Effective Email Newsletters - Rule 1: Stay off the Spam Lists!
Part 1 in a 1 part series.
We do a lot of email and email marketing at WineCommune. Some days we send over 100,000 emails. Email is an integral part of communicating with our customers and we work hard to ensure our emails are delivered and not trapped by spam filters. Any wine business can benefit from an effective marketing program. As spam, and efforts to fight it, have increased, however, it has become more difficult to ensure your emails don't get trapped in spam filters.
I was discussing ways to keep your email marketing clean on a popular webmaster discussion board and thought some readers here would be interested.
When evaluating your email marketing campaign, here is a list of factors to consider to ensure high deliverability:
1. Is your list truely opt in? Are you subscribing people to your mail list just because they register for you site, or do they affirmatively choose to join your list?
2. Are you doing any co-registration for your newsletter (ie. are people joining your newsletter from sites other than your own)? That is usually impossible to police properly and will lead to spam reports.
3. Check the content of your emails. Do they trip spam filters? Are you using too many images? Is your newsletter language too "spammy": buy now, check this out, sale, v1agra, etc.
4. Does your email comply with can-spam? Physical address, unsubscribe information, etc.
5. Check your mail server's ip address on the rbl lists. Google "rbl check" to find tools that allow you to check your status.
6. Monitor your bounce backs - remove emails that block you or are not valid emails.
7. Consider outsourcing your email to a newsletter hosting specialist company (google: newsletter hosting). They do all this for you and keep their IP's off the spam lists.
8. Monitor your email lists for "dead drop" emails - addresses people use to see if you are selling their email address. These people are usually trouble period - they have a very broad definition of spam (flame away!). Also look for spam filters that want you to click a link to allow the email to be sent - personally, I think this is the worst type of spam filter and NEVER click those links. Make your own decision.
9. Do not sell/trade your email list. Do NOT even allow others to send promotion emails to their lists on your behalf. That worked in 2000 but won't work now - see #8 above.
10. Send multi-part messages with both html and text parts (not really a spam tip, but good practice considering the number of people who read email on a bb/treo and delete newsletters before they sit down at their computer).
11. Email on a regular schedule.
12. Limit the number of emails you send per week/month.
13. Don't use MS Word or other verbose html editors to create your emails. Make sure just pure html goes in - all the extraneous tags can confuse/trip spam filters.
14. Make sure your email server is closed to relaying.
15. Make sure your email server will properly respond to a reverse dns lookup.
16. When people subscribe to your newsletter, be sure to ask them to put your newsletter's from email address in their address book or white list.
17. Consider double opt in. Your subscribe rate will drop by half, but so will your headache rate.
18. Enjoy!
PS. Kudo's to Angie who several years ago took my hand and showed me how to keep our email marketing clean. I hope I haven't divulged too many trade secrets Angie!
We do a lot of email and email marketing at WineCommune. Some days we send over 100,000 emails. Email is an integral part of communicating with our customers and we work hard to ensure our emails are delivered and not trapped by spam filters. Any wine business can benefit from an effective marketing program. As spam, and efforts to fight it, have increased, however, it has become more difficult to ensure your emails don't get trapped in spam filters.
I was discussing ways to keep your email marketing clean on a popular webmaster discussion board and thought some readers here would be interested.
When evaluating your email marketing campaign, here is a list of factors to consider to ensure high deliverability:
1. Is your list truely opt in? Are you subscribing people to your mail list just because they register for you site, or do they affirmatively choose to join your list?
2. Are you doing any co-registration for your newsletter (ie. are people joining your newsletter from sites other than your own)? That is usually impossible to police properly and will lead to spam reports.
3. Check the content of your emails. Do they trip spam filters? Are you using too many images? Is your newsletter language too "spammy": buy now, check this out, sale, v1agra, etc.
4. Does your email comply with can-spam? Physical address, unsubscribe information, etc.
5. Check your mail server's ip address on the rbl lists. Google "rbl check" to find tools that allow you to check your status.
6. Monitor your bounce backs - remove emails that block you or are not valid emails.
7. Consider outsourcing your email to a newsletter hosting specialist company (google: newsletter hosting). They do all this for you and keep their IP's off the spam lists.
8. Monitor your email lists for "dead drop" emails - addresses people use to see if you are selling their email address. These people are usually trouble period - they have a very broad definition of spam (flame away!). Also look for spam filters that want you to click a link to allow the email to be sent - personally, I think this is the worst type of spam filter and NEVER click those links. Make your own decision.
9. Do not sell/trade your email list. Do NOT even allow others to send promotion emails to their lists on your behalf. That worked in 2000 but won't work now - see #8 above.
10. Send multi-part messages with both html and text parts (not really a spam tip, but good practice considering the number of people who read email on a bb/treo and delete newsletters before they sit down at their computer).
11. Email on a regular schedule.
12. Limit the number of emails you send per week/month.
13. Don't use MS Word or other verbose html editors to create your emails. Make sure just pure html goes in - all the extraneous tags can confuse/trip spam filters.
14. Make sure your email server is closed to relaying.
15. Make sure your email server will properly respond to a reverse dns lookup.
16. When people subscribe to your newsletter, be sure to ask them to put your newsletter's from email address in their address book or white list.
17. Consider double opt in. Your subscribe rate will drop by half, but so will your headache rate.
18. Enjoy!
PS. Kudo's to Angie who several years ago took my hand and showed me how to keep our email marketing clean. I hope I haven't divulged too many trade secrets Angie!
posted by Michael Stajer at 2:21 PM
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