In today’s world of social media marketing, small business owners might assume that email marketing is no longer relevant. But the truth is, email marketing allows business owners to create an open, direct line of communication with potential customers that is so vital to business growth. Email marketing is still a potent form of getting the word out about your business, your products, and your services.

Whether you’re just starting your new business, or attempting to expand a well-established business into more markets, email marketing could be a game changer. Aside from being a very green form of marking, (no paper wasted on your part), it’s also extremely cost effective and easy to track and measure.

It’s probably obvious that without an acceptable number of email subscribers, the range and circulation you might be wanting for your marketing message will be out of reach. So here are a few tips to help maximize your email subscriber database.

Understand the Importance of Belonging

Understanding the importance of a human being’s need to belong to a group is the first key element in building a subscriber list. People want to see that others have become committed to your website, blog, etc., so they get that warm fuzzy feeling when they decide to hand over their email address. There are several ways to can use the “need to belong” phenomenon in growing your email list:

• Display subscriber testimonials on your subscription page
• Display post comments of other subscribers
• Display number of times visited, twitter followings, etc.,
• Make subscribers feel as they are subscribing to a specific community

Be Direct

If you’re anything like me, then you hate when people waste your time by beating around the bush. So be direct. Much like making an executive decision, speak in the active voice rather than the passive.

Don’t ask or demand people to subscribe, rather find a direct middle ground, such as: “Enter your email now to get started.” A trick to this is start the request with a definitive verb/command like, “Download your free e-book now”, rather than inanimate phrase, “Free E-book inside.”

Don’t Make Subscribers Regret Subscribing

Realize that your subscribers are a special asset; don’t take them for granted and don’t confound their in-boxes with emails that aren’t at all what they originally signed up for. Even without an actual purchase, this can still conjure up feelings of buyer’s remorse, and is also a good way to lose subscribers.

So keep the content of the email as close to the original promise. Keep the amount of emails minimal; people don’t like seeing fifteen emails from the same person in a two hour span. And always give the option to unsubscribe. It comforts people to know they could always opt out, and it keeps you compliant with Can-Spam regulations.

Understanding your readers on an emotional and psychological level will always make you prepared for moments when that subscribers list is thinning out and it’s time to recharge. More importantly, subscribers find it imperative to subscribe to a good product and this is what they are looking for when they decide to hand over email addresses. So be sincere and good luck.

Photo by Warm ‘n Fuzzy

Permission-based email marketing is extremely effective, but the truth is that it can also be very hard work. Anybody who has tried to build an email list of any size and significance will know this. And so you can imagine a situation where, after all your hard work and investment to build a list of highly targeted recipients, you suddenly notice that only a small fraction of the emails you are sending out are actually reaching their targets.

Chances are that you will have been blocked by some internet service provider (ISP) which makes it virtually impossible for you to send any email message to certain addresses. At this point it hardly matters whether the recipient in question is one of your longest serving customers or not, as long as his ISP has blocked you, your emails will not reach him. This can have a huge negative impact on your business and so the first question we have to ask is how people who are not spammers end up being blocked by an ISP.

Actually there are two main causes of email deliverability problems that you need to worry about. These are spam traps and spam complaints. If your email ends up in a spam trap you will almost certainly get blocked.

But what is a spam trap? This is a special email address used by ISPs and other receivers to catch SPAMMERS. Usually the email address will be one that is not used or accessed by any human and so clearly there is no way you will have received any permission to send email messages to that particular address. And so this will be conclusive evidence that you are a spammer and the ISP will promptly block all your emails.

Sometimes ISPs will use email accounts that have been abandoned to identify spammers to block. This is where you will get caught if you do not look after your list on a regular basis and go for long periods without sending out any communication to your list.

Either way these spam traps serve the same purpose;  and the result will be that you will be completely blocked by that particular ISP from sending any emails in their direction. So if a large percentage of your opt-in email list uses that particular ISP, an equally large percentage of your emails will not be delivered.

The only way out would be for you to remove the offending email addresses. This is not very easy to do because ISPs will never reveal their spam traps.

The other cause of email deliverability problems are persistent spam complaints against you. While no ISP will block you just because of a single spam complaint, that they will take action if they feel that they are too many spam complaints against you. How many is too many? Each ISP has their own standards and criteria but mostly it will be one spam complaint for every 1,000 emails you send out. In most cases they will start off with a temporary punishment like blocking you for a short period, say 72 hours. However if the spam complaints are persistent then there is a chance that they will take the drastic step of blocking your ip address on a long-term basis.

One key thing you can do to minimize your chances of ever ending up in a spam trap is to avoid purchasing email lists. While not all email lists being sold out there are bad the truth is that many of them will usually have outdated email addresses thus dramatically increasing the chances of your email address ending up on somebody’s black list which will greatly harm your email marketing efforts. Build your own lists and make sure that they are all double opt-in.

The other precaution you can take is to ensure that the email lists you build are in constant use and that you do not stay for more than 3 months without communication with your subscribers. Actually, the more regular your emails, the lesser the chances of you ending up in trouble with ISPs. Regular would usually be weekly or every two weeks.

You should also remember that when you stay for long periods of time without sending emails to your lists and then you suddenly resume, chances are high that some of your subscribers will have forgotten about you and will be quick to file spam complaints.

Always remember that your sender reputation is key to the success of your email marketing campaigns and so it makes sense to take every possible precaution to maintain an impeccable reputation and to stay away from the deadly wrath of ISPs.

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In the past few weeks, we’ve been contacted by several different prospects who wanted to hire us to handle their email marketing. That’s not unusual in and of itself, but the fact that these prospects all had the same story set off an “aha moment” for me.

You see, each of these prospects used to do email marketing on a regular basis. And they each considered their email marketing programs to have been successful. And yet they each stopped doing email marketing.

They started hearing the rumors that email marketing “was dead”. So, even though their own open rates had not declined, and their own click-through rates had remained steady, and, in two cases, the web traffic that was attributed to email marketing had actually increased, they still decided to put their efforts into other marketing tactics.

But here it was, months later, and they were having a hard time tracking and measuring those other marketing activities. They couldn’t quite say how effective they had been, they weren’t sure how many clients these other activities had sent their way, and they weren’t really positive that they were spending their money wisely.

So they wanted to get back into email marketing.

But they had been out of that sphere for so long, they didn’t know how to start back up again. So if you, too, have been lured away from email marketing by the promises of social media, or SMS messaging, or daily deal platforms, or whatever, I welcome you back into the fold.

Here are some easy tips for rekindling your email marketing program:

First, have no fear about reaching out to your past subscribers. In most cases, you can get back into their good graces very quickly and effortlessly. In fact, some readers may not have even noticed your absence.

It’s perfectly acceptable to offer an explanation for your lack of email messages over the past weeks, or months, or however long it’s been. If your absence was caused by a financial hiccup, poor time management, or some other sob story, don’t go into the nitty-gritty details. Just say something to the affect of “We apologize for our absence” or “Hope you’ve missed us as much as we’ve missed you”.  Going into too much detail could cause your readers to lose faith in your business, so spare them the details.

If you’ve been absent from email marketing for more than just a few issues or so, it might be necessary to give your readers a brief re-introduction to your services so they will remember what kept them from hitting the unsubscribe button when you were sending out your emails more regularly. Remind them why they like you and describe what you have to offer them.  Be sure to make this section very benefits-rich – more about how you will help your reader than about how great you and your business are.

And finally, don’t think of email marketing as a stand-alone platform. There’s no need to abandon your new marketing activities in order to reintroduce email. In fact, email works great in combination with social media, with your blogging efforts, even with your print marketing campaigns. Don’t think of the various marketing platforms as one-or-the-other, instead, focus on multi-channel efforts.

The fact is, email marketing is still an exceptional tool for small business marketing. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to track and measure, and it’s still very effective. If you’ve fallen victim to the false rumors that email marketing is a dying channel, you should definitely consider reinstating your email marketing program.

Photo by misterbisson

]]> http://www.modernimage.com/blog/email-marketing/how-to-kick-start-your-abandoned-email-marketing-program/feed/ 0 http://www.modernimage.com/blog/email-marketing/why-use-email-marketing-for-your-small-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-use-email-marketing-for-your-small-business http://www.modernimage.com/blog/email-marketing/why-use-email-marketing-for-your-small-business/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:39:56 +0000 Karen Scharf, Small Business Marketing http://www.modernimage.com/blog/?p=1119

As a small business owner, email marketing should be part of your marketing strategy. Although there are innumerable ways to monetize and sell your products from your website, an essential strategy that must be implemented is email marketing. It is probably the single most effective way to build relationships with your target audience, converting prospects into customers.

Over time, one successful marketer after another has proven email marketing to be a highly reliable method of establishing rapport and getting people to know, like, and trust a small business.

Although there are many reasons why this form of marketing works so well, the five main reasons are that it’s personal, it’s quick, it’s automated, it’s inexpensive, and it’s measurable.
Let’s take a look at each one in a little more detail.

Reason #1: Email Marketing Is Personal

Using simple code, it is possible to mention each customer by name because most email marketing software culls this merge information from the list database. Thus, personalization does not take any additional effort. Your customer’s name can be added in the salutation as well as in the body of the email copy. In addition, other personalized data– like city, interests, and occupation, for example– can be applied using mail merge fields. Moreover, lists can also be segmented by this method. What all this means is that your customer believes that you are writing directly to her. This will increase response rates.

Reason #2: Email Marketing Is Quick

In business, it’s a common axiom that “money loves speed”. Essentially, your business will prosper in direct correlation to how efficiently it is run. With email marketing, speed is built into your marketing process.

With email marketing, everything can be done quicker; for instance:

• Templates can be instantly selected from a large list of choices.
• Messages can be loaded into an autoresponder so that the work needs to be only done once. In fact, some marketers have 52 weeks of emails loaded into their autoresponders so that they can market to new customers for a whole year without any additional work.
• The very latest information can be broadcast to all subscribers quickly.

Reason #3: Email Marketing Can Be Automated

If speed is the number one ingredient for small business marketing success, consistency must be a close second. Unfortunately, as human beings we are rarely consistent because life is complicated. We just can’t follow through on a particular task all the time, every time, 100% of the time, with no fail. Software, however, like a machine, does not have this limitation. Software can perform your email marketing tasks reliably, each and every time. Apart from providing consistency, automation also gives your staff the freedom to focus on other tasks that require their attention.

Reason #4: Email Marketing Is Inexpensive

The monthly cost of an email marketing service is usually very small, usually less than $50. This means that your profit margins will always be high with an effective email marketing plan because your operating costs are almost negligible.

Reason #5: Email Marketing Is Measurable

The ability to measure a marketing process will make all the difference to your small business success. There are numerous ways to keep track of how well your email does because most email marketing software tells you who opened the email and who clicked through on the link. This statistical information can be used to weed out poor campaigns and roll out more successful ones.

If you haven’t added email marketing to your small business marketing plan, now is definitely the time to get started.

Be sure to request a copy of our FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read.

30-Day Email Marketing Software Trial

If you’re ready to tackle your own email marketing program, you’ll need a service that will:

• keep you CAN-Spam compliant
• add your new subscribers to your mailing list automatically
• handle your unsubscribe requests the legal way
• and put your prospect communication on auto-pilot

You can get a 30-day FREE trial of the same email service provider that we use for our own business. Just click here to open a new window and activate your FREE trial.

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I am sure you’ve notice that when you order online from any big-name store like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sears, etc, 99% of them ask you to enter your email address. Most of them even make it a requirement in order for your purchase to be processed. (And by the way, no, 99% is not a scientifically base number. It’s simply my own observation; so you might not want to repeat this as a statistical fact.)

But back to the point I was trying to make. These big name stores know what they’re doing when it comes to marketing. They’ve spent the money, they’ve done the research, they’ve compiled the statistics, they’ve hire the MBAs. And they still choose to use email marketing. That alone should be proof positive that email marketing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to promote to targeted customers.

Did you know that it is more than three times easier and less expensive to sell to a repeat customer rather than a brand new one? But, unfortunately, many small business owners never follow up with their customers after they’ve made a purchase. They do a pretty good job of advertising, they’ll spend a lot of money on a display ad, or radio announcement, or direct mail piece. But once the sale is made, they let the customer go.

And that’s so unfortunate, especially when you consider how valuable a current customer is. Not only are they easier and less expensive to advertise to, but they typically buy more often and spend more money. What a shame that so many entrepreneurs don’t take advantage of this.

By implementing an email marketing program, small business owners can easily stay in touch with their current customers, start building relationships, market their products or services, advertise upcoming sales and events, etc.  There are a ton of email programs geared specifically toward entrepreneurs that could have your own email marketing program up and running in no time.

If you haven’t started using email for your own small business marketing, I encourage you to get started this week! There are a few things you’ll want to look for when choosing which service provider to use:

1. I highly suggest that you choose an email marketing system that allows for sequential autoresponders. This means, for example, your customer will receive your first email message on day #1, then he’ll receive your next message on day #3, and the third message on day #5 (or whatever sequence you set up). You only need to set up your messages one time, and it will be sent out automatically to each new customer.
2. You’ll also want a system that allows you to send out regular email newsletters whenever you want. Unlike the sequential autoresponders, newsletters are set up on an as-needed basis and typically sent to your entire list at one time. Let’s say you’re running a big sale, or you just got a new inventory delivery, you can send out an email newsletter and let your customers know. Make sure the system handles HTML newsletters (the ones that look just like a web page) as well as text-based newsletters, and that it will send the appropriate message automatically.
3. Pay attention to the limit on the number of email addresses you can store. If you know your business has over 2,500 customers, you’ll obviously need an email marketing system that can store more than 500 email addresses. However, many systems will charge a few based on the number of email addresses you have in your customer list. If you currently only have the addresses for 271 of your customers, there is no need to pay for 2,500 addresses. Make sure the system will grow with you as your list grows.
4. The system should easily integrate with your website. This basically means that the system will provide you with the code that you need to put on your website in order to start collecting email addresses there. The code will generally be provided as copy-and-paste: you copy it from the email system and paste it into your web page.
5. Look for a system that will allow you to import and export your email address list. If you have a list of 600 names in Excel, you’ll want an easy way to get those names into your email marketing system without having to type in each and every one. Likewise, you’ll want to be able to export your email addresses so you can update your CRM or point of sale software with any addresses that are entered directly at your website.

As I mentioned, there are many email marketing programs that are geared toward small business owners. I personally use 1Shopping Cart and I highly recommend it (you can get a free trial at www.try1SC.com). You might also look into some of the other popular programs, such as aWeber, InfusionSoft, or Constant Contact.

What ever system you decide to use, I encourage you to get started today. Email marketing is easy to do, cost effective, and easy to track. And after all, if it’s good enough for the big-name businesses, it should be good enough for yours.

Few marketing initiatives have as high a marketing ROI (return on investment) as does your email marketing campaign. However, ensuring that email speaks directly to your customer in a way that spurs them to respond, requires the ability to think outside the box. Creative thinking is not just the word of the day, but for every day your company tries to maximize the returns from its email programs. It’s not just about the style of font or the color of the links, but the message itself and how it’s ultimately received by your customers.

Email marketing allows you to deliver a concise message about your company, its approaches and ultimately, its strengths. However, it can only accomplish that if you decide to continually raise the bar on your email marketing campaign’s performance. The status quo no longer applies. Today’s successful email campaigns rely upon more than massive numbers to produce results. So, what are some of the unique ways to improve your email marketing?

Test, test and test some more!

If time is money, then the time your company spends putting together your email campaign is wasted if you don’t take the time to test it first. Use multiple email accounts on different email providers such as AOL, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail etc. Check font, links and image quality before going live. Don’t play with default settings. Have a clear test. Review results and be sure to eliminate those bugs before going live.

Take advantage of new information.

Yesterday’s news is exactly that, yesterday’s news. The most successful email campaigns not only take the opportunity to up-sell & cross-sell different products and services, but always make a point to include new information. That could include upgraded products, new product developments or recent market & industry trends. Make it point to update your customers on the information most pertinent to them and take the time to use your industry’s best business practices to provide your customers with valuable resources.

Be willing to adapt.

Regardless of whether your email campaign is directed towards the general consumer or to B2B customers, adapting means to change and try new initiatives. Have an overstock of products and need to liquidate them immediately? Use your email campaign to give customers the first shot at pricing discounts. Running a customer reward and incentive program? Use email marketing to update members on recent incentives, discounts and credits. Welcome change and the opportunity it provides to upgrade your message.

Granted, email marketing requires a fraction of the financial outlay when compared to conventional marketing approaches. However, your time is wasted if your customers receive an email that is fraught with errors. Take the time to test your email before going live. Continually upgrade your approaches and make your email campaign is about more than just your product or services. Make it about what your company does and how it does it.

Have you ever walked through the “boutique district” of a town, where the streets are lined with little coffee shops and book stores and art galleries? Have you noticed that they are less about what you are shopping for, and more about the experience of shopping there? The cigar shop smells delightful, the cookie shop has recipes you’ve never seen before, and the book store has comfy chairs.

Now think back to the last time that you shopped at a “Big Box” store. The merchandise was cheap, but the experience of shopping there was awful. The underpaid employees ignored you with spite, and there was no place to sit down and rest.

As a marketer, you have a choice: you can imitate a customer-oriented boutique or a cheap Big Box warehouse. If you’re planning an email campaign for a small business, the boutique should be your model, because your mailing list is probably rather small. In this case, your weakness is also your strength.

Here are a few great things about running a “boutique” email campaign:

1) An exclusive list is a superior list. Restrict your list to people who have proven a genuine interest in your product. You could even restrict it to people that have purchased your products. These people will have a much higher response rate than the list of people who signed up because you were offering a freebie. Those people were just looking for free stuff, and that’s all they’ll ever be looking for.

2) When the list is smaller, you can be more responsive. If you send out a million emails at a time, you will soon be so overwhelmed with customer responses that you will stop replying to them. If your email list is smaller, you can take the time to reply to each person. Customers love this!

3) You can offer them what they want. If your list of readers is small and targeted, you can stay in touch with your customers and find out what they want. Pay attention to the feedback you get, and send out a few surveys as well. Then tweak your offerings in response.

4) You can offer consistently excellent quality. A good way to do this is to pre-write content and deliver it at a set time each week. That way, you have the time to make it great, and they’ll click on your email first.

More and more people are using mobile devices to check their email. Unfortunately, many email marketers are still assuming that their readers are viewing email from a PC, so they are sending marketing pieces that read as gibberish on a mobile. Here are a few ways to tweak your email newsletters so that they read well on any platform.

First impressions count. Many mobile devices display the first few words of an email so that readers can quickly decide whether to read it. This is called a pre-header. Make the pre-header work for you by including the user’s name, plus a short tease about what the email contains. Try using a casual tone so that at first glance, the email appears to be from an acquaintance.

To create a pre-header, simply type the desired message into the first few lines of the email, then add the newsletter copy after it. Since the pre-header is usually previewed as plain text no matter what font you use, you can format the pre-header so that it’s small and inconspicuous when the email is opened.

Consider load time. Load time is very important on mobile devices, which don’t have the same super-fast download speeds that PCs have. Send fewer, smaller images which load faster.

Sending an image? Include an alternative in the pre-header. Many mobile users keep their images turned off. If you have images in the body of your email, include a link to an online version of the newsletter, or at least include a short reminder to turn on images.

Include an unsubscribe link in your email. Why? Because most mobile readers are busy–so busy that they forget that they signed up for your list. You don’t want to annoy them by making them delete content that they’ve decided that they don’t want. I know of an organization that takes the opposite route and willfully circumvents all attempts to block their emails. As a result, one of my acquaintances changed his email address just to escape their daily updates–and he complains about them to everyone that will listen. That can’t be good for business.

Tell subscribers why they’re hearing from you. If your pre-header includes a short reminder that they’re getting your email because they signed up for your newsletter, it may prevent them from unsubscribing. This can be particularly important in the first few communications that they receive from you.

Photo by MJIphotos

Email subject lines are the first impression that potential customers get when it comes to email marketing strategies.  Since email subject lines are generally less than 50 characters and most people make a split second decision about whether or not to open the email itself, creating them is a daunting task.

As the creator of an email marketing message you have only seconds to impress your readers.  You have to convince them that your email is not spam, not a virus, and not pointless in just a few words.  If you fail to do this well, your email marketing campaign will fail miserably. That’s a lot or pressure. However, achieving this task isn’t all together impossible.  There are some things that you can do to improve your chances of getting customers to open that email.

Make Your Email Subject Lines Personal

Creating an email subject line that includes personal information is far more likely to get readers to take the plunge and open your message.  You could simply use a subject line such as “Hey Teddy Open This!” and get some significant results, but spammers also use this technique rather rampantly.  Many customers will still ignore subjects like this, thanks to their tarnished reputation.  However, personalization doesn’t stop there.

Using customer purchase history is one way you can personalize your email subject lines without the old boring “Hey Teddy” technique.  For example, if you run a hobby supply shop and your customer regularly purchases knitting supplies, a subject line such as “Knitting Supplies Half-Off Today Only!” is probably going to get her attention pretty quickly.

Other ways of personalizing an email subject line are to invite inactive customers back, with an incentive.  Also if customers have abandoned a shopping cart recently, you may want to remind them of this in the subject line.  This can often lead to a sale; when the customer remembers the abandoned purchase; they are more likely to follow through.

Time is of the Essence

Another smart way to get customers to open an email is by attaching a sense of urgency to the task at hand.  If customers believe that a promotion is only going to be available for a certain day or a limited amount of hours, they are going to be more interested.  Furthermore, if you can convince them that the product is available in limited supply, they are going to be more interested.  The same sort of idea has helped to fuel the day of Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon for years.

Test the Waters

Using a technique that most email marketers refer to as A/B marketing can help to improve your marketing results.  The way it works is that you create two different subject lines promoting the same product.  They need to be different in wording but promote the same product for this little test to work the best.  Then you take around 25% of your customer base and divide them into even groups. Send one group subject line A and the other group subject line B.  Once you have done this you can determine which subject line was more popular by the amount of customers that responded. Whichever line garnered the most attention is the one to roll out to the rest of your mailing list. Voila!

A/B testing can be used in a variety of ways.  It can be used to determine if positive or negative lines work best, if your old favorite line works as well as a new line that is making a lot of buzz, and if personalization really works for your business. It is a valuable tool to keep in your marketing bag.

Because email subject lines are critical to the success of your small business marketing program, they should not be taken lightly. Take the time to develop and test your email subject lines and you’re sure to see your email marketing results improve.

Photo by djwaldow

When you send your email marketing messages, are you ever alarmed by SMTP error codes?

What are these email error codes and what do they mean? Should it be a cause for alarm or can it be addressed by a simple quick fix?

Before panic sets in, first let’s understand these codes and what they mean to your email marketing program. Otherwise known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, SMTP is in charge of sending out your email messages. So an SMTP error code basically means that your email did not get to the recipient. Keep in mind, not all SMTP codes are error codes. However, the “sent codes” are rarely ever seen, and the codes that you receive in your bounce back message generally indicate an error.

SMTP codes usually consist of three digits that carry different meanings. The digits specify what has gone wrong, in other words each digit gives some form of diagnosis to the email sending failure that happened.

The first digit indicates if the command was established and processed. However, there are five different values for the first digit, which includes (1) Command accepted by mail server but confirmation message is required, (2) Task was completed without errors, (3) Mail server accepted the request but requires more information, (4) Temporary failure encountered by mail server and you have to try again, and (5) Fatal error encountered, Mail server cannot process request. You will most likely encounter error digits (4) and (5).

Meanwhile, the second digit can mean syntax errors, status of connection, mail server status or information reply. The third digit of the SMTP error code contains the details of the status of the mail transfer.

Common SMTP Codes

Let’s take a look at the most helpful SMTP codes that indicate the status of your messages:

211 – System status message or system help reply

220 – The SMTP Service is ready

250 – Requested action accepted and completed

251 – The user is not local to the server but will forward the message anyway

252 – Recipient not verified but mail server attempts delivery

354 – Indicates mail server is ready to take message or start mail input and end with a dot

However, the SMTP codes that you really want to pay attention to are the error codes, and here are the most common:

421 – Service not available, closing transmission channel and service to shut down

450 – Mailbox busy or unavailable, thus requested mail action was not taken

451 – Server error, requested action aborted

452 – Insufficient system storage, requested action aborted

500 – Command unrecognized due to syntax error

501 – Syntax error in parameters or arguments

502 – Command not implemented

503 – Mail server encountered bad sequence of commands

504 – Command parameter not implemented

550 – Mailbox unavailable, requested action aborted

551 -  User not local to server

552 -  Storage allocation exceeded, requested mail action aborted

553 – Mailbox name invalid, requested action aborted

554 – Transaction failed

While these error codes are the most common, the ones you’ll encounter the most often are those with the 55-digit range, the most common of which is the 550 SMTP error code. The 550 code is usually generated when you’ve sent your message to an improper email address, and simply double checking the email address and resending the message will fix the problem.

If you’re doing any type of email marketing, SMTP error codes are not something to take lightly. If you consistently send messages that are getting bounce back, the receiving internet service provider – in other words, where your email is getting sent – could decide to blacklist your own email address or IP address. This could prevent all of your future email messages to that ISP, even those sent to other addresses, from getting delivered.

SMTP error codes can give you excellent insight into the technicalities of your email marketing program. Unfortunately, most marketers ignore them. By paying attention to your bounce back messages, you can usually catch mistakes and fix them, before you end up on an email blacklist.

The above image is from Dave Malkoff. Thanks Dave!