I was also getting to a point where potential clients were beginning to judge me on size. The viewpoint that I couldn’t get the job done because I wasn’t big enough (not like that, calm down) was very frustrating – and in my opinion a load of nonsense. Nevertheless, those views weren’t going to change and so I’d reached the stage where I needed some help. I needed to hire my first employee.

Despite the pressure, hiring someone was still a big decision. Could I afford the salary? Would they drain away my profit margin? What happened if the extra capacity didn’t generate new contracts? Could I afford to pay someone year-on-year, as well as myself?

I wanted assurance so I wrote out some calculations based on potential new work vs increased costs, but, to be honest; at that stage it was still speculative. It was about belief and taking a bit of a punt.  I had to ask myself what I wanted? I set up a company to build a business. I didn’t set it up just to do nice work or flatter my own ego. I wanted the business to make money. My big fear was becoming the company’s bottleneck. So I reckoned, long-term, I needed staff who could deliver the work, eventually, without me altogether. Decision made!

The preparation, interviews and hires

I got someone in to help me with employment contracts. This was absolutely crucial, not least because the laws are so complicated these days and it’s very easy get into hot water. I’m so glad that I spent the £300 on a decent HR consultant as it’s probably saved me a fortune in the long run. I can whole heartedly recommend the Chris Wilkinson of the HR Dept in this respect.

The critical factor, of course, was being able to find the right person. I used all the free channels I could like social media, universities and local industry group Meetdraw. I’d taken the decision early on not to spend what little resources I had on employment agencies, they are useful but not cost effective in the beginning.

I ended up with around 35 applications but, with it being my first appointment, I felt compelled to interview every single candidate. Despite being time consuming, this actually turned out to be a great plan, as I found a second contender who I would have written off based on his CV.

So this gave me two winners but a real dilemma in choosing one for the position. They had different strengths, different experience and different education. In almost every way they were opposites. When I said I was taking a bit of a punt, I actually super-sized myself to go double or quits! Much to my own surprise I employed both of them. Now that was scary, but I just couldn’t pass up on the opportunity and thankfully they have both won me work which, as a sole trader, I could never have contemplated.

Since then I have hired another six staff and as a rule only employ people who are smarter than me. Some business owners struggle with this concept, but you won’t get anywhere by wanting to know more than everyone else on your team.

Looking after the new team

Being a young boss can be a difficult balance at times. Although I want to be a friend to my team, I have to constantly remind myself that I won’t always get invited to the pub because, no matter what, I’m the ‘big scary boss’. In fact this is a good thing, you shouldn’t set up a business to make friends, it’s there to make money, and there are times when you might have to make difficult decisions about staff to support that goal. If you’re best mates, that can cloud your judgement.

Despite that, and at the risk of sounding mushy, as soon as I hire someone I want to look out for them, not just because I want to hang on to them but because I want them to love their job. I think that comes from having worked for some idiots in the past and being determined not to make Studioworks one of those places.  I’m always trying to improve working conditions, benefits, surroundings (check out the recent rebrand and office revamp), fun, happiness, flexibility and these are things that mostly cost nothing but mean a lot.

All this sounds like a grand plan but, really, I just give my team the tools to do their job effectively and let them get on with it.  At first that was a terrifying prospect, but in time it’s paid to let go, recruit well and have trust in my staff. It’s freed up a lot of my time to run the business and stopped me being the bottleneck in the operation.

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As a company we’ve grown a lot in the past year, taking in a number of new employees and skills. This growth was great for the company, but we’d outgrown the old branding developed when we started in 2009. As a company we felt that this no longer reflected our approach and it was time for a refresh.

We started by going back to basics by redefining what the company stood for, our values and what we were striving to achieve and become, we also developed a clearer brand image and logo along with a freshly revamped website to showcase us as a company and put the work we do at the heart.

Along with the new brand we were also working on an office redesign, with help from Steve at Burtt-Jones & Brewer. We plotted and planned then set a rather tight schedule of 4 weeks to get it all complete for the event.

It’s amazing what an experienced and capable team can achieve with a deadline looming. We enlisted some help from our great local suppliers Dorset Digital Print and Broadview as well as Burtt-Jones Brewer as I already mentioned. The whole team put in a lot of effort but I really think it paid off.

I’d have to admit though the last parts of the office arriving on the morning of the event was a little too close for comfort. If you’d like to see what we did on the brand or in the office pop in for a chat; we’ve a lovely comfy sofa and beanbags to have our coffee on.

Food and Nibbles

Networking

Jon relaxing

who-we-are

The Setup

The Office

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Browser

A browser is the name for the software you use to view a website. When you go to www.studioworks.co.uk you are using a browser to view the website. There are many different types of browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome are the most common.

Client Side / Client Facing

This is a term used to represent any area of your website that is accessible by your customers such as the home page.

Back End

This refers to your administration area which you use to update your website, this area requires a password to access.

Database

A database is used to store all your website content e.g. blog posts, page, product information. The content will then be retrieved from the database and displayed on the website.

Bugs

Bugs in the system refers to either problems with the logic in the code  (Obviously not ours ) or due to unforeseen requirements. Bugs are in every piece of software especially in the early stages of development. We rigorously test our code before deployment and employ code tracking to immediately alert us to any problems.

Framework

A framework is a software platform that developers use to create reusable software. Using a framework means that any developer who knows the framework can easily understand the system, if no framework is used the developer must learn the underlying logic of the system. Using a framework reduces the time it takes to develop applications, which reduces cost, thats why StudioWorks use Zend Framework 2.

Cashing / Cached

Cashing is the process of saving sections of the website to your computer which do not change such as the logo. This prevents the browser downloading the logo each time you view a page, this increases the speed of the website.

API

An API or Application Programming Interface is an interface between two applications. For example should you wish other websites to be able to fetch or send information to your website an API would be used as the interface between the two websites. An example of an API is the Facebook API, this allows you to receive and update customers Facebook page, with permission by the user.

Gremlins!

Gremlins are horrible furry little creatures, should any Bugs arise these Gremlins are surely the culprits!

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Our connector helps users of WHMCS to easily generate targeted Campaign Monitor lists of subscribers based on the products they buy, dynamically map lists based on products thereby allowing you to focus the marketing power of Campaign Monitor.

This works out perfect for both site owners and their subscribers, campaigns aren’t generically sent out to your subscribers and they will only receive campaigns related to products they’ve bought, it’s a win win.

If you’re looking to integrate these two services head over to our WHMCS to Campaign Monitor Connector page to find out more, if you have any questions about this or any other products or services please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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For those less technical folk, a web application framework basically provides a platform on top of which applications can be built in a structured manner (thus eliminating bad practices and ‘spaghetti code‘).

Why use a Framework?

It would be crazy to assume that a framework will solve every problem so we always make decisions on how to tackle a problem on a project-by-project basis. However, we believe that as a company and as a team of individual developers, we should have an excellent technical grounding and good fundamental understanding of at least one cutting-edge web development methodology.

Build a framework?

A few of our developers already have experience in building frameworks so at first this seemed like a good idea. However, we decided against this for a number of reasons. Top of this list was, why re-invent the wheel? Most of the PHP frameworks available employ some of the best engineers in the world who have spent a lot of time and money developing their frameworks. It would be silly to try and replicate this effort when there are frameworks out there ready for us to use.

Choosing a Framework

The basic process we used was to list our requirements then find a solution that best fits our needs. So, these are the requirements that we came up with (in no particular order)…

• Reducing costs and speed up development - ultimately allowing us to deliver more projects on time and on budget.
• Further improve our products by increasing the quality of code.
• Be on the cutting edge of technology and development techniques.
• Allow our designers and developers to work closer together.
• Further improve the ease of testing.

Our Chosen Framework

Zend have recently released the much anticipated version 2 of their Object Oriented, MVC (Model View Controller) style PHP Framework – Zend Framework 2 (ZF2 for short). This latest iteration of the 5 year-old framework makes use of the latest and greatest features of PHP 5.3+ to provide a solid foundation to almost any web project. As a company Zend is a key contributor to PHP and the creator of the core PHP scripting engine and ZF2 is currently their flagship web development framework. It is fully Object Oriented, it uses MVC and provides us with the following benefits…

Rapid development - ZF2 allows developers, like us, to deliver great quality applications quickly, on time and on budget.

Code re-use, testing, extensibility and flexibility - By default OOP MVC frameworks allow for maximum code reuse but ZF2′s new modular structure makes this even easier whilst keeping everything neat and tidy at the same time. This also allows for easier unit testing, it is infinitely extensible and it is extremely flexible.

Vast amounts of documentation - The number of available resources and components available to use is huge and growing steadily. Zend’s own ZF2 documentation is extensive. There are more than 500 pages of documentation including tutorials, reference guides, and API documentation.

Community support - Zend’s community following is vast. There are forums and re-useable modules being developed all the time. It also means that any ZF2 or PHP developer with knowledge of MVC development can jump in and lend a hand and instantly know what to do.

Quality - ZF2 follows industry best practices which will help us to develop top applications to our full potential and to the best possible quality. No more unruly or cryptic spaghetti code!

Well known and trusted - ZF2 is well known and trusted by some of the biggest names on the internet (including Cisco and the BBC).

Drawbacks

As with any third-party solution there are, of course, drawbacks. Chief among which is the learning curve for those developer who’ve not used Zend before. Fortunately our developers are well use to Object Oriented PHP and MVC so its not such a big issue for us but anyone new to these design patterns may find themselves banging their heads against the table for a good while before being able to produce even simple applications.

Roundup

In our on-going quest for quality, speed and efficiency we’ve decided to adopt Zend Framework 2 as our PHP framework of choice for bespoke development projects. We’re looking forward to making the most of this cutting edge technology and all of the benefits that a structured OOP MVC framework will bring. This is a fantastic opportunity our clients to benefit from top quality projects delivered on time and on budget.

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studioworks.co.uk QR code

I’m personally surprised how many of these things pop up all over the place given the feedback I get from everyone around me, and not just all my creative type buddies but non-geeky people also. Unless it’s just my corner of the world, I really struggle to see how these engage users more, mainly because no one knows what a QR code is let alone how to make use of it. A Ypulse survey found that 64% of school and college students didn’t know what a QR code was, and of the remaining 36% less than one in five had ever bothered to scan one.

User Experience & Engagement

You see I think the issue is that, they look odd and have no description with them usually other than something like “scan me” which doesn’t really give me the hook I need to then get out my phone, unlock it, find the barcode scanner app, try to line it up and then wait for the results. It’s just not a very slick or intuitive experience. I think it’s also just possible that people are using QR codes to try and tick that ‘using the latest technology’ box without really looking at the results it helps to generate, or not.

Although I think the experience with QR codes could be better, I think this is mainly down to phone manufacturers to sort out. Some kind of ‘quick scan’ button or something. After all over 40% of us carry the things (Neilsen, 2011), there must be a market for this?

OK so maybe we can convince manufacturers to implement this? Well no I don’t think we can. With the rise of NFC (Near Field Communication) chips that will do a lot more than a QR code already, why would they put in the effort. With NFC enabling things like touch payments with your mobile, these are set to become much larger than the humble QR code. NFC can also be built into things like stickers, displays etc, exactly where you are finding QR codes now.

Technicalities

OK I forgot to mention one thing, QR codes are free (make a QR code here) and NFC isn’t but then again QR codes do have their gremlins. The biggest of which is light conditions, if you try to scan a code in dim light it can be very hard to get the scanner to pick up the code so you end up fiddling more than if the poster just gave you the URL it was trying to point you to in the first place. In an experiment by Lab42 only 13% of people were able to scan a code given to them due to various technical or environmental difficulties.

Even before environmental factors effect the scanning, there is the problem that people can’t simply use their phone’s camera to scan a code. They need to first download a special QR code scanner app to their smartphone or have one of a few phones that do this out of the box. There are a host of different scanning apps out there and picking one that works well can sometimes be a challenge in itself. Its no surprise then that a study by comScore showed that only 6.2% of smartphone owners ever have scanned a QR code successfully.

To sum up. If we imagine one thousand visitors attended an exhibit that used QR codes, only 400 would have smartphones (40%) of which only 25 would have knowledge of the technology to read the codes (6.2%) and only 3 people would successfully scan the code due to technical difficulties (13%). Oh dear.

There is a better way though

QR codes can work in some cases though. OK so I may not have given that impression above but I think with some simple changes you could get much more from your codes and above all, accurately measure the results those codes are yielding. Simple labels such as “Scan the QR code to see last years event highlights (1 min video)” lets visitors know what they get for the effort of scanning the code. That QR code should then direct the user to a URL that is being tracked in something like Google Analytics so all successful scans of it can be tracked and some information gathered about its use. I also think if you are using QR codes extensively in public attractions like museums, you need to consider things like free WiFi so all visitors can get onto the net to use the code. International visitors paying roaming charges in particular will be thankful you’ve done this.

If you are tracking your QR code use and getting encouraging statistics, I would keep using them, you are obviously in a market where smartphone use is high and user ability is equally good – keep doing what your doing. If your not tracking your QR code use specifically, and by this I mean each and every code separately, then why not?

The post QR Codes: Use them or lose them? appeared first on Studioworks.

The Top 10 Email Marketing Tips

Despite what you may hear, email marketing is a complicated process with many moving parts. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a successful email marketing program or campaign while keeping things relatively simple. We’ve narrowed down the ten email marketing tips that you absolutely must remember. If you follow them, you certainly won’t fail!

Email Marketing Tips No.1: Make Sure Your Email Has Obvious Links

The purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page, product page or website. It’s really that simple to define the main purpose of an email. Without driving clicks to your page or website, users can’t convert to sign-ups or customers. The key to accomplishing this is, quite simple, capitalize on every moment where a user may feel compelled to click. Include lots of links (at least one per paragraph of text) and make sure that your links look like links. Using strong calls to action and even authoritative “click here” messaging will also help you.

Takeaway Message: It’s a best practice to have few main links but to make sure that those links are obvious to the user.

Email Marketing Tips No.2: Minimize Your Use of Images

Always keep in mind that an email is not a print mail piece. Many (if not most) of your recipients will not see the images included in your email, which means that every image you include can be wasted space. Use well-coded html instead of image heavy design. Never send an email that is simply one big image and certainly don’t put any messaging in an image that a user must see to complete the action you want from an email (i.e. “click here” or “order now” messages).

Takeaway Message: Use images sparingly, rely on html to enhance the look of your email and never use an image to convey a critical or important message.

Email Marketing Tips No.3: Make It Easy to Unsubscribe

It may seem counter intuitive to make it easy for a user to leave your mailing list, but the other option is much less appealing. When users get frustrated while trying to figure out how to remove their email from your list, they eventually just start to flag your email as spam. Every user who notes your email as being spam counts against your sender reputation with email providers and makes it harder (and sometimes impossible) to get your email into the inbox instead of the junk folder.

Takeaway Message: Have clear, easy-to-find unsubscribe links that require minimal action from the user to complete the task of unsubscribing.

Email Marketing Tips No.4: Follow Spam Tips EVERY Time You Send Email!

We’ve also covered in detail the best ways to avoid getting flagged as spam and removed from your users’ inboxes, but we can’t emphasize enough how important it is to follow those steps. More importantly, it’s important to follow them from the beginning of your email marketing effort and to follow them every single time you send. We know that it’s tempting to send a harder sales email that trends against some of our advice for staying out of the spam folder, but it only takes one email that looks like its high spam to keep you out of the inbox for weeks, months or years afterwards.

Takeaway Message: Even if it means your email isn’t as effective as a sales tool, following all of the steps to avoid being flagged as spam is absolutely, unquestionably critical with every send.

Email Marketing Tips No.5: Maximize Your Email Template Dimensions

You don’t have a lot of space in a person’s inbox to convey a message, and most of your users will be viewing your email in a preview pane with the images turned off. Make sure that your html email template isn’t more than 600 pixels wide and that you clearly get your value proposition and at least one link into the first 100 pixels of height. It won’t look as nice as putting a shiny header graphic up there, but it will yield better results. Also, consider a secondary column on the right or left hand side in order to get more information above the fold of an email preview pane!

Takeaway Message: Design for what your email will look like in a 600×200 pixel space without images loaded! How it looks in those dimensions with that restriction is how must users will see the final email.

Email Marketing Tips No.6: Keep Your Text Short and Easy to Scan

Most users aren’t going to read the full text of your email. They’re going to scan it for key points that they may be interested in. Keep your text short (very small paragraphs or bullets) and use font bolding and additional colors to highlight words or phrases that you know will be important to your users and clients. Too much text will get your email deleted just about as fast as anything, and it creates more risk for triggering spam filters.

Takeaway Message: Less is more! Content may drive the internet, but it doesn’t improve email performance. Write concisely, user trigger and keywords and make sure that your most important messages are highlighted or bolded.

Email Marketing Tips No.7: Keep Your Email List Clean

There’s no value to not taking the time and making the effort to make sure that you’re removing bad email addresses from your house list. Making sure that incorrectly formatted email addresses are caught when somebody signs up and then “pruning” addresses that are returned as undeliverable, non-existent or with full inboxes from your email list before the next send isn’t optional if you want to have a successful email marketing program. If your list starts to show a higher percentage of undeliverable email addresses, email providers will flag you as spam.

Takeaway Message: Even if it creates more work for you, make sure that you’re pruning your list and removing bad emails from it. The result if you don’t will put you in the spam folder!

Email Marketing Tips No.8: Properly Use Alt Text, Title and Linking with Images

Because using images in email can create dead space, maximizing the code behind those images is critical. Make sure that ALL of your images have both alt text and title text as different browsers will read those two types of text differently (Alt text and title text are the text messages that appear when an image doesn’t load or when somebody hovers over an image with a mouse). Also, make sure that all of your images are actually links to your landing page or website. This way, at a minimum, your potential image dead space can still drive traffic to your destination.

Takeaway Message: Make sure that all of your images are properly coded. This means not only making sure that the image height and width is properly defined but also that the image has alt text, title text and is linked to a webpage or landing page.

Email Marketing Tips No.9: Send Test Emails BEFORE Sending to Main List

There’s nothing worse than sending an email and then finding out that it went right to the spam folder or that something in your email layout broke in Hotmail’s email viewer or Outlook’s preview pane. Before you send an email to your entire list, send a test version to a test account using each of the big email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Live/MSN and any account using an Outlook client). If there are any significant segments of your list using another email provider, you’ll want to include that in your test as well. If you catch any errors, there’s still time to start disassembling your email and fixing them, or remove a problematic segment of your email list.

Takeaway Message: Catching an error in an email sent to a seed address is useless if it happens after you’ve already sent to the main list. Use your seed addresses to test send to and check formatting and deliverability before you send to the main list.

Email Marketing Tips No.10: Make Sure to Piggyback a Text Version

We’ve previously discussed how to decide if you should use an html email or a text only email, and our recommendation is that you use both. But, at a minimum, if you are using an html email you must piggyback a text only version of the email onto your send. A number of people do opt to view email as text only, and, increasingly, people are reading text-based email only on mobile phones.

Takeaway Message: Make sure, no matter what, that your html email has a piggybacked text email attached to it! It’s that simple!

Bonus Tip! Always Ask Users to Add You to Their Contact List!

At every opportunity, remind users that they can be assured that they won’t miss out on the valuable information that they love receiving from you if they add your send address to their email contacts list. The more people you get doing that, the better your deliverability will be!

The post Why email marketing should be simple appeared first on Studioworks.

Embedding Images In Email: Why Should I Second Guess It?

Without a doubt, the number one error we see in companies who want to begin an email marketing program is the desire to design an email that looks exactly like a webpage or, worse yet, like a print postal mailer by embedding images in email without any hesitation.

Heliomail understands why email designers like images. An email, just like any other piece of marketing material, looks better when it’s got appealing images in it. If it displays properly to the end-user, it probably converts better as well. The problem, as you’re about to see, is that most end-users won’t see the images and graphics you embedded. As an added bonus, embedding images in email t often get you sent to the spam folder.

Embedding Images In Email: Is It the Only Way to Include Images in Email?

Actually, there are two ways to include images in email. The first way ensures that the user will see the image, even if in some cases it’s only as an attachment to the message. This method is exactly what we call as “embedding images in email ” in daily life. Essentially, you’re attaching the image to the email. The plus side is that, in one way or another, the user is sure to get the image. While the downside is two fold. Firstly, spam filters look for large, embedded images and often give you a higher spam score for embedding images in email (Lots of spammers use images to avoid having the inappropriate content in their emails read by the spam filters.). Secondly, if you pay to send your email by weight or kilobyte, this increases the size of your message. If you’re not careful, it can even make your message too big for the parameters of the email provider.

The second way to include images (and the far more common way) is the same way that you put an image on a web page. Within the email, you provide a url that is the reference to the image’s location on your server, exactly the same way that you would on a web page. This has several benefits. Firstly, you won’t get caught for spamming or for your message “weighing” too much because of the image. Secondly, you can make changes to the images after the email has been sent if you find errors in them. On the flip side, your recipient will need to actively turn on image viewing in their email client to see your images.

Embedding Images In Email: What Does “Have Image Viewing Turned On” Mean?

Unfortunately, even as Heliomail speaks, image urls and image files are being used to plant viruses on computers and to collect information about people. For this reason, most email service providers, such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail, set the default status on delivered messages to block images.

What a user sees when this happens is a large, white, empty space (with your image alt or title text if you’ve included it) and often a message to right click to download the images. Most people spend less than a minute scanning an email while they decide whether to read it or delete it. If you’re email is full of images, they don’t see much that allows them to make a decision. Chances are, unless users are already very loyal to your brand and interested in your content, you are about to get deleted.

Email users can overwrite the “images off” default in their email, but most of them don’t. Most studies and surveys reveal that anywhere from 40% to 60% of users read email with the images turned off. Any way you cut it, that’s almost half of your recipient base who won’t see your email with the images embedded as you intended. And that’s not even counting mobile phone users!

Embedding Images In Email: How Much Do Mobile Phone Users Impact Image Viewing?

Increasingly, mobile phone users impact your email viewing greatly. Recent studies suggest that up to 20% of your users check their mail on text-only mobile phone applications. If your email is a single image, or is based on a great deal of images, you won’t resolve to those users at all.

So, What Should I Do?

Surprisingly, Heliomail would like to tell you that you should use images. You should just use very few of them and be careful where you put them.

Images definitely have a marketing impact. A portion of your viewers will see them and turn them on. If you just follow these basic steps with images, you’ll be fine. Also, remember that you can do a lot of things just using html tables and colors that will make your email visually appealing AND deliverable.

The Less Than 25% Rule: No more than 25% of the real estate in your email template should be image-based. You want at least ¾ of the email to be readable without images.

Alt and Title Text: This is the text that is contained within your image url that appears when the image doesn’t load (and in some cases appears when your mouse hovers over a graphic). Having this text beneath your graphics is important because you can still convey the message that was in the graphic even if the graphic doesn’t load.

No Trapped Messages! The basic rule is this: “If it’s important that your readers know a piece of information, it cannot be trapped in an image.” All important information, such as price, product title, value proposition and expiration date, must be in html text. This includes “Click to order” buttons. If those are images, you’ll have users looking for where they’re supposed to click, and possibly not finding it. Those should be html buttons.

Images are an important part of any marketing campaign or collateral. However, email presents challenges in that you can’t control how the end product displays to the user in all cases. It’s better to have an email that can be delivered and seen by the user than to have one that looks fantastic, but only when it’s loaded on your computer screen and not when it’s in an inbox!

No matter what email marketing strategy you are taking, the first step to ensure a successful email campaign is to choose a reliable email sending partner. Heliomail, offers you powerful Email Marketing Software, which is both a great long-term and short-term solution to improving your email marketing program to a new level.

The post Don’t use images for critical information in email appeared first on Studioworks.

The idea of this featured originally named the “Friendshake” is to quickly add details for people you’ve just met, which can come in handy, especially when you want to distinguish someone you’ve just met from anyone else with the same name online. This feature requires both users to sign in to the featured so avoids creepy Facebook stalking (as long as you do don’t leave it on!).

There are a number of apps with similar functionality including “Find My Friends” for IOS however the integration with Facebook is what makes this a feature instead of a quick 5 minute fad. This helps bridge the gap between online and in person interaction and will no doubt come on handy at Social Networking events.

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What is CAN-SPAM and Why is It Important?

It’s possible that you don’t even know what CAN-SPAM is. Maybe you think that it involves a popular processed meat product. However, if you’re going to send email to your customers, CAN-SPAM is a very important law that you need to know about. It governs whether the email you send is considered a legal communication or an illegal piece of unsolicited spam. If you don’t abide by it, you’re subject to fines and penalties from the U.S. federal government.

In this article, Heliomail will give you the history of what CAN-SPAM is and tell you what you need to do in order to achieve CAN-SPAM compliance.

A Touch of History: The Passing of the CAN-SPAM Law

In 2003, as inboxes were being flooded with unwanted email spam, the United States federal government took action with the passing of the CAN-SPAM law. CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. Essentially, the law set forth a number of requirements that need to be met in order to send commercial email to customers.

It’s important to note that the law makes a difference between a commercial email and transactional email. If you’re responding to a customer service inquiry or sending an automated email receipt of purchase, you don’t need to worry about CAN-SPAM compliance. However, any email that contains marketing information or a customer solicitation must comply with the requirements of the law (and that includes promoting links to content on advertising-driven websites). Each individual violation of a rule in the CAN-SPAM compliance requirements can leave you open to a fine of up to $16,000, so following the rules is important! Fortunately, there’s an easy checklist for you to follow.

CAN-SPAM Compliance Checklist

Once you get past all the government language, CAN-SPAM Compliance isn’t that complicated. If you just follow 7 simple steps, you’ll be completely safe.

Step 1: Be Who You Say You Are!

You can’t pretend to be another website or company just to get a user to open an email (or to avoid emails going to junk). This is a popular trick offshore spammers use to get through spam filters, but it’s illegal. The email address that you send from (the “from” address and the reply-to address) must be your own. The domain that you promote in the email must either be your own or be one that you are authorized to promote, and it MUST be the domain that you say it is (i.e.: you can’t tell people that they are going to a site that sells coffee and then send them to an adult entertainment site). Basically, the information that a customer sees in the email has to actually be you or your business.

Step 2: Don’t Lie in the Subject Line

This one is easy. If your email subject line says that opening the email will give the user a daily quote of the day, then that’s what needs to be in the email. You can’t use a subject line that promises a discount on groceries and then present an email that promotes anything other than a discount on groceries. In short, your subject line has to be truthful. The terminology of the law is that your subject line can’t be “misleading”.

Step 3: Tell Them That You’re an Advertisement

You can do this many ways, including small print at the bottom of the email. However, somewhere in your email, you need to make it clear that the email is an advertisement. It may seem obvious to you, but the law says that you need to make it explicit at least once in the email.

Step 4: You Need to Have an Actual Physical Location

This one is also simple. Somewhere in your email you must provide a physical postal address (street or postal box) where you can receive communications via mail. This ensures that you are not a scammer and also allows customers a way of sending a verified communication to you to remove themselves from your mailing list.

Step 5: You Have to Let People Know How to Opt-Out

You cannot (and should not) send a marketing email without letting users know how to stop you from sending future emails to them. This is called allowing email Opt-Out of your email list. This is typically done at the bottom of the email. The only actual CAN-SPAM Compliance requirement is that it be easy for an ordinary person to recognize and read this information. Also important is the “universal unsub rule”. If you have multiple newsletters or email lists, you may allow a person to unsub from only one list. However, you MUST provide the option of unsubscribing from ALL future marketing email of any kind. Unsubscribing from all future marketing email is called a “universal unsub”.

Step 6: When People Want Off Your Email List, Take Them Off.

When somebody requests an opt-out or unsub from your email list or lists, you have up to 10 business days to remove them. When you send an email, the information or link to unsubscribe from that email must be valid for 30 days. You’re not allowed to charge a fee for removal from the list or require any information other than the user’s email address. Most importantly, the user can’t be required to do anything other than send you a reply email or visit a SINGLE webpage to unsubscribe. Finally, once a user has unsubscribed, you may not under any circumstance sell or rent that person’s email to anybody else. This is the most complicated part of the law, but it’s also the most important. And, if you don’t honor it, it’s the easiest to get in trouble for because people will get upset if they continue to receive unwanted email from you.

Step 7: Make Sure You Know What Your Marketing Agency is Doing!

Also make sure that you know what your affiliates are doing! Make sure that you know what anybody who sends email on your behalf is doing! You are legally responsible for the actions of anybody you hire or authorize to send marketing email on your behalf.

There you go. Follow these simple seven steps, and you will be CAN-SPAM compliant. Most third-party email platform providers will actually make sure that any of these criteria that can be automated (such as physical address, unsub links and removing unsubscribed members) are automated. However, it’s in your best interest to always review your marketing emails before they go out to make sure that they meet every criterion on the checklist!

No matter what email marketing strategy you are taking, the first step to ensure a successful email campaign is to choose a reliable email sending partner. Heliomail, who provides this complimentary tutorial on email marketing, offers you powerful Email Marketing Software, which is both a great long-term and short-term solution to improving your email marketing program to a new level.

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