Get Your Emails Delivered!

Deliverability is today's biggest issue for every
email marketer. Email marketers face deliverability
problems because of email overload. Many people who
spend much time online and that have businesses very
much related to computers and Internet often get more
than 100 emails per day. Usually, 8 out of 10 emails
are considered as SPAM. Problem is that your email
message, supposedly that you are legitimate marketer
and have permission for contacting, can be flagged as
SPAM. This can make harm to your business and
reputation.

Here you can find some interesting facts about
deliverability and SPAM:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/funfacts

Using some Hosted ASP email marketing software you
will loose money because of the fact that you will pay
for every message sent and not for every message
delivered. Beside that, you will loose money in lost
sales. Using desktop email marketing software like
GroupMail you will pay one-time-fee for software
licence and not for number of messages delivered.

You can have deliverability issues because of
anti-spam lists, because of ISP filters and because of
corporate/user filters. So there are three hurdles you
have to jump over to get your messages delivered. So,
how can you improve your deliverability rates?

Subscriptions

The first necessary step in getting your email message
delivered is that you have permission of your members
to send them your messages. Never, and we mean never,
put people on your list without their permission. We
recommend you double opt-in method for getting new
subscribers so that they have to confirm their request
to be your subscribers. It is recommended to ask them
to enter their work email instead of free email
addresses. Some companies go that far that they don't
allow subscribing if you use free email address. It is
because of the fact that work email address is
considered as more reliable and stable than a free
email address.

Welcome message

So, after they confirmed their request you have to
take the next step. You have to automatically send
them your welcome message where you will give
description of your company, email newsletter and list
management info (information about subscribing,
unsubscribing, digest mode, archives…).

In this welcome message it is very important not to
forget two most important things. To tell them to put
your From address in their Whitelist filtering rules
to ensure that your message will arrive in to their
inbox and not in their Bulk folder. And second very
important thing, you should ask them to save your
welcome message for future reference. Many people
forget that they subscribed to certain email
newsletter. Because of that they can accuse you for
spamming and report you to your ISP or email marketing
company.

Regulations, relations and reputations

You have to constantly have good relationship with
major ISP in order to ensure good deliverability. ISP
relation often can be a complex job so many email
marketing software companies have special people
assigned for this type of job. They have to actively
watch news about ISP politics and to fulfil their
request.

For example, some ISP won't deliver your message if
your messages don't have a so called DomainKeys or
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) key to ensure that the
message really came from your domain name and to
protect email sender identity. This prevents email
spoofing. Some other companies won't deliver your
messages if you are not compliant with Habeas Sender
Warranty Email Header. The Habeas headers allow you to
guarantee that the emails you are sending are not spam
and bypass filter systems.

Speaking about DomainKeys, for example if you send
your message from one Yahoo email address to another
Yahoo email address the recipient will see this info
below From name:

"Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was
sent by yahoo.com."

You can have your own DomainKeys so that your
recipients get similar message like above only with
your domain name in it. Not only that it is
recommended to have your own DomainKeys it is also
very professional to see that your company is have
one. It shows that email communication is very
important for you.

For more information about those standards and
regulations visit:

http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
http://www.habeas.com

You have to ask your email service provider what steps
they take in order to ensure the maximum
deliverability. If your email service provider is
blacklisted your messages won't be delivered on many
places. Also, you have to check whether your domain is
blacklisted. You can use different services like
http://www.dnsstuff.com , http://www.spamhaus.org,
http://www.spamcop.net, http://www.OpenRBL.org. Having
a good reputation with major anti-spam lists and
policies ensures that your messages won't be filtered.

List maintenance

You have to track which email addresses are
undeliverable and if it repeats several times you have
to remove those email address if your software won't
do that for you. Also, if you don't use double opt-in
method for getting subscribers it can happen that
someone make a typo in entering their email addresses
so instead of, for example, username@domain.com they
enter username@domain in your subscription form. Email
marketing software like GroupMail has add-on called
Email Inspector which removes bad email addresses and
can validate recipient addresses by format, using DNS
lookup and full SMTP user account testing.

Content and consistence

"Content Is King!" – one of the best known rules on
the Internet. In email marketing, it is not only
important that you include quality content. It is also
important that your message don't look too "spammy",
that it isn't full of words used by spammers like:
free, buy now, guaranteed, limited time offer…etc,
thay you don't write words all in capitals. It is
considered as SHOUTING!
There are several useful tools that will check your
content if it is considered as "spammy" before you
send your message. One of those services is EzineCheck
( http://www.ezinecheck.com).

Also, you have to follow one of the most important
rules in email publishing and that is consistency. You
have to choose your From field name and stick to it,
you have to make your Subject line in that way that it
clearly represents you, to choose one format and
always use it.

For example, let's say you have a newsletter called
Best Practices Guide. You can design your subject line
this way:

[BPG] Article Title, Issue No., Date

This can be your template so it is more likely that
your message won't be deleted by mistake. You can make
your style even further. You can make a practice that
your every article starts with number or question so
this template can be:

[BPG] 7 Best Deliverability Tips, Issue No. 10,
10/10/2005 or [BPG] How To Get Your Emails Delivered,
Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005.

We have said that you have to choose your From field
name and stick to it. Beside that, your From email
address is even more important. Many subscribers make
filters based on From email address so if you change
your email address it is more likely that your message
won't be delivered or read. That's why your From email
address has to be consistent.

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta.
Infacta is email messaging services company providing
powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail,
software for sending highly-personalized email
messages and Group Metrics, software for email
tracking. For more information visit:
http://www.infacta.com