Mailer

Basically, you just need to enter a working unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message body itself. The link type depends on the system you will choose, therefore you are free to use a URL, text, or even an image (of a button). If you use the Styled Text or the HTML format you can indeed display some custom text or the picture of a button.

You can use any text link like:

– Unsubscribe
– Click to unsubscribe
– Remove my address from your list

Or a picture with a link:

3 ways to handle unsubscribes with MaxBulk Mailer

There are several ways to handle unsubscribes. You can simply choose to handle the requests manually, thru a semi-automatic script hosted on your website, or using a fully automated system like MLM, also hosted on your website.

If your list is small and you send your message not too often you may opt to handle unsubscribes manually. The system is simple to implement but you’ll have to maintain your list by hand.

If your list is small or medium-sized you may consider using a semi-automatic script, it is rather simple to implement and you will save a lot of time.

Finally, if you handle several lists and send emails quite often you should consider installing the MaxBulk Mailer Mailing List Manager (aka MLM).

Manual unsubscribe handling

If your email list is small why not just let your recipients unsubscribe themselves by email? You could simply add the following text at the beginning or at the bottom of your message:

“To unsubscribe from this list just respond to this message with the word UNSUBSCRIBE”
or something shorter like “To unsubscribe just hit reply with the word UNSUBSCRIBE”

The recipient will then reply to your message and write ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ as the response above the quoted message. You will then have to unsubscribe the address from your MaxBulk Mailer list manually.

If you are using the Styled Text format for your message you can go a step further and format the reply this way:

Unsubscribe

Just add that code at the bottom of your message and replace ‘YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS-HERE’ with the email address you want the unsubscribe requests to be sent to. Try it. That line will open your mail reader and will automatically fill the destination address, the subject and the body.

Again, you will have to unsubscribe the addresses from your MaxBulk Mailer list manually.

Unsubscribe handling thru a script

We developed a very simple script you can install on your system to handle unsubscribe requests. It is called ‘unsubscribe.php’. You can download it here: Unsubscribe PHP script.

This script is really simple and easy to modify in order to include more features. Currently, it only stores the unsubscribed e-mail addresses so you can know which ones to get off your list.

There is a demo of the script running on our server. With the demo, you can add an address using something like:
https://www.maxprog.com/site/scripts/unsubscribe/demo/unsubscribe.php?email=john@doe.com

and then you can see the list of unsubscribed addresses here:
https://www.maxprog.com/site/scripts/unsubscribe/demo/unsubscribe.php?admin=admin

Feel free to click on both links to unsubscribe an email address and see the list of addresses.

Regularly you just need to save the address list to a text file, name the file ‘unsubscribe.txt’ and drop it over your list in MaxBulk Mailer. That will batch unsubscribe all those e-mails from the selected list.

Fully automated script – MLM

Finally, you can choose to fully automate the unsubscribe process. You can do that with the Maxprog Mailing List manager, also known as MLM.

Actually, MLM is also a script you have to install on your server however it does much more than handling unsubscribes. MLM is also a double opt-in list subscription manager and a message opening/click-through tracking script. You will find all the information about MLM here: Mailing List Manager PHP script.

Once you have installed MLM on your server just add the [Unsubscribe] tag to your message and MaxBulk Mailer will create the proper link for you.

The substitution text for that tag can be edited from the MaxBulk Mailer preferences, the ‘Tags’ panel, at the bottom.

By default, it is ‘here’ so if you add this to your message: “If you don’t want to receive messages from us just click [Unsubscribe].” it will be converted to: “If you don’t want to receive messages from us just click here.”.

“here” is a link to the MLM unsubscribe script. Of course, you can use the sentence you like with the substitution word or sentence you prefer.

The link will always allow the recipient to unsubscribe from your list. Note that the MLM unsubscribe behavior can be modified by editing the ‘lm_prefs.php’ file, you can tell MLM to keep unsubscribe addresses in the list, ask for a confirmation, or send (or not) a confirmation email.

The MLM installation is fully explained here and also at the beginning of this video:

Make sure your unsubscribe system works properly

Don’t be lazy and fully test your unsubscribe system. Make sure everything works as expected! It is really frustrating for somebody that receives a message to get an error when trying to unsubscribe.

In addition, always make sure you are unsubscribing addresses and not deleting them. If you delete an address nothing will prevent you to add it back again accidentally. In other words, you simply can’t add an unsubscribed address again. You will get a ‘duplicate found’ error. You can resubscribe it tough.

How do I Avoid My Emails being Marked as Spam?

As you probably know I am in charge of answering support requests here at Maxprog. As a result, MaxBulk Mailer users asked me about e-mail delivery issues quite often, especially problems related to spam filtering software flagging and blocking their legitimate messages. This is called ‘false positives’. This particular issue is quite frustrating because most of the time you have no idea where the problem comes from. In other words, you have no clue about what is happening and even what to do to fix it. It is even more frustrating for me when people think maxprog bulk mailer software is the culprit. There is no relation actually, MaxBulk Mailer is an e-mail client like any other. So, how do I Avoid My Emails being Marked as Spam?

In this post, I will try to gather all my knowledge about how to prevent running into this kind of problem. Let’s see the typical story:

Writing and sending a message

You composed your newsletter, as usual, you selected your subscriber list and then sent the message with a copy to yourself. You later found out that your copy never arrives and then, asking a few subscribers it turns out some of them did not receive anything either.

Does this story look familiar to you?

A message wrongly flagged as spam is called a false positive. A spam filter will check your message and will give it a score. If you reach a given score threshold the software will flag your message. Basically, the spam filter will check whether:

• Your message looks like spam
• The mail server you are using is blacklisted
• The recipient list contains lots of dead addresses
• The recipient list contains spam traps
• You are sending your message to too many recipients

Ok. So, how do I Avoid My Emails being Marked as Spam? Let’s go through this list:

Your messages look like spam – False positives

When you write a message, above all, try to be as personal as possible. For instance, think and write the text like if you were sending the message to one person only. It is easy to do, just select one of your best-known customers and write the message with him/her in mind. Finally, add tags to the message to insert personal info, a personal greeting for example. It is explained in detail here: How to make your e-mail’s look more personal. Do not use spam-like words. The list is huge but just have a quick look in order to get the picture. A List of Common Spam Words, The Ultimate List of E-mail SPAM Trigger Words.

The mail server you are using is blacklisted

If your mail server is on a blacklist like Spamhaus or SORBS there are chances your message will never go through. How do you find out? Easy, MXtoolbox. That service will check your mail server domain or IP address with about 100 blacklists. Here you should get green OK icons on all lines. You should work on that overwise. Very seriously! All blacklist systems offer a way to get delisted.

The recipient list contains lots of dead addresses

How old is your list? Where or how did you get it? Are you maintaining it regularly? Did you know those big mail servers like Gmail may flag a message sent to their server after reaching a given error threshold? That means that if your list has what Gmail considers too much dead/invalid addresses, the whole message will be flagged. You should check your list and remove bounces from it! Bounces are those delivery error e-mails you get in your inbox, don’t ignore them! Remove the invalid e-mails addresses from the list right away. One solution is to verify the list with eMail Verifier at least once and then process bounces with eMail Bounce Handler as explained here.

The recipient list contains spam traps

Spammers usually collect email addresses by using automated e-mail address harvester software. Those tools build lists out of web sites. Spam traps are specific email addresses placed on purpose so any e-mail messages sent to such type of address are immediately flagged and considered as spam. Finally, an anti-spam system may instantly block your whole message as soon as it finds a spam trap. Nobody else will get it!… So, never harvest email addresses from the web and never purchase lists. Create your own lists!

You are sending too many messages at once

There are systems, like Gmail that may flag your message because you have reached a given delivery threshold. That means you have sent too many messages to that particular server. The solution is quite easy, send your message at a slower pace. It is explained here in detail: Sending a message through a server with a daily or an hourly delivery limit.

Test the ‘spamminess’ of your e-mails

Now I would like to talk about a great service I am sending all my customers to. It is called Mail Tester.

This free service is literally for testing the ‘spamminess’ of your e-mails and avoid false positives. You just need to send your message to an e-mail address they will give you. A few seconds later you will get a score and a detailed report of what is ok and what is wrong. That simple! In addition, you get some directions to fix the problems. The best here is to try to get a score of 10/10, therefore, there are chances you will have to sign your messages with DKIM. Hopefully last versions of MaxBulk Mailer support DKIM. It is explained here: How to use DKIM with MaxBulk Mailer.

Allow the recipients to unsubscribe

And remember to add an unsubscribe link to your messages. You can do that by installing our Mailing List Manager (MLM) on your web site. You can use MLM only to handle unsubscribes for local lists and ignore all the other features. When you use MLM, MaxBulk Mailer will add unsubscribe headers that Gmail will display automatically.

In conclusion, I hope you liked this post and found some valuable clues on ‘How do I Avoid My Emails being Marked as Spam?’. I personally recommend you to follow the rules. For instance, try to write several versions of your message, test them with Mail Tester and use the one that gets the best results. Above all, do not be in a hurry to finish soon.

I welcome your comments.

More information on Spam:

– E-mail Spam
– The Definition of Spam
– How to create and publish your first newsletter

How to use DKIM with MaxBulk Mailer

With MaxBulk Mailer 8.6.7 we added support for DKIM. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a method for validating the authenticity of email messages. When an email is sent with DKIM activated, it is signed using a private key and then validated on the receiving mail server (or ISP) using a public key on your domain DNS record. Using DKIM is opcional but quite recommended since having emails that are signed with DKIM appear more legitimate to your recipients and are less likely to go to Junk or Spam folders. In addition to verifying the authenticity of an email message, DKIM also provides a way for ISPs to track and build a reputation on your domain’s sending history.

So, in order to use DKIM first you need a domain and you have to use an email address from that domain as the sender of your emails. For example our domain is ‘maxprog.com’ and our address ‘support’ belongs to that domain. If you don’t have a domain and/or use a gmail/hotmail/yahoo address for example, this is not for you.

In addition, when adding a DKIM record it is also a good idea to add SPF and DMARC records. I will talk briefly about that below but I will wrote a complete post about email deliverability later.

How does DKIM work?

The process works like this: You publish a cryptographic public key as a specially-formatted TXT record in your domain’s overall DNS records. When a mail message is sent with MaxBulk Mailer, the software generates and attaches a unique DKIM signature header to the message. DKIM allows you to associate your domain name with your email messages, thus vouching for their authenticity. You create the DKIM by signing the email with a digital signature. This signature is located in the message’s header.

What is SPF?

Another quick method to improve your email delivery rates is to incorporate SPF, or the Sender Policy Framework into your DNS settings. SPF is an email validation protocol designed to detect and block email spoofing by providing a mechanism to allow receiving mail exchangers to verify that incoming mail from your domain comes from an IP Address authorized by you. As DKIM, SPF is not required but highly recommended.You will find more information on SPF here. Don’t worry, I will write a post about SPF later.

And what about DMARC?

A DMARC record is the record where the DMARC rule sets are defined. Once SPF and DKIM are in place, you configure DMARC by adding policies to your domain’s DNS records in the form of TXT records (just like with SPF or DKIM). You will find more information on DMARC here. I will also write a post about DMARC and email deliverability later.

Where do I create a DKIM record

Best is you use this DKIM wizard. Just enter your Domain name and a DomainKey Selector of your choice. Then click on ‘Create keys’. You will automatically get a public and a private key. The public key is the one that will be added to your server DNS record and the private key to MaxBulk Mailer DKIM panel. If you scroll down the page a bit your will see “Step 1: Configure Your DNS Server With The Public Key.” with the formatted DKIM DNS record.

As an example, this is what our DNS record looks like:

You can see the SPF record followed by DMARC and finally the DKIM record (the last two entries).

And how to enter the data into MaxBulk Mailer DKIM panel:

Here you can see that ‘Domain’ contains the domain name, ‘Selector’ the selector we have chosen in the DKIM wizard and finally the private key, as is, including ‘—–BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY—–‘ and ‘—–END RSA PRIVATE KEY—–‘. The password field can remain empty for the moment.

Checking the DNS record

You can check whether your DKIM DNS record has been properly updated with the Dig command on macOS (with the Terminal app) or with nslookup on MS Windows (with the command prompt). Proceed this way:

macOS > dig [selector]._domainkey.[domain] TXT
Windows > -type=txt [selector]._domainkey.[domain]

In our case since our selector is ‘dkim’ and our domain ‘maxprog.com’:

macOS > dig dkim._domainkey.maxprog.com TXT
Windows > nslookup -type=txt dkim._domainkey.maxprog.com

You should get your DKIM record in the ‘ANSWER SECTION’ of the DIG response. With nslooup the response is the record itself. Note that it can take a few hours for your DNS changes to be propagated so be patient.

You can also verify your DKIM record with those user-friendly tools:

– DKIM Key Checker Recommended!
– Network-Tools.com
– WhatsMyIP.us
– DKIM Core Key Check

Checking the DKIM signature

It is very easy to validate your DKIM settings, just click on the MaxBulk Mailer DKIM window ‘Test’ button. The software will check everything, your DKIM DNS record and the private and public keys. MaxBulk Mailer will actually sign a dummy message and then try to validate it with the server. If you are successful then you can be sure that all your outgoing messages will be signed!

More information on DKIM:

– DKIM.org – Frequently Asked Questions
– What are DKIM records?
– Protecting Your Brand From Phishing: How to Create a DKIM Record
– DomainKeys Identified Mail
– Email authentication
– Privacy-Enhanced Mail
– What Is DKIM? Everything You Need to Know About Digital Signatures
– Understanding SPF and DKIM to Improve Email Deliverability

All the information above can be quite intimidating for most people, I know that so I recommend you to contact your server support. They should be able to help you with DKIM. They are used to handle that.

—
Stan Busk – Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com

64bits versions of maxprog products

We are currently working on 64-bit versions of all our products. Apple macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux are all 64-bits operating systems (note that MS Windows has also a 32-bit version available).

Let me explain a bit what’s that about, the terms 32-bit and 64-bit refer to the way a computer’s processor handles information. A 64-bit operating system handles large amounts of memory more effectively than a 32-bit system. While 32 bits of information can only access 4 GB of memory, a 64-bit machine can access 17.2 billion gigabytes of system memory! That means that your video card and other devices will not be stealing usable memory space from the operating system any longer. In addition software programs that require lots of calculations can operate faster and more efficiently on 64-bit processors.

I believe that handling more memory is very good for most of our products and they can even work slightly faster however it will be difficult to tell. The memory space available for our programs will be bigger and it will be less problematic in case of memory leak issues. A memory leak is when memory which is no longer needed is not released properly. This is a rare problem that may end with the program crashing.

Currently MaxBulk Mailer 64-bits has been built successfully. Yo can download a beta versions here: macOS | Windows

Please test it and report any error or add your comments below.

—
Stan Busk – Software Engineer
at www.maxprog.com