A blog post

What Does Being Blacklisted Mean?

Posted on the 06 September, 2011 at 8:46 am Written by in Newsletters, September 2011

What Does Being Blacklisted Mean?

In short, being blacklisted by Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN, Comcast, Verizon, etc. means that a sufficient number of recipients flagged your email messages as SPAM, and you can no longer send emails – or worse yet, they can cancel your internet connection altogether.

How do I avoid being blacklisted? Don’t use your desktop email (like Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.) to send your newsletter to contacts. It’s extremely risky. Your ISP (internet service provider, i.e. Comcast) carefully monitors how many emails you’re sending. Even though you may be asking your contacts to contact you to  remove them from your list, it’s far too easy for others to click the SPAM button. Enough clicks and you’re blacklisted.

Hosting solutions are the best way to manage your newsletters and promotions. Products like MailChimp, Constant Contact, iContact and others is the best way to create, send and track your newsletter. These products take you step by step through the creation process with hundreds of templates to choose from. Managing your contact list has never been easier; just upload your current contact list and the product will manage the opt-outs for you. These products also allow you to monitor how many recipients opened your newsletter, what links were clicked and who opted out. This information can be extremely important to know. Many marketing campaigns, products and services are created just out of the statistical information and this can give you an edge.

All of the hosted products above provide special code that can be added to your website to invite visitors to opt-in to receive your newsletter or promotion emails. Remember that you need to ask for permission before sending out newsletters and other promotional information.

MailChimp is one of my favorite hosted newsletter products – it’s free up to 2,000 subscribers minus a few options. I highly recommend them – not because it’s free, but because of their superior customer service and use of the product itself.

Until next time~

~Laura Pumo


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