When creating your email campaigns you want to do everything you can to ensure that your mail reaches your recipient's inbox.  Whilst most spam filters keep tight lipped about what would cause a message to be marked as spam, Microsoft has released a short guide of things to avoid getting caught in the Outlook junk filter.

You'll find the guide here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA010450051033.aspx

Most points there are fairly obvious and would never be used by legitimate mailers, but a couple there may catch people out who use a term in a legitimate way.

The guide is not a complete list and there are many other factors that could still cause your email to get blocked.   It should also be noted that this guide is for the filter built into the Outlook client only.

Here at Suite26 we always advise you to test your email campaigns as much as possible in as many different email clients before sending.   It's easy to register a Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail account and just send a preview message to those accounts, but we would also recommend using an email testing service such as LitmusApp which will test your email in a number of different email clients and against lots of different spam filters.

There's an excellent article on the AOL Postmaster blog this morning which discusses the difference between recipients giving permission to receive your mail and actually requesting to receive it.

We all talk about permission based email marketing and how important it is to ensure your mail is delivered reliably to your recipient's inbox, but this article shows that while a recipient may technically have given permission to receive your mail they did not actually request it.

In the example they provide they show that the sender required users to give permission to be on their mailing list before allowing them to carry out a primary function on their website (effectively a forced opt-in) and thus the sender experienced a large number of complaints and delivery problems.

So, here's a few points you should remember:

• Recipients should always request to receive your mailings (for example a sign box on your website or a tickbox shown next to other forms on your site)
• Make sure that potential recipients know what your mailings will be about, how often they should expect to receive them and re-affirm that they can unsubscribe at any time.
• Don't force a recipient to sign up to your mailing list before being able to achieve some task on your site.
• Don't assume that just because somebody has given you their email address that they want to be on your mailing list.   You must always provide a mechanism (ie; tickbox) for them to indicate they want to be on your mailing list.   Adding your entire address book from Outlook is not an option!
• Ensure that recipients can unsubscribe from your mailings with one click and that you honour that unsubscribe from that day forward (Suite26 will do this for you automatically but you must ensure any further back-end databases you may have honours the unsubscribe too)

Finally, the AOL article touches on the topic of engagement.   AOL, among others, keep statistics on how many users click on your mail, how many click to display images, how many click the spam button, how many reply, how many click the not spam button along with other metrics to figure out how engaging your mailings are.   If you regularly get a low engagement score then you could find your mails ending up in the spam folder or maybe not even being delivered at all!   We will be writing more on engagement and the future of deliverability in some upcoming blog posts.

You can read the full article on the AOL blog here: http://postmaster-blog.aol.com/2009/12/03/p/

Do you want to grow your email list quickly and get your marketing out to as many potential clients as possible? Been approached by a "reputable" list vendor offering you thousands of "legitimate" opt-in addresses?

However tempting it may seem, just don't go there. We're not just talking here about the dodgy providers who offer millions of addresses for peanuts, but the more professional looking ones who will provide you with a segmented, opt-in list from people who have agreed to receive "3rd party" marketing about your chosen subject.

The main problem here is that the recipients on these lists will not have the slightest clue who you are. No matter what permission they gave to receive "3rd party" mailings they have not given you their permission to email them. Sending mail to these people will have many of them hitting the Report Spam button in their email client and if too many do that your domain is going to end up on spam blacklists. Can you afford for your brand to become blacklisted and have your reputation tarnished?

The next problem is you have no idea when and where the address was collected - it could have been added to the list years ago and may no longer even be in use. Sending email to non-existent or dead addresses will also count against you and you could again end up on one of those blacklists. What's more, if you receive a complaint and are asked to prove where you got the address, which site they opted in on along with date/time/IP address - could you provide that information?

Then you run into the relevancy issue. The recipients who do actually receive your mail, don't report you for spamming and open it up may not even find the content relevant to them (after all they have no idea who you are) - they'll just delete it.

So, you spent all that money on buying/renting a list then money on sending it out only to find most did not arrive, the ones that did weren't opened, you've got a ton of spam complaints and your domain is on a number of blacklists - now it doesn't seem like such a tempting idea after all!

Oh and finally using a purchased/rented list will break the Ts and Cs and anti-spam policies of almost any ESP - us included. So just don't bother - we can see purchased lists a mile off.

Recent studies and surveys have shown that Email Marketing is still the most popular and effective form of direct marketing available to UK companies today. However it is a continual challenge for companies is to stand out from the competition. According to The Aberdeen Group’s report ‘Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your customers’, 96% of companies believe email personalisation will improve your performance.

Suite26 is the newest addition to the Global Gold product portfolio, it is the latest Email Marketing application with integrated CRM system and Survey Manager to be launched. This web-based application allows companies to send personalised communication to their clients by combining THREE powerful web applications in ONE, thus helping companies grow their business.

Below are 5 key ways that Suite26 will allow companies to get closer to their clients and provide effective email marketing to them:

1. Identify and Listen to High Value Customers

Don’t just send customers your company’s messages - listen to customers closely and address their needs, wants and interests directly with personal one-to-one email communications. Suite26 will help you to identify high-value customers by proactively engaging them with surveys, so you can gather more detailed profile information. Review what your most valuable customers want and then you can adapt your messages to better target opportunities with highly personalised email campaigns.

2. Leverage your Customer Database

Suite26 also allows you to use your customer data to segment email lists, which can then be used to improve your email marketing campaigns. For best results, your email database should contain as much customer information as possible, including demographic, behavioural and transactional data. The application comes with a vast number of options for collecting your customers information, but if you require more, you can add custom fields to enable this. Use this data to segment your lists and personalise your campaigns for best results.
 
3. Integrated CRM

Your CRM system will contain valuable demographic, behavioural and transactional information about your customers over time. Use this data to personalise campaigns to make them more relevant to them, you can then add in your Google web analytics code, which can indicate how your customers might react to future campaigns, enabling you to better tailor your messages.
 
4. Automate Email Personalisation Efforts

Follow-up messages can be sent automatically based on consumer behaviour. These event and action-triggered emails - allow marketers to not only improve content targeting and personalization, but also the timing of email message delivery, so you can reach customers at the right time in their buying cycle. All of which can be managed effortlessly in Suite26.
 
5. Keep an Eye on Stats

Think of your performance statistics as the pulse of your email campaign. It is essential for you, as marketers, to watch the numbers and changes in them.  Alter campaigns when seeing a change in customer behaviour.  Marketers who regularly test and measure results, have a better understanding of what interests their customers, and is one of the quickest ways to begin improving email communication and building stronger, profitable relationships with them.

Sign up for your FREE trial today