At the top of your email:

Remind them why they are receiving your email
You are receiving this email...
-Because you are a customer of X.
-Because you signed up to X newsletter.
-Because you are a subscriber to X emails.

This will help the recipient immediately recognise who you are and remind them why they are getting the email.

Use a Viewonline Link to help display blocked and unloaded images
Most mail clients will not display the images on your email, so inserting a viewonline link at the top of your email will help encourage recipients to open up the email in a new web browser page. This will display all the content and images in full.

Try including:
-Problem seeing the images? [viewonline]Click here to view this email in your web browser [/viewonline].
-Images not displaying? [viewonline]View the full email online here [/viewonline].

This will help to get the email opened and avoid recipients possibly ignoring or deleting the email because they’ve been put off by the email looking incomplete.

At the bottom of your email:

Include full company details
Always include your company name, address and contact details at the foot of your email. This will help you build and maintain trust with the recipient. Emails without full company details can look illegitimate and untrust worthy, which could lead to the email being marked as spam.

Make the unsubscribe link easy to find
Avoid burying the unsubscribe link amongst a paragraph of text or changing its colour so that it doesn’t clearly stand out against your email’s background colour. If a recipient is no longer interested in receiving your emails, make it easy for them to locate the unsubscribe link, rather than running the risk of the recipient getting annoyed and marking the email as spam.

By sticking to this checklist, you can help guarantee more opens, clicks, responses and ultimately sales, (if that’s your goal?)

Branding:

• Does your email feature your logo, corporate branding and colours?
• Does the branding on your email match the same style and feel as your website?

Content:

• Does your message contain the benefits to the reader? How will they benefit from your offer, latest news or new product or service etc?
• Does your email include well-placed, clear and compelling call-to-actions? Is it obvious what you want them to do next?
• Is your email well structured and have an even balance between text, images and links?
• Have you avoided using spammy words in your subject line and body text?
• Is your subject line intriguing and persuasive enough to make the recipient want to read on?

Personalisation:

• Have you tried personalising your email with the customer’s name, yet without over-personalising the email?
• Is your ‘From Name’ a named person or just a generic one such as info, sales or support? Using a name can help make it feel friendlier.

Data Management:

• Have you recently checked to see how up to date your email address data and contact groups are?
• Is your sign-up process as easy as it can possibly be? Have you personally tested it recently?

Legal Bits:

• Does your email contain any of your corporate details? Full company name, head office address, a contact number?
• Is your unsubscribe link clearly visible, simple and straightforward?

Technical Design & Testing:

• Have you tested the your email to see how it renders in different mail clients and web browsers? Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo etc?
• Have you included a link for the email to be viewed in a new web browser page?
• Do your images have alt text so that content will still appear even if the images cannot due to certain mail client settings?
• Have you kept the resolution size of your images and logos small and checked that they load properly and quickly?

If you can tick all these boxes, you’re ready to go!

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/

These providers often provide a 'Report Spam' or 'Spam' button within their interface which users can click on to mark a message as spam.  Unfortunately, some recipients use these buttons as a quick way of unsubscribing instead of finding and using the link within the e-mail itself.   It is therefore very important to ensure that these recipients are unsubscribed from your lists.

By integrating with the provider's feedback loop, Suite26 will receive an automated notification whenever these buttons are used and we can then locate the original recipient and ensure they are unsubscribed from future mailings.

Any contacts which are unsubscribed in this way will appear in your e-mail reports with 'Feedback Loop' as the unsubscribe reason.

It is very important that you honour these unsubscribe requests in the same way as any other.   If you continue sending mail to recipients who have unsubscribed in this way it is very likely that you will be blocked from sending mail to any addresses by that provider.

If you have any questions regarding this feature or require any other help with deliverability and spam related issues, please do not hesitate to contact support@26.co.uk