Email Best Practices: Part 3 - Delivery

Posted by Adam Peck on 22 July 2009 | 2 Comments

Tags: email marketing

Welcome to the third part of our five-part series about maximizing email performance. As you remember, there are five key elements to master, each of which is a critical contributor to email marketing success.
In this post, we’ll focus on delivery — also known as successfully getting to the inbox.

GET TO THE INBOX: Eliminate obstacles for delivery

Don’t look like a Spammer

Avoid “spammy” language. If certain “catch phrases” are in your message, or your formatting or coding look suspicious, the spam filters will block you. Words and phrases to avoid:

• Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Serious Cash
• Free!
• 50% off!
• Earn $
• Discount!
• Eliminate Debt
• Double your income
• You’re a Winner!
• Million Dollar Opportunity
• Cash Bonus

Watch your text to image ratio. Messages with a lot of images have a tendency to be blocked because spammers often embed their catch phrases in images to try get around text filters. Try to stick to an 80:20 text to image ratio.

Be sure to properly code your message. Make sure you have a professional code your HTML. Sloppy coding is an easy red flag for spam filters.

Keep your list Clean

Have registrants double-enter their email addresses. This prevents registrants from entering email address information incorrectly.

Incorporate logic on the sign-up page to validate email address syntax. Only accept properly structured email addresses — do not simply make the email address field an open field.

Review your list for common typos. Proof read your list carefully.

Remove profanity. Email addresses that are obscene will surely be blocked by spam filters.

Remove hard bounces, repeated soft bounces and addresses with no activity in over six months. There’s no sense in sending an email again and again if there is no chance of delivery or an “open.”

Check back for the next post in this series where we will cover strategies to improve email open rates.