At Elite Email we have dedicated email servers spread out across Canada and the United States so that we can offer our customers the absolute highest level of service with the best email deliverability.

After months of planning and preparation, each one of these servers has been beefed up and is running better than ever before.

To quote Kanye West, our email servers are now BETTER, FASTER, and STRONGER!

Emails will now send out faster, however everything is still tailored to specific ISP limits and guidelines. So, even though we’re eager to push the pedal to the metal we must ensure that we play nicely with others and follow the rules.

But, the good news is that this upgrade makes our sending infrastructure much stronger and all customers should see immediate benefits when sending email.

We already employ all forms of email authentication including SPF, Sender ID, Domain Keys, and DKIM. In addition to that, we have relationships with major ISPs around the globe and have active feedback loops with any ISP that offers such a service. And, of course, wherever possible, our IPs are whitelisted or on the Trusted Sender list.

But, even with all that, we are always striving to do more and be better. After all, as soon as we sit back on our heels, we risk slipping and we never want that to happen!

One of the issues that really bothers ISPs is when you try to send to a ‘hard bounces’ address over and over again. This shows poor list hygiene and is definitely contrary to best practices.

A hard bounce is usually the result of sending to an email address that does not exist and is permanently undeliverable. So, if you put yourselves in the shoes of an ISP, you can see why receiving multiple attempts over time to a ‘hard bounces’ address is contrary to the high email marketing standards we expect from all Elite Email clients.

Up until this point, our customers have always been able to clear bounces manually. You could simply click the “Clear Bounces” button on your email’s bounce report and everything would be cleaned for you. But, many customers were forgetting to do this, which we totally understand because we know how hectic things can get!

As a result of much customer feedback and the goal of constantly improving delivery, we have released a new feature that automatically removes hard bounces from your mailing list. This feature was released over the weekend and based on preliminary reports is working well.

Keep in mind that we only remove HARD bounces, so soft bounces (which could be ‘mailbox full’ or ‘temporary server error’, etc) are kept on your mailing list unless you manually remove them. This is because there is a chance that when you re-send to a soft bounced email address that it can be successfully delivered.

Stay tuned for more great features to boost your email marketing that we have planned over the coming months!

Everyone at Elite Email feels this is great news because it allows for much greater and instant communication between mail box providers and ESPs.  With better communication I firmly believe that both the receiver and sender benefit. Tucows joins a long list of other ISPs who provide feedback loops. While many people may not be familiar with Tucows, it is worth noting that it has registered more than 8 million domains and hosts millions of inboxes. 

I’m sure most major ISPs that don’t already operate feedback loops (or “FBL” for those that want to use the cool industry lingo!) will start doing so in the near future.

This upgrade, without getting too technical, puts a ton of new horsepower under the hood of Elite Email!

Emails will now send out faster than ever before (…adhering to ISP guidelines, of course).

This upgrade includes major enhancements to both the underlying hardware at our data centers and also major improvements to the sending software.

During this upgrade we’ve also added several new servers, which increases the stability of our network. In case of network failure, we can now route customer’s emails through different data centers in the USA and Canada.

This upgrade was meticulously planned to ensure almost unnoticeable downtime for our customers so that sensitive email marketing campaigns were always delivered on time.

While all of us at Elite Email are exciting about the upgrades, we also want to thank our loyal customers. It is only because of our tremendous and rapid growth that such upgrades were required and for that we are incredibly grateful.

This past week the Social Marketing Division at EliteAnswers.com helped launch a Canada-wide campaign for Sauza Tequila that harnesses the power of two of the most popular social networks: MySpace and Facebook.

The premise of the campaign is that Sauza Tequila (which recently introduced new mango and acai berry flavored tequilas) is looking for Canada’s best DJ in a contest dubbed “Sauza Tequila DJ Mix Off Challenge”.

The contest calls upon DJs across the country to put together their best mix and submit it to a regional and, upon advancement, national judging panel. The semi-finalists will really get to shine when they are invited to perform live at a club in front of a national judge.

The promotion taps into the amazing social marketing power of MySpace, where the DJs are invited to post their submission on the Sauza Tequila wall for all to see. You can view the MySpace page here: http://www.myspace.com/sauzatequila (The French version can be seen here: http://www.myspace.com/sauzatequilaqc)

Sauza already has a booming group of loyal enthusiasts on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2365913470) and those people have not been left out of the mix. Exclusive messages and contest updates have been sent to all members of the group, which further engages them in the conversation with the brand they like.

Sauza really understands how to harness the power of social marketing to engage their customers in an exciting and interactive way that sets them apart from those brands that are stuck to traditional marketing platforms.

This reluctance isn’t because we enjoy keeping secrets or like building suspense, it’s because we need to go through the most rigorous of beta testing to ensure our customers email marketing activities are not interrupted for even a second. The only standard we accept is absolute excellence and while holding the bar that high does lead us to have a long beta testing cycle, we believe that anything less is simply a disservice to our loyal customers.

Last night I was watching CNN and was reassured why beta testing is so important. CNN has lots of new gadgets and graphics for their election coverage, most of which so far have been running fairly smoothly. The folks at CNN seem to have a good handle (as they always have) on how technology enhancements can really spruce up a newscast. Yesterday they showed off a cool new feature on that nifty touch screen they’ve been using lately. With a few taps of the screen, they were able to load Google maps and zoom in to any area of the country to illustrate a particular point. In this case the host (John Roberts) was showing the levies in New Orleans.  After proudly announcing this new feature, which, I must admit, was incredibly off-the-charts cool, Roberts went to switch the touch-screen to show the Republican side of the story. He tapped the screen and there was no response. He tapped again, and nothing…again, nothing, and again. This is on national TV with millions of people watching and all anyone can see is John Roberts tapping the screen to no avail. Finally he knew it wasn’t coming back and tossed it over to Wolf Blitzer for a semi-smooth cover-up. I guess no one at CNN ever tested the new Google Maps feature followed by resetting the screen to the other party. With millions of people watching, they couldn’t have been happy about this glitch, which once again reaffirms why you need to test, test and then test some more before releasing something live.

So, that is exactly what we are doing with our EliteEmail.com, our flagship email marketing program. We test and then we re-test. Then we test even the most obscure scenarios because each customer of ours does their email marketing a little differently and we need to make sure their experience is flawless. We may not achieve perfection and I’ll be the first one to admit that, but that’s where we are setting the bar and we’re not prepared to cut any corners. Ultimately, I believe this philosophy shines through in our program and is something our customers appreciate even if they have to wait a little bit longer.

I was just reviewing some of the recent template usage metrics and these new templates (obviously fueled by the time of the season) have been a massive success.

It is interesting to see that businesses around the globe of all types, ranging from banks, consultants, restaurants, bands, artists, and more all chose to send out holiday eCards to their contacts. Furthermore, in most cases these messages carried no promotional message whatsoever, and simply wished “happy holidays” and ‘happy New Year”.

This is a wonderful example of how email marketing can help boost your brand image with your customer base, even if you aren’t actually measuring sales conversions as your key email marketing ROI metric for a certain campaign.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome this new partnership. As always, we are trying to move the overall email marketing industry forward and separate legitimate email marketers from those that send spam/UCE, which includes adult orientated emails aimed at minors. By allowing our clients to scrub their database against the email registries in both Michigan and Utah, we are keeping children safer and that is in all of our best interests.