Serasi

Email marketing has become more complicated as corporate spam filters have become more stringent and the FCC CAN-SPAM Act more refined. Our summary below describes how to increase the odds of your emails getting both delivered and read.

1. The money is in the list. Make sure you have a clean, targeted and preferably double (confirmed) opt-in list. Quality is more important than quantity for deliverability.

2. Get an Email Service Provider (ESP). Professional ESPs stay on top of best practices in deliverability. Research shows high quality ESPs have 30% better deliverability than internal servers. They also automatically purge bounced and bad email addresses. ESPs we recommend include Icontact, VerticalResponse and Constant Contact.

3. Make your subject lines eye-catching but clear and concise. Avoid words such as “New”, “Act Now”, or “Free”; phrases that are likely to be picked up by spam filters. Carefully screen your entire email for keywords that trigger spam filters. A good reference list of words to avoid can be found on the WilsonWeb website.

4. Include web analytics tracking tags in all emails. The ESPs mentioned above all have easy tracking code insertion.

5. Use code with absolute URLs and keep your HTML simple. Refrain from using long-string and dynamic URLs. Use a high text-to-HTML ratio.

6. If you are sending many emails to a particular company or through a particular ISP, consider listing with a Reputation Service. Reputation is a way for the internet service providers receiving your emails to easily separate SPAM from legitimate bulk email. One Reputation Service provider is ISIPP; typical rates are $100-$300 per month.

7. Test away! Test different design layouts with varying numbers of articles and graphics. Test different days and times of day.