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.

Not surprisingly, time and spaces are running out rapidly, so please phone and book your Free Suite26 training seminar today to ensure you don't miss out on the email marketing seminar that is going to change how you market and build your business forever.

All spaces for February 3rd, February 10th and February 17th have already gone and February 24th are filling up fast, so don't delay anymore, get your diary out and call us so you don't miss your free Suite26 training seminar.

In case you've forgotten, you get 250 free email credits just for coming along but if you recommend a friend to attend, you get an extra 250 free email credits for your account. That is a total of 500 free credits towards a serious email campaign. Not to mention lunch, meeting us and excellent networking opportunities.

Suite26 is truly the only Online Pay-As-You-Go Email Marketing Application worth its salt, especially for the small business. You'll immediately see how Suite26 lives up to the hype and you won't end up kicking yourself for missing out on this excellent money saving opportunity.

We really believe this jam-packed, interactive seminar will equip you with all you need to use email marketing to grow your business.

These seminars are designed to fit in around your busy schedule so we're providing lunch as well. Call 0845 313 0911 now to book your place, recommend a friend to attend, or to find out more about our seminar programme. Don't wait.

After the huge success of the last training seminars back in September, our in-house training sessions are back by popular demand. So we're inviting all customers to our Harlow offices to attend:

Free Suite26 Training Seminars
Every Wednesday throughout February 2010.

We've put together another jam-packed, interactive seminar, which teaches you everything you need to know to grow your business using email marketing.

It doesn't matter whether you're a complete novice or have some experience of email marketing, as we show you how Suite26 makes it quick and easy to:

• Manage multiple email marketing campaigns
• Create and send professional looking, personalised HTML emails with images and logos
• Import your existing contact lists and create targeted customer groups
• Track and analyse individual customer responses
• Measure and improve on your campaign performance.

Your seminar includes:

• Helpful How-To Guides
• 250 FREE email credits + 250 if you book early
• A Free Lunch

Venue: Unit 2, 6 West Road, Harlow, Essex, CM20 2DU

Dates: Every Wednesday throughout February 2010

Running times: 11am - 2pm

Check out the full range of benefits you get when you attend a Suite26 training seminar.

Call 0845 313 0911 today to book your free place or to find out more about these seminars. Don't delay, book by Friday 8th January and receive 250 FREE extra credits.

Please feel free to invite anyone else you know that is looking to use email marketing to help develop their business.

While you're celebrating this Christmas and New Year we'll be in the background keeping an eye on things as always.

Have a wonderful time and see you on the other side!

If you know of anyone looking for a low-cost, easy-to-use email marketing application, then today could be your lucky day as we've just launched the Suite26 Referral Scheme.

Enjoy cash or email credit rewards

You can earn cash or email credit rewards every time one of your referred customers purchases Suite26 credits.  In essence, the more your referrals spend each month, the bigger the cash or credits reward you receive, and with no limit on the number of referrals you can make, you can potentially earn hundreds of pounds or thousands of credits in rewards every month.

Find out more about the scheme, view the breakdown of what you can earn with very little effort.

What do I do now?

1. Join the Suite26 referral scheme by calling 0845 313 0911 to speak with Ricky or Mark to obtain your unique ID number.
2. Tell your referrals to quote your name or ID number with their first purchase to get the cash or credits rolling into your account.
3. Advise your referrals to quote your unique ID number so they too will earn bonus credits on their first purchase.

Find out how you can start earning your cash or email credits for your business via Suite26 today on 0845 313 0911.

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/

The Christmas Credits Countdown - Save 15% on email email credits!

The clock's still ticking but time is running out on the Christmas credit discounts.  So come on, think of all the savings and mileage you'll get when you bag your Suite26 bargain today. Remember these credits never expire, so buy them today, save yourself money and hold them until you're ready to do your mailing, which might be a New Year promotion for 2010 or a special message to your customers this Easter.

We hate to see a bargain go to waste, so call 0845 313 0911 and quote CCC today because you now have until 5.30pm Friday 4th December to buy with 15% off, after which time this email credits offer will self destruct! Tick, tock...

For this week only save 20% on email credits with The Christmas Credits Countdown

Alas, we told you that it was a Christmas Credit Countdown and that you had until Friday 20th to get your credits much cheaper than usual and now you know why. So you've missed out on that special 25% off deal

Fear not though, if you move quickly enough this week you can still save 20% off standard prices. So for those of you who took too long procrastinating and pondering whether or not to purchase last week, here's another chance for you to make a great saving. So get busy because time is passing and these lovely discounts are slipping away. Remember these credits do not expire, they'll be good to go whenever you're ready!

Last week.............25% off

This week............20% off

Next week.............15% off

7th t0 11th Dec.....10% off

14th to 18th Dec.....5% off

Just so you know, you now have until 5.30pm Friday 27th November to buy your email credits and get 20% off.

How do I bag this bargain?

1.  You call us on 0845 313 0911 and quote CCC.

2.  Tell us how many credits you'd like to buy.

3.  We allocate your credits to your account in minutes. That's it.

For this week only save 25% on email credits!

As usual the countdown to Christmas has probably begun without you and there's still mountains to do, finalising your Christmas and New Year offers and e-cards.

The good news is that this year, with Suite26 at hand, there are two things you don't need to worry about. One is the cost of doing a mailing - it just got 25% cheaper - and the other is the speed. No matter how late you leave it, your festive messages will arrive just in the nick of Christmas time!

 Call 0845 313 0911 and quote CCC25

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.