Nine Ways to Improve Your Email Deliver-ability Results

Welcome to the age of Email 2.0. We’re now in an era where marketers have begun to eschew the traditional (and often ineffective) “spray and pray” approach to email marketing, and shifted their efforts towards creating successful email strategies that target current customers.

What has caused this shift in strategy? The answer is basically intolerance. Users no longer tolerate spam. ISPs no longer tolerate spam. Deliver-ability is King. Winning the battle of the inbox is the goal of Email 2.0.

Regardless of if you are currently running email campaigns or are considering taking advantage of this low cost communication option, below are nine email deliver-ability best practices you should remember if you want to make sure you end up in the inbox:

• Become a preferred sender by including verbiage which encourages recipients to accept your “from” address in their address books. Add address book instructions to your email content.

• Manage your lists. Make sure your list starts with a strong base in permission- based, opt-in email addresses. Quickly respond to un-subscribe requests from recipients and to those who may have reported your messages as spam. Monitor and remove hard-bounces – a bounce rate higher than 20% can harm your deliver-ability and ISP reputation. Purge old or inactive addresses.

• Focus on long-term list acquisition techniques. Keep your subscribers longer by managing the amount and frequency they receive your emails. Make sure they are not on too many specific “sub-lists” based on their profile and/or preferences. Maximize your segmentation and targeting by not burning out your recipients with too many emails.

• Keep your email content timely and relevant to your consumers. Utilize personalization to increase your results. Test dynamic content strategies using profiles and rules to send the most appropriate content to specific audience lists.

• Don’t underestimate the importance of the first email – most likely the “thank you for registering” email. Studies show the first emails determine the lifetime value of the email connection. So, be sure to send one, and make sure you are sensitive to the message. You may not get a second chance to make that first impression.

• Add your business name to the subject line to be sure your recipients recognize the email as coming from you. When the recipient sees the email is from your business, even if they don’t open it, they are less likely to mark the email as spam.

• Add unsubscribe information to the header and footer. Again, rather than the recipient reporting your email as spam when they no longer want to receive information, provide them with the appropriate opt-out process.

• Reduce and/or eliminate spam triggers in your email copy. Most email service providers offer a content evaluator tool.

• Follow email authentication guidelines. Your IT or email resource should be able to help with this.