Eight Ways to Improve Your Marketing Email’s Deliverability – Part II
In examining improved email deliverability last time, we discussed the importance of using seed emails, using a proven email template, and maintaining clean lists and IP’s. If you missed the first part of this series, you can find it here.
This time, we’ll focus a bit more on the email itself, as well as keeping track of statistics. So, on to the final four:
Use a combination of text and HTML
Most SPAM filters and content filters these days are very selective with regard to which emails get through. Emails which are heavy on graphics often trigger these filters. Does that mean that you can never send an email with images or other graphics? No! But, including a mixture of text and graphics/images will allow these filters to “see” the email’s text and having that text-to-image ratio will increase the likelihood of successful Inbox delivery. Designing your email ad with images separate from text will also allow recipients whose email client automatically blocks images the ability to read the body of the email.
Watch for SPAM phrases
To go along with the point above, SPAM filters love to grab emails which include certain words or phrases which are commonly associated with SPAM. Regardless of whether they are used in a From or Subject line, in the body of the email ad, or as text behind an image, if these words or phrases are in the email then the SPAM filters will find. Your email ad will be on its way to the cyber dump.
For a list of words and phrases to avoid in email marketing please visit here.
Keep/Monitor stats/delivery reports
This is the best way to know how your email marketing campaigns are doing with regard to deliverability. Of course, gauging response rates is very important as well, but unless you are carefully monitoring your analytics reports, you will never know the true response rates for your email marketing campaigns. For example, suppose that you have mailed two campaigns asking recipients to sign up for your newsletter. For each campaign, you have received 10 sign-ups. You are disappointed because you needed 12 to make it feasible to continue with the email marketing campaign, so you are thinking of scrapping your email advertisement altogether and trying something new. What if you discovered that you were only achieving 30% email deliverability because of the use of a few SPAM phrases? What if you could get that deliverability percentage up to 70%? What about 90%? Closely studying your statistics and analytics will give you the information you need to improve your campaigns and achieve greater ROI for each email campaign.
Use an experienced and reputable email marketing service
There are a great many email marketing companies out there. When interviewing (yes, you should interview and ask specific questions – it is your money!) a company for your email marketing campaigns, there are certain questions… Do they offer any type of service guarantee? Do they own the email deployment software or do they resell another company’s service? These are a few of the questions you should ask. A good email marketing company should have happy clients and a reputation of integrity.
For more on questions to ask, please visit here.
Tour Our Digs
New Digs Coming January 2013
Thrive News
Meet The Thrive Team
