The RSS tool takes content from your blog (or any RSS feed) and sends it as a message to your subscribers automatically.  The RSS driven campaign will check daily to see if anything has been added to your RSS feed in the past 24 hours.  If there’s new content, the message will be automatically created and sent out.  If there is no new content a message will not be sent.  There are two main steps to utilize the eMail Networks RSS functionality.

The first is to update your email template with the RSS “Merge Tags” which places the RSS feed within your email template body.

RSS Merge Tags

Create an RSS Template

You can customize your message template for the RSS Schedule using these RSS feed Merge Tags:

Example (This will loop through the RSS feed and display the articles)

Create an RSS Schedule

After creating the RSS message template, you can select this message in the RSS Schedule setup screen.

1. Open the Tools folder in the left menu, then click RSS Schedule (Note: if you do not see the RSS Schedule option and would like to use it, please contact your account administrator)
2.  Click Create
3. In the RSS schedule setup, select the RSS message you created with the RSS template code above
4. Add the message details like subject and from address
5. Select a list to send the RSS messages
6. Enter the full URL for the RSS feed URL (including the http://)
7. Select the max number of entries to include in each message sent out
8. Click Preview to view the message that will be created from the RSS feed
9. Select the send frequency (daily/weekly/monthly) and time of day to send the message
10. Once everything is set up, change the status to Active.  This will make the RSS Schedule live
    .

1. Complaints: Occur when subscribers mark your message as spam. Complaints happen for a variety of reasons, but may indicate that you have insufficient permission for some or all of the addresses on your list.  In addition, complaints can cause future campaigns to be blocked and sent straight to the spam folder.
2. High unknown user rates: When a message is sent to many email addresses that have become inactive or do not exist anymore.
3. Spam trap addresses: Email addresses that are used by a blacklist to test if the email address was obtained by a bot that is crawling for addresses.  If a message is sent to a spam trap, your IP reputation will drop.
4. Content: Spam filters look for specific words or characteristics from each message that are weighted based on their likelihood to indicate that a message is unwanted or legitimate mail. Spam filters are always adapting and learning more about what is and isn’t unwanted mail, so it is not possible for us to offer specific advice about improving your mail content.
5. Sending Consistency: Sending with consistent volumes and frequencies month over month is ideal. Spammers tend to “pop up” on an IP and disappear.

Here are some specific recommendations to consider that can help improve delivery rates:

Complaints

• Clearly offer an unsubscribe option to subscribers and honor unsubscribes requests. Opting out should be just as simple as opting in
• Add text reminding subscribers where they opted-in to receive your email
• Monitor your complaint rates
• Validate you are adhering to applicable anti-spam and privacy laws and policies
• Ensure your marketing communications are timely, relevant, have been requested and that you have permission to send them to the user
• Consider the frequency of your mailings. What are the user’s expectations?
• Check if you imported new emails that were unverified or from an outside source. Email addresses such as info@, sales@, and webmaster@example.com are a clear indication that the list is not 100% opt in
• From address should be working email addresses that are well monitored

High unknown user rates

• Maintain your mailing lists. This includes purging old, bad or inactive addresses from your mailing lists.
• Acquire names responsibly and send mail only to users that opt-in to receiving your email.

Spam trap addresses

• Monitor and manage both hard and soft bounces. Bounce notices can provide invaluable information regarding the ISP’s treatment of your email.

Content

• Choose content wisely and verify URLs look normal and point to valid domains
• Use your own domain in your From address. Don’t use free email addresses as your From address as all DMARC compliant mail receivers (including Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) are bouncing emails sent as “@yahoo.com, @outlook.com, @gmail.com” addresses that aren’t sent through their servers.
• Ensure emails are cleanly formatted and clearly identifiable as originating from your service.
• Use a friendly from name and email address to help subscribers recognize and trust emails sent from you
• Implement outbound email authentication using a sender authentication package. This helps protect from spoofing and ensure the Critical Impact mail servers are authorized to send mail, while protecting the brand and domain from threats to their brand and misrepresentation.
• Segment or separate traffic by brand or type of mail. Corporate email, customer acquisition, customer retention and transactional emails should be segmented. Senders who wish to maintain separate reputations for each should consider segment mail streams by IP address and utilizing separate authentication packages.
• Follow content and formatting best practices: use the Spam/link checker tool to help remove known spam keywords and broken links.

Sending Consistency

• Be consistent. Send email from the same IP’s
• Less is more. Send less mail more often vs. lots of mail for short periods of time

The bottom line to remember is: if as little as 1% of your customers complain, the inability to communicate with your entire customer base may be the end result.

Finally, please thoroughly test before launching any campaign. This means frequent testing with recipient accounts using various clients and major email service providers to ensure that communications are being received in a desired fashion.

Delivery Rate Scenarios

Scenario 1: Your email is being delivered to the Junk email Folder
Symptoms:

1.  Open, click and unsubscribe rates decline

2.  Recipients inform you that your email is delivered to the junk folder

Common Causes:

1.  Too many recipients reported your previous emails as spam

Recommended Actions:

• Be consistent. Send email from the same IP’s
• Change the Subject lines of your messages to be more relevant.
• Make sure the From address is recognizable and would never be perceived as deceptive.
• Reduce the frequency of your messages.
• Make sure you are sending what the recipients expect to receive.
• Increase the relevance of your messages.
• Reduce frequency to addresses that have not opened or clicked recently.
• Make the Unsubscribe option easy to find and use.
• Send an immediate confirmation message.
• Add more relevant text content to your messages.

2.  Too much of your mail is sent to invalid or inactive email addresses

Recommended Actions:

• Avoid mailing addresses that have not responded to your mail (i.e. opened or clicked) recently, or from users that have requested to be unsubscribed
• Please contact support@emailnetworks.com for help to create an exclude list and properly import.

3.  Your sender authentication record is incorrect or missing

Recommended Actions:

• Ensure your outbound mail is compliant. Contact support@emailnetworks.com to verify your sender authentication is set up correctly.

Scenario 2: Your message is delivered successfully without a bounce but not delivered to the Inbox or junk mail folder

 Symptoms:

1. Open, click and unsubscribe rates decline

2. Recipients inform you that your email is not delivered to the Inbox

3. Some or all of the email sent to your personal email account is never delivered to the Inbox

Common Causes:

1. You are sending to dynamic spam/trap accounts

Recommended Actions:

• Reduce frequency to addresses that have not opened or clicked recently
• Contact Support to create a Dynamic Exclude List.
• Segment mailings (transactions, newsletters) by IP address and try to identify bad data segments or sources

2. Too many of your email messages have been detected as SPAM by internal filtering and reputation systems

Recommended Actions:

• Change the Subject lines of your messages to be more relevant
• Reduce the frequency of your messages
• Make sure you are sending what the recipients expect to receive
• Increase the relevance of your messages
• Reduce frequency to addresses that have not opened or clicked recently
• Make the Unsubscribe option easy to find and use
• Add more relevant text content to your messages

Scenario 3: Your mail is blocked or mail is bouncing

Symptoms:

1. You receive an unusually high number of bounce messages

2. Open, click, and unsubscribe rates decline significantly

3. Recipients inform you that your email is not delivered to the Inbox or the junk mail folder

4. Some or all of the email sent to your personal email account is never delivered to the Inbox

Common Causes:

1. Volume Caps

Recommended Actions:

• Utilize additional IP addresses with the same sender authentication

2. Blocklists

Recommended Actions:

• Contact support@emailnetworks.com

What is an email Bounce?

Bounces are messages that ISPs send back to Critical Impact to explain why they can’t deliver your email to the email address you sent it to. Once you send an email, the recipient’s email server either accepts your message, or “bounces” it. If the recipient’s email server accepts your message, the recipient’s email address remains active in Critical Impact. If the recipient’s email server rejects your message, we consider this a bounce. There are two kinds of bounces – one is temporary, and one is permanent.  We’ll explain how each of those work in the next section.

The Soft Bounce (temporary bounce) – The email address is valid, but the message couldn’t be delivered to it, most likely due to a temporary encumbrance.

A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s email server rejects your email message due to a temporary condition that exists on the receiver’s side, e.g. perhaps their inbox is full and not accepting any new messages. When a soft bounce occurs, Critical Impact will retry sending your email to the intended recipient every 60 minutes for 24 hours, which totals 24 attempts. Only after the system makes the 24 attempts does a ‘bounce’ appear in your tracking report.

The 24 re-tries do not count as bounces or additional sent emails.  Instead, 24 unsuccessful retries equate to one soft bounce. The following table describes the possible causes of a soft bounce.

It is important to note that soft bounces are not controlled by our system or by you, our customer.  Soft bounces are entirely dictated by the intended recipient’s email servers.

Soft Bounces can also be caused by poor sender reputation and/or issues stemming from too many bounces, too many complaints, or sending SPAM.  This type of soft bounce is called a “block bounce”.  It occurs when the email server rejects your message due to filtering issues, such as URL blocks, complaints, lack of proper authentication, or the domain or IP address is found on a blacklist utilized by the receiving domain. A subscriber who receives a block bounce will be re-tried in the next email send.   The following table describes the causes of a block bounce.

Soft bounces can also be caused by technical issues. This flavor of soft bounce, also called a technical bounce, occurs when the recipient’s email server rejects your message due to technical errors, such as a data format or network errors. When a subscriber experiences a technical bounce they will be re-tried in the next email send. The following table describes the causes of a technical bounce.

The Hard Bounce

A hard bounce occurs when the email server rejects your message due to permanent conditions (this typically results when an email address no longer exists, or is inactive). No more attempts are made to send this email campaign to this subscriber, and the subscriber will be automatically unsubscribed from all future email attempts.  While this model suits most cases, certain ISPs change from time-to-time based on how they handle spam and a number of other deliverability items.
The following table describes the possible causes of a hard bounce.

Bounce Tracking

We track your bounces in the tracking area of the application. To access your bounce tracking data, follow these steps:

1. Click the Reports folder.
2. Click Custom Reports.
3. Select Display All Hard and Soft Bounces by Date.
4. Click Run Report

We take bounces very seriously. Poor delivery results from any of our customers damages the reputation of the company and, by extension, all of our customers. Therefore, the Sending Guidelines and Thresholds are in place to prevent abuse of our email system and to ensure our clients practice permission-based, opt-in email. We continue to lead the industry in deliverability rates – due in part to our commitment to, enforcement of, and client consultation on permission marketing best practices.

0    Unknown
2    Email Send Error
10    Email address is invalid or not active, no such mailbox exists
20    General Soft Bounce
21    Soft Bounce – DNS Failure
22    Mailbox Full
23    Message Too Large for mailbox recipient
24    Response timed out from destination mail server
25    Message Quarantined
26    Message was flagged due to characteristics of spam
27    Firewall issues on the desitnation mail server prevented this message from being delivered
28    Mail server refused connection
30    Email address is invalid or not active, no such mailbox exists
40    Destination mail service problems
50    Message was flagged due to characteristics of spam
51    Spam
52    Message was flagged due to characteristics of spam (Content)
53    Mail blocked due to attachment
54    Destination mail server does not allow relays, mailbox is most likely incorrect
55    Mail server requires more information on senders domain
60    Auto Reply response detected (e.g. out of office)
110    Mail server requires confirmation
501    rejected due to configuration issues with remote host
502    bounced due to bad connection issues with remote host
503    refused or blocked due to content related reasons
504    bounced due to not being delivered before the bounce-after
505    bounces due to receiving no response from remote host after connecting
506    rejected due to other reasons
507    refused or blocked due to general policy reasons
508    rejected due to SMTP protocol syntax or sequence errors
509    rejected or blocked due to mailbox quota issues
510    refused or blocked due to remote mail server relaying issues
511    bounced due to mail routing issues for recipient domain
512    refused or blocked due to spam related reasons
513    refused or blocked due to virus related reasons
514    Invalid Sender, might require pre-authorization
550    General Send Error
1000    bounced due to invalid or non-existing domains
1001    rejected due to expired, inactive, or disabled recipient addresses
1002    rejected due to bad, invalid, or non-existent recipient addresses
1100    rejected due to bad, invalid, or non-existent recipient addresses

SPAM filters have become increasingly complex in order to identify which emails are from legitimate senders which are not.  Spam filters look at a long list of criteria to decide whether your email is spam.  Also, spam filters are very private about why your email passed or failed to try to prevent spammers from figuring out their techniques.

Typically, there is not one single change that can be made in order to let your email pass a spam content filter.  Instead, most filters use a scoring system, if you score high enough, they block your email.  Having !!! in the subject may be 10 points, and having a high image to text ratio could be 24 points!  Once you are over a certain score, your email is blocked.  There are 100’s of spam filters, each with their own unique settings.

Reasons a message could land in the SPAM or junk folder

Subscriber Engagement

• AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and other major email clients use subscriber engagement to filter spam
  1. The more your recipients open, click, and read your messages, the more highly engaged your audience
  2. The more engaged your audience, the more likely your messages are to land in the inbox
  3. If your subscribers are not engaged, the message could be filtered as spam
• Email providers don’t share exact filtering data with senders. But by tracking your campaigns’ opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, you’ll be able to gauge how your subscribers are engaging with your messages

Subscribers click “report spam” button

• One of the greatest marks against you if you’re having trouble getting into the inbox will be if your email content has been previously flagged as spam by your subscribers
• If a lot of your recipients click the “report spam” button against your messages, their email client can start to block your campaigns and deliver other messages straight to the spam folder
• If subscribers move emails out of the spam folder, that’s a positive indicator and can help ensure future emails that are similar are delivered to the inbox instead.

Subscribers No Longer Wish to Receive Messages

• A frequent sending pattern might be tolerated initially, but eventually subscribers may tire of the frequency and start marking your mail as spam
• To prevent this, you may want to adopt engagement based sending

List Hygiene

SPAM Traps

• Spam Traps are email addresses that are used by a blacklist to test if the email address was obtained by a bot crawling for email addresses.  If you send to a SPAM trap email address, the SPAM filters will know that you did not receive this address through a valid opt-in
• Purchased lists can contain many dead emails and spam traps that quickly inform mailbox providers that you are sending unsolicited emails
• To avoid including a SPAM trap email in your mailing list, use an opt-in process to obtain your subscribers and do not buy lists

Unsubscribes

• If the unsubscribe link is not prominently displayed in the message or the message footer, some subscribers choose to mark as SPAM instead of unsubscribing

Subject Line

• Misleading claims could make the message look suspicious: the subject line needs to correlate with the content of the message.
  Example: the subject line states that the recipient has won a prize, while the copy lists conditions that have to be met in order to claim it.
• Your subject contains trigger words or excessive punctuation (FREE!!!!)
• Exclamation marks are especially risky in email subject lines

From Address

• A free email address as your from address can trigger SPAM filters
  1. Avoid using a free/personal email address such as @hotmail.com or @gmail.com
  2. Instead, use an email domain for the company or organization for which you are sending email
  3. Make sure to use a working email address that can receive messages
• Your from address needs to be recognizable and trustworthy to external audiences: if subscribers do not recognize the address, they may mark the message as SPAM before opening it
• No from address or noreply@ since this looks like spam and will increase the likelihood of your email being filtered.
• Frequent changes of from address names
• Obscure from address field names or from addresses that do not exist

Message Content

Word Choice

• There is no complete list of spam trigger words, but you can try testing various text and avoid the risky words listed below.
• Be careful with words associated with the language of sales. If overused, they may trigger spam filters and route your emails to junk folders. Risky words include: prize, free, bonus, buy, purchase, order, guarantee, credit card, sex
• Anything about getting money, paying less money, or money-back guarantees may be marked as SPAM
• Excessive use of “click here.”  Make your call-to-action links more specific to avoid filters.
• Don’t forget to use spell check; misspellings are yet another spam indicator in your email content

Font Styles

1. Font Colors

   • Do not use too many different font colors (especially red or green)
   • Since red is a loud color and can be hard to read, it may cause your message to be caught in an email filter

2. All Capital Letters

   • Using all capital letters MAKES IT LOOK LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING, makes your email look like spam, and will dramatically increase the likelihood of your email being filtered
   • When emphasis is needed, use a maximum of one word per sentence in all capitals, never a whole sentence

3. Extraneous Styles

   • Make sure your content does not include styling from Microsoft Word. If you are pasting in content from Word, you will want to use the “Paste from Word” button in the message editor to avoid having extra styling tags pasted along with the text

4. Font Size

   • Using extra large font size could trigger a filter.  Ordinary font size is considered 10-14px

Excessive Punctuation Marks or Symbols

• !!! or ??? or $$$ are likely to trip email filters especially when used in conjunction with spam-like words and capital letters.
• One exclamation mark per sentence is enough

Links

• Spam filters check the links in your message. If you link to a domain that has a poor reputation you will be penalized.
• Check that the links in your message are valid.
• As a best practice, please avoid shortened URLs in emails because spammers frequently abuse them. Some shortened domains have been placed on some of the most widely used block lists, which means that emails containing these links can be blocked by a spam filter
• Linking to too many different domains in an email could make the message look suspicious
• Additionally you should avoid linking to URL’s that contain folders with 1-2 characters, because some filters will see that as a bad thing

Unsupported Content

• Javascript, form code, or embedded video within your email could flag the message as SPAM
• Sending attachments with the message

Images

• Good text to image ratio: it’s suggested that for every graphic, include at least two lines of text
• Do not send any image-only emails
• Optimize images: this will shrink the overall size of the message

Message Length

• An email with no content in the subject and body of the message might be classified as spam.
• Keep emails short because too much copy is another red flag for spam filters.

Email Versions

• Include both a HTML and text version of your email.  Not having a text only version of the message could trigger a SPAM filter
• Note: our system automatically generates a text version from the text inserted into the message tab of the message editor.  Just make sure that if your message contains only images, you add some text to the text only tab.

Incomplete Information

• Your physical address is required by law. Always include your reply email address and your Web site URL, if you have one. Depending on your business, you may decide to include your phone number as well.
• Your physical address is added by default to the message footer.  If you use a custom footer make sure to add the physical mailing address to this footer of elsewhere in the message content