Email Marketing Information

By Julia Gulevich

You owe an on-line business and broadcast email campaigns at a regular basis to your customers and subscribers. One of the crucial elements of your email marketing strategy should be the measurement of your email campaigns effectiveness. If one day you discover that your delivery rates have fallen into the basement, you’ll want to find out what you have done wrong.

Here may be different causes for this. If you didn’t buy or rent a dirty email list but emailed to your own list of subscribers, maybe you ignored spam complaints you had received in the past, or maybe you composed your message in the manner that it triggered spam filters and was deleted, or maybe… whatever.

If you are embarrassed and don't know where to start to identify the major factors hampering your email deliverability, read these fool-proof tips to boost the email deliverability and see how you can improve your email marketing strategy. Any changes you make should result in a marked increase in delivery rates.

Welcome new subscribers with a permission-based email

Permission is a crucial element of each email marketing campaign. It creates the necessary prerequisites for high email deliverability. Readers who agreed to receive your mailings and got drawn into your culture are less likely to report you as spam and more likely to open and act on your messages. You can welcome every new subscriber immediately to determine what they want to receive from you, when, how frequently and in what format.

Revise message content

On its way to the recipient your message is the subject to spam filters on every corporate and ISP e-mail server. If it's full of grammar or coding errors and has a spam-like content, it will either be blocked or sent to the Junk folder.

If your e-mail service provider (ESP) provides a message analysis tool, for example, as a regular service or an add-on, use it and run every message you send through it. If you don't use an ESP, you can check your message with a free spam analyzer like Lyris' ContentChecker. It will tell you how your message looks like for SpamAssassin. You’ll be able then to remove spam-like content from the message as well as the errors or oddities in the format and design that would trigger a spam filter.

Analyze email campaign reports

A good e-mail program generates an email delivery report during and after each broadcast. Studying those reports is important because they will tell you where you're failing, what your delivery rate is (total messages sent divided by total messages delivered, minus hard bounces), and which ISPs or other e-mail destinations rejected your messages and why.

Be in touch with ISP and blacklists

Even if most of your email messages are blocked by ISPs, don’t give up. Contact the ISPs where you're having the most trouble and ask them what must be done from your side to get your emails delivered. If your ESP doesn't have someone in charge of ISP relations, you’ll have to contact the ISPs yourself.

You can sign up for a feedback loop if the ISP offers that kind of service. This is an e-mail notification service that tells you, among other things, which e-mail messages recipients flagged as spam. You might be required to qualify for the ISP's internal whitelist before you can join the feedback loop, but that only helps improve delivery to that ISP.

The email delivery reports I’ve already talked about shows you which receivers are blocking your email and why. If the IP address you sent the emails from was blacklisted for suspected spam activity, you’ll most likely find the blacklist name in the bounced message.

Blacklists are a little more difficult to deal with because they don't have the same personnel transparency like ISPs. But most reputable blacklists provide directions on how to contact them and how to request removal of the IP address.

Deal with spam complaints immediately

One of the reasons why ISPs block commercial email messages is ignoring spam complaints whether they come from an ISP's feedback loop or the recipients you emailed to. When you receive one, you must immediately remove the email address from your database. It doesn’t matter if the recipient actually subscribed to your mailing list. What is appreciated is that you're known to react quickly upon complaints.

Because of this you must monitor every mailbox associated with your e-mail program. You must also check old not used mailboxes from time to time just in case if someone sends a demand to be removed from your list to that mailbox. You’ll need to forward the removal request to the right email account then.

Validate your list before emailing to it

Clearing your lists from bad email addresses is tremendously important. Repeated emailing to the addresses that an ISP reported as closed or nonexistent is another top reason you are blocked. You can run your email list against an email verifier program (hopefully there are plenty of them on the Internet) that will detect the majority of invalid addresses. However, after your email campaign is complete, you are likely to receive bounced emails. You’ll need to remove email addresses associated with hard-bouncing messages from your email list as well. You may have to do more of this if you use only single opt-in, which doesn't require subscribers to confirm their addresses via a Web page or reply e-mail.

Use authentication

More and more senders care to prove that they are who they claim to be and to legitimize their IP address they send e-mail from. Your ESP can help you with if it doesn't require that as a condition of taking you on as a client.

Authentication and reputation

Is there any difference between these terms? Yes, they differ significantly. Authentication is a process you can control directly. You choose which ISPs to authenticate yourself with and install the code required or provided by the ISP.

Reputation is built on the way you do your email business. Even legitimate businesses can gain bad reputations if they fail to follow good email practices such as:

* Add recipients to your database only after their permission, and remove them immediately upon request.
* Remove invalid and bounced addresses quickly from your database. Sending repeatedly to bad addresses is a spammer signal to many ISPs.
* Participate in feedback loops with ISPs that offer them and deal with spam complaints quickly.
* Track your IP address on most known blacklists, and take all efforts to request removal.
* Earn certifications or assurances from third-party reputation services that ISPs consult when deciding whether to accept, block, or filter your e-mail.