Schewanick Computer Services

Deliverability is today's biggest issue for every email marketer. Email marketers face deliverability problems because of email overload. Many people who spend much time online and that have businesses very much related to computers and Internet often get more than 100 emails per day. Usually, 8 out of 10 emails are considered as SPAM. Problem is that your email message, supposedly that you are legitimate marketer and have permission for contacting, can be flagged as SPAM. This can make harm to your business and reputation.
Here you can find some interesting facts about deliverability and SPAM:
http://antispam.yahoo.com/funfacts
Using some Hosted ASP email marketing software you will loose money because of the fact that you will pay for every message sent and not for every message delivered. Beside that, you will loose money in lost sales. Using desktop email marketing software like GroupMail (http://www.group-mail.com) you will pay one-time-fee for software licence and not for number of messages delivered.
You can have deliverability issues because of anti-spam lists, because of ISP filters and because of corporate/user filters. So there are three hurdles you have to jump over to get your messages delivered. So, how can you improve your deliverability rates?
Subscriptions
The first necessary step in getting your email message delivered is that you have permission of your members to send them your messages. Never, and we mean never, put people on your list without their permission. We recommend you double opt-in method for getting new subscribers so that they have to confirm their request to be your subscribers. It is recommended to ask them to enter their work email instead of free email addresses. Some companies go that far that they don't allow subscribing if you use free email address. It is because of the fact that work email address is considered as more reliable and stable than a free email address.
Welcome message
So, after they confirmed their request you have to take the next step. You have to automatically send them your welcome message where you will give description of your company, email newsletter and list management info (information about subscribing, unsubscribing, digest mode, archives...).
In this welcome message it is very important not to forget two most important things. To tell them to put your From address in their Whitelist filtering rules to ensure that your message will arrive in to their inbox and not in their Bulk folder. And second very important thing, you should ask them to save your welcome message for future reference. Many people forget that they subscribed to certain email newsletter. Because of that they can accuse you for spamming and report you to your ISP or email marketing company.
Regulations, relations and reputations
You have to constantly have good relationship with major ISP in order to ensure good deliverability. ISP relation often can be a complex job so many email marketing software companies have special people assigned for this type of job. They have to actively watch news about ISP politics and to fulfil their request.
For example, some ISP won't deliver your message if your messages don't have a so called DomainKeys or Sender Policy Framework (SPF) key to ensure that the message really came from your domain name and to protect email sender identity. This prevents email spoofing. Some other companies won't deliver your messages if you are not compliant with Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header. The Habeas headers allow you to guarantee that the emails you are sending are not spam and bypass filter systems.
Speaking about DomainKeys, for example if you send your message from one Yahoo email address to another Yahoo email address the recipient will see this info below From name:
"Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by yahoo.com."
You can have your own DomainKeys so that your recipients get similar message like above only with your domain name in it. Not only that it is recommended to have your own DomainKeys it is also very professional to see that your company is have one. It shows that email communication is very important for you.
For more information about those standards and regulations visit:
http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework http://www.habeas.com
You have to ask your email service provider what steps they take in order to ensure the maximum deliverability. If your email service provider is blacklisted your messages won't be delivered on many places. Also, you have to check whether your domain is blacklisted. You can use different services like http://www.dnsstuff.com, http://www.spamhaus.org, http://www.spamcop.net, http://www.OpenRBL.org. Having a good reputation with major anti-spam lists and policies ensures that your messages won't be filtered.
List maintenance
You have to track which email addresses are undeliverable and if it repeats several times you have to remove those email address if your software won't do that for you. Also, if you don't use double opt-in method for getting subscribers it can happen that someone make a typo in entering their email addresses so instead of, for example, username@domain.com they enter username@domain in your subscription form. Email marketing software like GroupMail has add-on called Email Inspector which removes bad email addresses and can validate recipient addresses by format, using DNS lookup and full SMTP user account testing.
Content and consistence
"Content Is King!" - one of the best known rules on the Internet. In email marketing, it is not only important that you include quality content. It is also important that your message don't look too "spammy", that it isn't full of words used by spammers like: free, buy now, guaranteed, limited time offer...etc, thay you don't write words all in capitals. It is considered as SHOUTING! There are several useful tools that will check your content if it is considered as "spammy" before you send your message. One of those services is EzineCheck (http://www.ezinecheck.com).
Also, you have to follow one of the most important rules in email publishing and that is consistency. You have to choose your From field name and stick to it, you have to make your Subject line in that way that it clearly represents you, to choose one format and always use it.
For example, let's say you have a newsletter called Best Practices Guide. You can design your subject line this way:
[BPG] Article Title, Issue No., Date
This can be your template so it is more likely that your message won't be deleted by mistake. You can make your style even further. You can make a practice that your every article starts with number or question so this template can be:
[BPG] 7 Best Deliverability Tips, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005 or [BPG] How To Get Your Emails Delivered, Issue No. 10, 10/10/2005.
We have said that you have to choose your From field name and stick to it. Beside that, your From email address is even more important. Many subscribers make filters based on From email address so if you change your email address it is more likely that your message won't be delivered or read. That's why your From email address has to be consistent.
About the Author
Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com