Getting Your Emails Delivered

Sent any emails to prospects lately? Maybe you’ve sent a newsletter, an opt-in email containing important information for a prospect or some type of customer follow up. If so you know that getting your email to its intended destination and out of the spam filters is getting to be more of a difficult battle.

Did you realize that your open and click thru rates could easily be affected by as much as 30% due to being classified incorrectly by a spam filter?

One method of increasing your odds of winning the delivery battle is by ensuring that the people who ask for your information have actually made the request to be on your mailing list. This process is commonly referred to as opt-in or double opt-in and is accomplished by sending a unique link to the subscriber when they request your information. Basically, before adding this person to your mailing list they must click the unique link that you have sent them verifying that they are actually the person who requested the information. More importantly you are able to verify that they are the valid owners of the email account used to register.

When your website visitors use email accounts that are typically tied to a company, a primary ISP or email addresses associated with other similar organizations your chances of having an email account with a longer lifespan increases dramatically. Not in all cases, but all too often email accounts created through a free email provider like Yahoo or Hotmail are temporary at best.

Having a list full of undeliverable addresses that bounce does you no good at all. As part of your regular list maintenance be sure to regularly remove all undeliverable email addresses. As a general rule I remove emails from my lists that bounce with a permanent error 3 times within a 30 day period. Beware that many ISPs track the percentage of your emails that bounce and will eventually block all of your emails if you continue to attempt delivery of messages to accounts that have been closed.

While HTML messages allow for text formatting, images, brand recognition and multiple columns of content is growing in popularity there is a downside to these benefits. A large portion of the spam email that is floating around on the internet is in a HTML format and therefore you are likely to be grouped in with the spam. Aweber conducted a study whereby they discovered that plain text messages where undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML formatted messages where undeliverable 2.3% of the time. As an option when HTML formatting is an important component of your email or newsletter, your messages can be sent as text/HTML

If you have files that would be of value to those on your email list it is often better to simply link to those files on your website verses attaching them directly to your message. The large number of malicious email attachments makes many users wary of opening attachments.

A large part of how your messages are filtered is based on the content that appears in the body of the message. Website URLs that have been associated with spam are a sure way of getting your messages classified as spam.

Certain words and phrases are a primary means of filtering emails as spam. Avoid using hot topics that are found in large amounts of spam: medical, medications, mortgages, pornography, making money, etc. If it is not critical that you use words that might get you filtered be sure to leave them out. Additionally, don’t try to be sneaky by changing the spelling of hot topic words as that will make your emails look all the more suspicious.

Never ever create messages that are one large image. While it is hard to argue the fact that images can do a lot to enhance any email, make sure to use them sparingly. As part of rate tracking technology images are often used to calculate the number of opens that a sender has received on a particular message. Often you can choose to turn rate tracking off to help avoid being filtered simply based on the image content of your messages.

If you are not familiar with CAN-SPAM Compliance that is something that you should at least have a broad understanding of, as part of your planning. In January of 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced rules regarding the delivery of email. To ensure your compliance it would be a good idea to have your legal counsel review your processes and procedures to verify that you are compliant with the Federal CAN-SPAM rules and regulations. Arguably two of the most important rules include having a valid snail mail address listed on all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link.

There are also a number of reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php

http://www.bondedsender.com

http://www.habeas.com

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal. Email marketing is an important and in many cases a critical part of any marketing program, but you want to be sure that all your hard work gets to its intended recipients. Hopefully the information provided here will help a few more of your emails make it to your intended target market. To Your Success.

Tagged as: can-spam, email marketing, lead generation, leads, marketing, newsletters, prospecting, prospects