If you sent a customer a piece of mail in the post, you would expect – unless the postman had an off day, that that piece of mail would get delivered.

When you hit the ‘send’ button on your campaign your email goes through a number of different processes that determine whether or not your email is actually delivered to the inbox.

Getting into the inbox is not as easy as you may think, there are a number of different factors involved, some are under your control and some aren’t.

Beyond your control are things like email authentication which we will cover later. The thing you can control is your reputation.

Reputation covers a number of different areas; I’ve listed them below

• Spam complaints
• Unsubscribe mechanism
• Subscriber’s profile management
• Bounce rate monitoring
• Creative & content
• Addresses collection processes

Put simply the better your reputation the better your chance of getting into the inbox

Spam complaints

Keeping the number of ‘this is spam’ hits to a minimum, there will always be the odd person on your list who hits the junk or spam button because the can’t be bothered to look for your unsubscribe link, these are sometimes known as ‘lazy unsubscribes’

You can help to combat this by putting your unsubscribe link at the top of every email. Always make sure you have a valid reply to email address and that this address is monitored. Add your postal address to the bottom of every email.

Spam traps – These are dead or dormant email addresses that the ISP’s monitor to see if email is still being sent to on a regular basis.

Unsubscribing

Make the process as simple as possible, one click unsubscribes work best, don’t make it complicated for people to unsubscribe, it just leads to frustration and probably a complaint.

Always honour any unsubscribe requests that are sent to you, whether they are replies to your email, unsubscribe link or website preference panel.

Make your unsubscribe link visible, don’t try to bury it in the depths of your email footer. Try adding it to the top of your email, if people want to unsubscribe let them go.

Bounce Rate

Monitor your bounce rate closely. Remove any hard bounces from your list, if you continue to send to email addresses that are returning hard bounces can often lead to getting blacklisted.

Check your list for soft bounces, make sure you don’t have any email addresses that are incorrectly formatted, things like www at the beginning of the email address or misspelt domain names (htomail, yaho, alo) will all cause an email address to soft bounce.

Add your sending address to contacts list

Ask your subscribers to add your email address to their contacts list. Do this on subscription confirmation pages and in ‘welcome’ emails. Add instructions on your website for subscribers who may not know how to.

Creative and content

Limit your html email to 500 to 600 px wide. You must use basic html (4.01) many email clients do not render some CSS, if you need to use CSS keep it within the body tags. You’re back to tables for layout, yes they are horrible but at least your email with render as you want it too. Keep your creative as light as possible, generally under 100kb is good and never ever send your whole message as an image, if the email client is set up to ‘images off’ by default, your message is lost.

When sending your campaigns make sure that they contain both plain text and html (also known as multipart messages) not everyone will want to receive a html version or may of configured their email client only to receive plain text.

When writing your subject lines make sure you don’t use consecutive exclamation marks or periods. For instance Open now for 50% off….. Open now for 50% off!!! These are often classed as spam.

Collecting Addresses

When asking people to subscribe to your email list, make it as easy to subscribe, generally don’t ask for too much information at registration, the very basic is email address and first name. You can always ask for further information at a later date.

Let your subscribers know when and how often you are going to send them emails and who the email will be from and the email address that the email will be sent from.

If possible make sure you use some form of validating email addresses, so that correct syntax is maintained. If you use an ESP they will often do this for you as many have their own inbuilt form builders.

Ask people to ‘double opt in’ where by the subscriber must click on a link in their ‘welcome email’ to verify their subscription to your newsletter.