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More Deliverable Email

6 Quick Tips for More Deliverable Email Marketing

Spam filters can be a marketers worst nightmare… All that time painfully spent crafting the perfect message for your audience, only to have it marked as spam, placed in a junk folder, or even worse, not received at all!

In 2013, it’s estimated that 74% of all email sent over the July – Sept period was spam, a statistics not likely to have decreased in more recent years… So it’s clear to see why spam has been at the route of many digital advancements in the world lately.

But what does that mean for legitimate email marketers that are trying to communicate valuable content to an interested and willing audience?

It just means you have to be smart about it, and you can’t drop the ball on quality.

We’ve put together a list of email optimisation tips to make sure your quality email communications actually reach their targeted audience.

Technical Factors

IP Address

Send from a dedicated IP address

There are differing opinions on whether it’s best to use a dedicated or varied IP, however, the general consensus is to use the former. We won’t go into the pros and cons of each option here but you can read a great article from Aweber here.

Warm-up your IP address

I’ll try to keep this relatively high level, to keep in line with the rest of this post, but each IP used to send emails if given an authority score. An ISP will scan your email and look for a number of different factors it believes signify a spam email. If it reaches a particular score, the email will be either prevented from searching the intended recipient or will at least, be placed into a junk folder or equivalent.

So to ensure your IP receives a positive score, its important to ‘warm-up’ your IP by emailing a portion of your audience at first and gradually working up to emailing your entire list. This helps ISPs become familiar with your IP and gives them a chance to rate your IP positively, giving your emails a better chance of landing in the inbox.

Keep your list clean

Ensure you actively remove any hard bounces and repeated soft bounces from your email list. Some email platforms will do this for you automatically, but it’s best to make sure.

Every time one of your emails bounces, most major ISPs record this and may start to block some of your emails if too many of them results in bounces.

Content

Never, ever, use attachments

Avoid the overuse of spammy words (ie. FREE FREE FREE!)
Don’t include too many outbound links. Keep this to a minimum, and try to keep it to one (your) domain.

Human Factors

Use double-opt-in

Ensure the quality of your email list is kept high by offering a double-opt in feature when users subscribe to your marketing list.

Use a consistent and recognisable sender name and email address and subject line

In some cases, the sender email address is the most prominent column, so you want to make sure you get this right!

Avoid using free email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail & Yahoo. They don’t exactly scream ligitamacy when seen on your inbox, so sending from an @yourbrand.com.au gives a much more professional and trustworthy first impression.

ISP are getting better and better at determining what is a ‘deceptive’ subject line. Plus, your subscribers just aren’t going to be impressed if you promise one thing, and deliver something else in the email. Or worse, don’t deliver anything.

Get whitelisted

One of the best ways to ensure your emails always make it to their intended recipients is to ask to be whitelisted.

At the first opportunity, start by asking your audience to add you email address to their address book. Remember to provide EASY instructions! The easier you make the instructions, the more likely they are to follow them.

Need Email Marketing Help?

We build databases, construct templates, devise strategies and manage delivery – all in the name of email marketing! If you need some professional help getting your email marketing campaigns on track, then we can help!

Call 1300 131 932 to speak with an email marketing maverick.