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Archives for April 2009

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Bounces

April 24th, 2009 | by Robert "Dude" Spellings, Jr.

Earlier today I needed to find out if a bounced email occurred synchronously or asynchronously. During the course of my research, the thought occurred to me that the difference between synchronous and asynchronous bounces is probably fairly unknown among email marketers, but knowing the difference would probably come in handy for them.

In order to explain the difference between a synchronous bounce and an asynchronous bounce, I’ll first need to explain the basics of how email servers communicate with one another while sending and receiving emails. First, the sending server contacts the receiving server and says “hey, I am server XYZ and I have an email to deliver to you.” The receiving server then checks to see if (a) it wants to receive email from the sending server, and (b) if it can deliver the email to the specified recipient.

At this point, the receiving mail server can do a number of things:

Accept the email message and deliver it to the recipient.
Temporarily refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
Permanently refuse to accept connections from the sending server.
Respond that the recipient does not exist and refuse the connection.

If any of the above responses, except number 1, are received by the sending server, the attempt to send that email is aborted and it is considered a Synchronous Bounce.

If the receiving server responds that it will accept the email message, then the sending server attempts to send the message. If the process of sending the email is aborted or interrupted for some reason, this may also result in a Synchronous Bounce, depending on the settings of the sending server (some of them will retry for a certain number of times for various types of interruptions).

If the receiving server indicates that it will accept the incoming email, and the process of sending the email message completes without complications, the receiving server will respond that the entire email was accepted successfully and the sending emails records a successful transaction in its server logs (actually, all of this is recorded in the server logs).

If after a successful transaction, the sender (the actual person sending the email) receives an email message from the receiving server indicating that the email message was not delivered for some reason, this is known as an Asynchronous Bounce. You are probably familiar with this kind of email because most people have received them. These are the emails that say something like “Your message could not be delivered for the following reason:” and then have a bunch of seemingly garbled text that supposedly explains the cause the failure.

Most email marketing systems have a method of capturing the messages from these Asynchronous bounces and then marking the message as “bounced” in their metrics reporting. Because the receiving server initially responds that the email message was delivered, and then sends the non-delivery message at a later time, this lag can cause the email reporting metrics to change and make it seem that “delivered” emails change and mysteriously morph into “bounces.”

It is important for email marketers to have a rudimentary knowledge of the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous bounces so that they can effectively maintain their lists and interpret the metrics associated with each email campaign. One reason that email systems may return an Asynchronous bounce message after initially accepting the email is because the email system may run the email message through some content filtering software and other tests to try and determine if the email is spam and should be rejected. If this is happening alot in your email campaigns, this may be something you want to check, so that you can ‘despamify‘ the language in your email, and/or otherwise figure out what it is about your email message that the email systems don’t like. Correcting this will help get your message into your recipients’ inboxes.

Hopefully, this information will help you become a better email marketer. If you have other technical questions about email marketing, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will do my best to provide answers. Thanks for reading.

The Direct Marketing Voice Links 4-24-2009

April 24th, 2009 | by admin

Donor Power Blog: How to waste your marketing dollars

via www.donorpowerblog.com Not all advertising is a waste. Some forms a very important part of moving people toward sales, and it does it very well and cost-effectively, even if it’s not direct-response advertising. It’s part of the larger strategy where direct response messages close the deal.

JCPenney Antes Up in the Digital Age – eMarketer

via www.emarketer.com eMarketer: Do you approach the online and offline JCPenney experiences differently? Mr. Bomberbach: We used to look at JCPenney as three different channels—the store, the site and the catalog. But that’s not how our customer sees us. They see us as oneentity.

Rockstar Small Business Branding

via Small Business Marketing Guide Pinkberry frozen yogurt has been spotted in the hands of famous people from Paris Hilton to Mike Tyson; it’s appeared in television shows like “Saturday Night Live” and within celebrity gossip magazines like Us Weekly and People. How did a frozen yogurt company achieve such pop culture street cred in such a short span of time? Rockstar branding.

Great video on “the first 9 rules of direct marketing”

April 24th, 2009 | by Luis Paez

The Direct Marketing Voice Links 4-23-2009

April 23rd, 2009 | by admin

Improving Audi’s (or any company’s) Service Communication

via thedirectmarketingvoice.com Below is a direct mail piece that I received on Monday from my local Audi dealer & service center. As an 8-page mailed booklet, I found it to stand out in the mail quite well, though the print quality was average. One thing that customer service departments can do better than other departments is to personalize their communications with customers

DMA Chief Exec receives raise amidst layoffs

via www.nptimes.com The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) announced its second round of layoffs within six months as expenses outpaced revenues last year. But, the tight financial situation hasn’t stopped pay hikes for the organization’s chief executive officer, whose salary has grown by 52 percent in four years.

Interesting Marketing Ideas For Your Business Database

via www.ryaneven.com There are a number of marketing campaigns that can be used to take advantage of a business database. There are pros and cons to each strategy, and various marketing campaigns will work better for some companies and products. Regardless of your marketing, however, it is a benefit to work from a business database for your information.

‘Causes’ Social Networking May Be All Talk, No Cash for Nonprofits Seeking Funds

via www.washingtonpost.com It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. After all, the Web earned gobs of cash for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. And besides, going online means sending fewer fundraising letters, which makes it appealing to penny-pinchers and environmentalists alike. But it turns out that approach doesn’t always work. The Facebook application Causes, hugely popular among nonprofit organizations seeking to raise money online, has been largely ineffective in its first two years, trailing direct mail, fundraising events and other more traditional methods of soliciting contributions.

Improving Audi’s (or any company’s) Service Communication

April 22nd, 2009 | by Luis Paez

Since Audi tends to be a high quality brand and their communications are typically very high quality as well, from a marketing perspective I was disappointed to see that they missed an opportunity to engage with me on a more personal level. Many companies struggle with their customer service communication, but even with those that execute well, there is room for improvement.

Below is a direct mail piece that I received on Monday from my local Audi dealer & service center. As an 8-page mailed booklet, I found it to stand out in the mail quite well, though the print quality was average. One thing that customer service departments can do better than other departments is to personalize their communications with customers – they have the best data quality and lists to mail to, as presumably their customers are active with them and update their information regularly so to obtain good service. This allows for communication & collateral that can be very personal and customized.

Here are my (unsolicited) suggestions:

Front - before

Front - After

On the front of the piece, I would have added two pieces of personalization: the recipient’s name & the name of the local dealer. Both pieces of data are in Audi’s CRM system, so why not include these on the piece? It definitely lets me know that they care enough to think of me specifically when they were creating the piece.

Page4 - before

Page4 - After

Though it’s a multi-page document, I took one of the center pages that also has a fold out flap featuring 5 coupons that I could redeem at my service center. My suggestions here are that they could have included specific information about my vehicle, letting me know that they are more aware than anyone the year and condition of my vehicle. Something that I did not put on the mockup is the opportunity to mention safety recalls. If there were any recent safety recalls that were outstanding on my vehicle, this would be a good opportunity to communicate this with a customer thus encouraging their visit.

Back - After

On the back of the piece, there are a couple of opportunities for excellence: First, and most obvious, simply writing a personal note to the recipient using variable data would have made this piece especially compelling. Second, integrating the name of an account manager, service advisor or another representative at Audi would be a good addition highlighting the team at the local dealer. Third, is an optional point but would be very good to see, that of using a personalized URL (pURL), that could be as simple as a one page mini-site where I could login and see basic information about my car and schedule an appointment. Making this URL personalized and variable printed on the piece would be the trick. Fourth, is the font on the address side. If you’ll notice on the “Before” image, the fonts used on the creative portion is slightly different than the font used for the address. Some printers have a hard time with this, but it’s definitely possible to resolve this detail and make all the fonts match.

Again, I do not mean to pick on Audi’s customer service department, and they are not one of QD’s customers, but it does serve as a good example of how an already high quality piece may be pushed up another notch. Anyone have other suggestions?