BUSINESS
Getting into the inbox
18-03-2010
by denise cox
Denise Cox thinks that the task of getting your email into a customer's inbox is a topic as big as the internet, but offers a few tips to get you started...
The bottom line is this... it is absolutely essential to build and maintain a good reputation.
There are two aspects to this. Firstly there is your ‘sender reputation’; or how ISPs and gate keepers rate you. And then there’s your reputation with the actual recipients of your message. This is why it’s important to send permission-based emails only. If you are reported as spam by recipients and/or ISPs - it will most likely result in all your emails getting blocked.
Once you have reputation monitors in place, here are three of most immediate steps you can take to help delivery:
- TEST: If the test ends up in the Junk Folder, start with the subject line – it can be as simple as tweaking the words/phrases used in it. If the tests still fail, move through and test one element at a time within the email body to spot possible words or phrases that are causing a high spam filter score* and thus causing it to get filtered out.ADD: Encourage readers to add your From: address to their Contacts. Include a line at the top of every mailing, e.g.: “Please add emailaddress@domain.com to your address book to help ensure that our emails reach your Inbox."
- SIMPLICITY: Reduce the complexity of HTML designs and ensure the HTML is well-formed. HTML tags appear to have a low level score, but they can accumulate to a significant filter level if there are complex designs, e.g. tables within tables, or too many span tags.
*Spam Filters are used by both ISPs/email providers and email software used by the recipient's of your message These use various methods to detect and score emails for the likelihood of each message being spam.
[source: denise cox, Newsweaver.ie]
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