Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

https://www.postmaster.aol.com/

First off, AOL doesn't care if your email gets through or not. AOL changes the rules almost daily, and from personal experience...they could care less if email from outside the AOL system gets through to their subscribers. What AOL will act upon is if an AOL customer can't email another AOL customer. It seems AOL has a bias if email between AOL accounts does not get through...hmm....me thinks perhaps its a corporate strategy that EVERYONE should be using AOL?

Anyhow, AOL is a giant PITA to deal with. I advise my clients that if they want to make sure AOL messages get through...set up a seperate AOL email list. Sign up with AOL's service...and use your AOL account to send email from. If it doesn;t get through, call their support number and raise heck....after all...you are an AOL customer and you are paying for the service. :-)

Another method is to have all your AOL recipients add you to their 'approved' list or add you as a person in their 'friends' list.

When sending to your AOL list, keep the number of emails being sent small (under 100 or 75 per block). Change up the send rate from time to time. If you have multiple IP addresses, use them. AOL is monitoring their incoming mail server, and if they see a lot of email streaming in from one mail server or one IP...they will add the domain, the ip, or the email address to a 'sand box' and slowly choke off the inflow. Be sure you are changing domains, ip's or send rates...and you might be lucky enough to escape detection. I doubt it though.

AOL has become so difficult, I simply delete all AOL email addresses in my lists or refuse to send email to them. In my biased opinion, AOL is simply internet lite or ISP service for folks who cannot use a real internet service providor. Ask yourself, is this the type of customer I'd want to encourage using the Internet?

My two cents.....

Darcy Moen
Customer Loyalty Network

We send out emails in relatively small batches and we mail-merge each one with the contact details, including their address. They are sent out sequentially and fairly slowly, using either Maximizer’s “Text only” email merge facility (Which executes the batches through Outlook or other MAPI or VIM clients) or we set up a local SMPT server and use the Marketing Campaign manager to send out HTML merged emails.

The keys to deliverability appear to be:

Personalisation – each email is addressed to the recipient in both the header and in the text. I like to include the full address, but that is my choice.

Differentiation – Each email is different to the next by dint of the specific merge fields

Few Graphics – a lot of filters, AOL included bounce emails which are predominantly images.

Batches of < 500 – we can do larger, but our own ISP needs to be notified!

Do them slowly. Setting Outlook or the SMPT server to send only 5 or 10 emails a minute is tedious if you are in a hurry, but it improves delivery.

Sort the list on email domain and then split out the AOL ones and re-distribute them evenly amongst the batches. Don’t send out 500 AOL emails in one batch next door to each other.

Capture your bounce-backs and analyse them. We use KnowledgeSync or Workflow Automation to do this. Split out the not-known email addresses – they are duds. Take all the other refused emails and test them against a different sending address in test batches of 10. If these get through, pursue your case with AOL to permit your domain as a recognised permission based email list user.

Be dutiful about those who request “Do Not Email” as the various ISP’s will block you first and ask questions later if they receive a complaint. On that matter, maintain a dialogue with AOL as it has been known for competitors to issue specious complaints in order to thwart your legitimate campaigns.

I had the pleasure of sitting with a client last week and showing him how to do that lot in Maximizer. We did the first email campaign at the end of the consultancy session and for the first time ever, he was able to see his emails go out, the results come back in and see the failures analysed and if possible corrected before his very eyes. It was very satisfying!

Good luck


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

I can only share what has worked for us.

Follow all the anti-spam tips for getting thru...e.g., use https:// in your links not justwww.blahblahblah.com

Don't use html

Don't send using bcc:

AOL is really all about making money. Their goal is to get you to PAY to e-mail their members.

When you get permission, remind them to add your sending address to their address book.

None of this is rocket science, but it seems to work for us.

Michael

You could call a company that I know is getting through to aol users Inbox360. Look them up on line to get their phone number. It is Inbox360.com. They send out 30,000,000 emails and some of their clients are Ford, Pfizer, HarleyDavidson . . .

have you noticed how many mailing lists have special messages for AOL users. I have spoken to AOL and basically they don't care.

I like Darcies idea of setting up an AOL account. Might be worth the 20 bucks as an experiment

Thanks to all who responded.

"AOL has become so difficult, I simply delete all AOL email addresses in my lists or refuse to send email to them. In my biased opinion, AOL is simply internet lite or ISP service for folks who cannot use a real internet service providor. Ask yourself, is this the type of customer I'd want to encourage using the Internet?"

似乎切断你的鼻子尽管前沿空中管制官e, if you ask me...excluding AOL people from your email list? Sure, if you're okay with the idea of eliminating a material percentage of people from your list (if it's consumers), that's a great idea. Me, I'm not willing to sacrifice 30-40% of my list. Moreover, we deliver to AOL all the time with results as good or better than any of the other ISPs on our email list, and we don't have to do any of the tricks like sending a handful in a batch (how long would that take with 50,000 AOL email addresses?) or throttling or varying IPs.

I'm not sure where all the confusion is...on the link I gave, AOL gives all that you need to facilitate delivery. Contrary to belief, they DO want their subscribers getting ALL of the mail that they request.

As for signing up for AOL to send emails to AOL subscribers, wouldn't that lump you in with all of the millions of people who, according to your post, shouldn't even leave the house without a helmet? ;)