Getting Email Delivered - the ISIPP SuretyMail Blog

Want to know why Postini is tagging your email as spam, and putting it in their quarantine?

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Today I want to talk about a practice that can really get your email in trouble: including attachments in email without first communicating to the recipient that you will be doing so.

We have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which I mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here’s why.

Increasing email deliverability is both an art and a science, and to really get results, you need to have some expertise in both. And of course, that’s one of the reasons that many companies pay someone to do it for them - be it an in-house email deliverability expert, an outside company such as ours, or a combination of both.

We’ve talked previously about why all the email addresses you send from (i.e. your email’s “return address”) should really exist. It’s because if they don’t, you’re email is going to get junk foldered, both due to spam complaints, and because ISPs actually test whether your from address exists. But there are some email addresses - used as “From:” addresses - that even if you create them on your system - even if they really do exist - you should just never use.

We’ve talked in the past about how important it is to be sure that your email renders well in many different email clients and devices, and also generally to be sure that your email is easy to read on mobile devices. But have you ever wondered what the majority of your users are using to read their email?

Disclaimers. Whether in email, print marketing, or contracts, who reads them? I’ll tell you who reads them: spam filters. How often do you think a user reads a message that starts with “You have received this message because you have opted in” or “You received this message due to your subscription” and thinks “Oh! That’s right, I did ask for this, so I won’t mark it as spam?” Now, how often do you think that a spam filter (or, indeed, a user) sees that and thinks “This must be spam”?

We’ve talked more than once here about how not just your content, but the formatting of your content, can make a big difference to your email deliverability. It’s something about which I can not put too fine a point, as some people just don’t get it - others don’t believe it - and yet others feel that it shouldn’t matter, gosh darnit, especially if their list building practices are kosher and their users really want their email. But it does matter.

Most mailing software these days will allow you to personalize your mailings, and, not surprisingly, most commercial emailers take advantage of this, personalizing their mailings in all sorts of ways. Using the recipient’s actual name when addressing them seems like it should be a really good idea. But it isn’t always the best idea. In fact, here are 3 reasons that personalizing your subject lines, in particular, can get you in trouble with spam filters and users, and kill your email deliverabilty.

Last week we talked about how if your email is not “mobile friendly”, that is, if it doesn’t render well on mobile devices, your email will not bring you the results for which you are hoping. And because once someone reads your email on their mobile device, they aren’t as likely to read it on their computer, this is very important. Remember that open and click-through rates can directly affect your deliverability.

I’m sure that you know that more and more people are reading email on the go (I, for example, read a large percentage of my email on my Sidekick, many others read email on their Blackberrys). In fact last year Marketing Sherpa determined that 64% of key decision makers are reading email on their mobile devices. Reading your email on their mobile devices. Have you ever stopped to think about what that means in terms of your email deliverability?

Here’s a word that is guaranteed to kill your email deliverability rate: debt. There is so much spam out there talking about debt, that the spam filters are eating just about anything featuring the word, especially in the subject line.

Three things happened within the last 24 hours which lead me to feel that today we need to talk about email personalization.

Here’s a very basic thing to remember: one of the main reasons that people (or ISPs) may mistake your email for spam is because, in fact, the content of your email makes it look like spam. Remember that old saw, that “content is king”? Well, content can also be the joker, where the joke is on you. Because if your content is garish or gaudy, then instead of getting the royal treatment, it will go straight to the junk folder.

We see fewer and fewer sites with Tell-a-Friend (”TAF”) forms and links these days - and we see fewer Tell a Friend links in email, as well - and there’s a reason for it. Generally Tell-a-Friend links don’t really generate much quality traffic, while they can bring deliverability trouble. In fact, there are a couple of different ways that exhorting your readers to “tell a friend” can cause you problems. (Tell-a-friend refers to asking your readers to, well, “tell a friend” about your article, page, etc., and providing them with a mechanism to easily tell a friend.)

Here’s a quandry. CAN-SPAM, best practices, and just being a good mailer all require that you have a working unsubscribe link. But, many spam filters - including some widely deployed spam filters, consider words like “click here to unsubscribe” or “click here to stop receiving these maillings” as an indicator that the email containing the phrase may be spam. So what’s an email sender to do?

One of the things that spam filters look at is the text:image ratio of your email. Did you know that?

Most of us probably remember George Carlin’s (may he rest in peace) “7 Words You Can’t Say on TV”. What fewer of us realize is that there is a list of words that you can’t say in email - at least, not if you want your email to get into the inbox. And, actually, there are a whole lot more of them than seven.

Confirmation messages are those messages that best-practices practicing email senders send to people who sign up for their mailing lists, to confirm that the person really wants to be on the mailing list - before they get added to the mailing list. The problem is, some email senders see confirmation messages as a place to slip in a little advertising. Don’t make this mistake!

You know, sometimes it’s the silliest, most boneheaded things which trip us up. This is true for your email too. See if you can spot the mistakes in this email (this is a genuine, unretouched email, other than our changing the name of the service to “Geegaw” in order to protect the hapless).

One of the (many) things that we explain to people in our Email Deliverability Handbook is that while you must comply with CAN-SPAM, you shouldn’t say that you comply with CAN-SPAM.