With my experience in the email marketing industry I have come to find that so often newsletter marketing campaigns fail to succeed because they are not correctly targeted. Targeted Email marketing is a relatively cheap direct marketing channel. Because email marketing is so cost-effective, email marketers tend to get just a little too trigger-happy. It's no surprise that sending masses of bulk email campaigns will result in nobody really opening your emails, particularly irrelevant one's.

Email marketing campaigns need to be highly targeted in order to be successful. Not only do irrelevant emails (wrong audience) waste time and money, it also lowers your 'open rate'. Additionally, it does more damage than just that. You're more likely to get unsubscribes, and also more likely to irritate people with emails that they find to be irrelevant. This does much to your brand reputation; and I don't mean that in a good way.

Targeted email marketing takes additional factors into account like age, interests, gender etc. and breaks this down so as to send newsletters to clients who specifically like IPods for example. With targeted email marketing, your click-through rate and open-rate will definitely increase, while unsubscribes will decrease. At the same time, your brand image and reputation shall me maintained, while you save valuable time and money.

There are more factors to consider if you're wondering why your email newsletter subscribers have not opened your email newsletters or clicked-through. Here are just a few:

- Personalization is missing. You need to address email recipients by their name and your 'From' name needs to be that of your company.

- You have not segmented your email subscribers correctly or your information is out-of-date.

- You have not cleaned out your list recently enough; this results in money wasted on inactive email addresses or people that never open you emails.

- Time of send. You need to do research on the best times to send; for example: it's never a good idea to send bulk marketing emails on a weekend. Also, you need to consider time zones.

- Frequency of send. Overloading subscribers with emails does so much more harm than good; your emails will never be opened if you send too many. On the same note; sending too infrequently can result in your subscribers forgetting who you are or why they signed up.

- Purchasing patterns. If you track purchases it is much easier to target future emails to get additional sales.

If the above factors are taken into account, then your targeted email marketing is bound to succeed.

2004: Google unveils Gmail. It will change webmail… and a few other things as well.

Five years ago, if we wanted to talk to somebody halfway around the world, we'd open up Outlook, Eudora or some other bulky piece of software on our desktops and type an e-mail.

Most of us had webmail, which was a convenience on the road since we could access it from any computer, but it wasn't enjoyable. Web inboxes were slow and cumbersome, messy with checkboxes and radio buttons, and often so riddled with spam they had to be emptied frequently lest they reach capacity.

Gmail changed all that. It was fast and elegant just like a desktop app. There was so much storage, you never had to delete anything. In fact, you couldn't — there wasn't even a Delete button! And you didn't miss the Delete button since it was almost entirely spam-free.

Gmail was so slick and easy to use, many of us switched to it full-time and have never gone back.

On its fifth birthday, it's difficult to ignore the enormous influence Gmail has had not only on web-based e-mail services, but on rich web applications in general. Several of the concepts introduced by Gmail, which were at the time on the bleeding edge of application design, have since been adopted by the web's mainstream.


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Often you need to test email and if it's working. With these commands you can test email flow at a very granular level to determine what's broken and where.

Scenario:
Your domain: mydomain.com
Domain you wish to send to: theirdomain.com

1. Determine the mail server you're sending to.

* Open a CMD prompt
* Type NSLOOKUP
> set q=mx
> theirdomain.com
Response:
Non-authoritative answer:
theirdomain.com MX preference = 50, mail exchanger = mail.theirdomain.com

2. Connect to their mail server


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