If you’re sending out an email newsletter to your clients or prospective customers, it’s not as simple as clicking “Send”, as you’d do with a private email, and assuming everyone will receive your message. Marketing mail is filtered by email accounts in a variety of ways that can prevent people from ever seeing your message; according to some estimates, as much as 10% of mass emails are never delivered.
What can you do to ensure that your emails are sent and to improve your deliverability rate?
There are a vast number of factors that go into this equation, but below are a few of the basics to consider as you choose and customize your email options:
- Permission: Every address on your mailing list should have signed up and given you permission to send your newsletter to them. But what if they share an email address with a spouse who doesn’t recognize your message when it arrives, or they simply forget that they signed up? It’s a good idea to send a permission email or “verified opt-in” message asking the owner of the email address to confirm their subscription to your newsletter. This also makes it less likely that subsequent messages will be filtered out by spam protection.
- Spam Filters: Anti-spam measures protect web users from the multitude of unwanted “junk email” flying around in cyberspace. But they can also block legitimate emails like yours. Confirming permission (see above) goes a long way toward reducing unsolicited messages, and so does choosing a legitimate, reputable newsletter service that’s less likely to be filtered out as spam. But it’s impossible to get around every spam filter out there.
- List Maintenance to Prevent Blacklisting: ISPs keep track of senders whose emails bounce, and may blacklist you in general if your newsletters continue to get sent to addresses that don’t exist or that have blocked you. It’s important to immediately remove addresses from your list after more than one bounce, so keep track and act promptly to protect your “reputation” with ISPs.
- Unsubscribe Options: To ensure that your readers always have the choice, make sure that information on how to unsubscribe from your mailing is included at the bottom of every message you send.
- Email Format: Certain types of email content are more likely to be treated as spam by ISPs. These include images, certain types of links, flagged words that appear in a high number of spam messages (e.g. medication, drugs, make money) and attachments. Try to avoid these commonly used words as much as possible.
This advice only scratches the surface of the steps you can take to ensure that your emails make it to their intended recipients. Email deliverability depends on a huge number of factors and precautions, all of which are much easier to manage with the help of a trusted marketing expert like Informatix.
We specialise in providing newsletter programs that enhance the legitimacy of your messages and ensure that your newsletter reaches its target recipients. To take the next step toward boosting your readership and nurturing profitable client relationships, contact us today.