I feel the holiday week is always a good time to look at marketing best practices. The phones are not ringing off the hook and it’s easier to focus on some of the details that often get overlooked. Here’s a look at some best practices for email blasts.
Email marketing has become more complicated as corporate spam filters and even law enforcement in the area has become more stringent. Here is our summary of how to increase the odds your emails get 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). The professional ESP services stay on top of best practices in deliverability. StomperNet research shows the higher quality ESPs have 30% better deliverability than internal servers. They will also automatically purge bounced and bad email addresses. Services we recommend include:
a. Aweber
b. Vertical Response
c. Constant Contact
3. Make your subject lines eye-catching but clear, concise and free from words such as “New” or “Act Now” that are likely to be picked up by spam filters. Carefully screen your entire email for keywords that trigger spam filters. A good list of words to avoid can be found at Wilson Web and Microsoft’s website.
4. Include web analytics tracking tags in all emails. The ESPs mentioned above all have easy tracking code insertion.
5. Code using absolute URLs and keep your HTML simple. 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 bulk email sent legitimately. One provider is ISIPP (www.isipp.com) which runs $100-$300 per month.
7. Test, test, test. Test different design layouts with varying numbers of articles and graphics. Test different days and times of day.