When running a legitimate business that sends large amounts of email, it can be a real challenge to make sure these critical emails are delivered to a user's Inbox. If your subscribers are actually paying you to send email on their behalf, the situation becomes even more precarious. It is certainly possible to run your own outbound mail server and to get excellent delivery. But to do so you have to be set up and manage things like SPF and DomainKeys entries in DNS, you must continually monitor your sender reputation, and you must act quickly to remove your server from any black lists. Most of all you must be vigilant about securing your mail server from malicious spammers who will use any vulnerability to ruin your hard-won reputation. I have worked with businesses that send hundreds of thousands of legitimate emails per month. Some of these companies have employees who's job function it is to monitor and guarantee delivery. Believe me this is a difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming job. For most small businesses it just does not make financial sense to dedicate personnel to this task. I recommend that my clients run their newsletters through paid services such as Constant
In this previous post I discussed how we used Constant Contact's custom fields to create a weekly recommendation newsletter for Hooks containing content that is truly unique for each customer. Since only the content of the custom fields changes from week to week, the rest of the email can just be a static template. Originally I had planned to simply build a nice email using Constant Contact's graphical design tools and resend that same email every week. Unfortunately, Constant Contact does not allow you to send the same campaign to the same subscribers multiple times. The solution we came up with instead was to make an XHTML template and use the Constant Contact API to create a new campaign from this template each week and schedule it to send. The Constant Contact API Java Client that we used to set the custom fields did not include functionality for creating and scheduling campaigns. We could have probably extended the client to implement the missing features, but in this simple case it turned out to be easier to post XML directly to the API REST server. The first piece of the puzzle was an XHTML version of the newsletter template containing all the
One of the greatest challenges with an application like Hooks is to keep users coming back to the site to update their recommendations. Without updated recommendations, the data in Hooks quickly goes stale. To encourage users to log back in to the Hooks for Facebook application on a weekly basis, we are relying on an engaging, personalized newsletter Maintaining an email list, managing subscriptions, and sending out customized emails are certainly features that we could have programmed directly into Hooks. But maintaining IP addresses with good enough of a sending reputation to get delivery into the inbox at the all the major ISPs is a time consuming and ongoing job. If you are a bulk mail sender, you have to really stay on top of your reputation by constantly monitoring black lists and delivery statistics. Since that is not our core business, we found much greater value in outsourcing all that functionality. Constant Contact provides an API that allows programs like Hooks to interact directly with the email lists in our account and to schedule and send emails automatically. Since the email goes out from Constant Contact's servers, we are not stuck with the chore of policing our outbound IP email
Hooks for Facebook can now deliver customized music recommendations straight to your inbox. Once a week Hooks compiles the latest recommendations for every user and sends them out as a customized email to each participating user. In addition to being personalized, the recommendations are genre specific. So users who choose Rock as their preferred genre will only receive rock recommendations. As always, Hooks learns from how you rate music in the application. So if you don't like the recommendations being generated, simply give low ratings to the songs you dislike and Hooks will recalculate your preferences. This personalized email marketing is done through integration with the Constant Contact API. By using the Constant Contact REST API, Hooks can automatically create and schedule email campaigns with personalized custom fields for each recipient. A sample of the Hooks recommended music newsletter is show below.