Email Marketing News and Tips

It’s not easy to say why email doesn’t get through to your recipients.  Every email client uses their own deliverability rules and changes them often.    

A way to ensure the best deliverability is to be proactive and create a “clean-up plan”.  Simply scrubbing your list isn’t going to be enough.  What you want to do is concentrate on improving your reputation among ISPs and email clients.   

Tighten your bounce rules.  Remove any email addresses that have previously hard bounced.   Continuing to send to these invalid addresses make you appear as a spammer to many ISP’s.  Why ruin your reputation?  By downloading bounce reports from Boomerang’s BlastWizard, email addresses that have bounced can be easily removed. 

Next, clean up the copy.  Look at your subject lines and content.   Spam-triggered content can get you into trouble.  Certain words, phrases and punctuation such as; “Viagra”, “Free Trial”, exclamation points and words all in caps will activate spam filters.  BlastWizard has a built-in content checker that scores your subject line and content using Spam Assassin.  If your score is too high you can make appropriate changes based on the score breakdown. 

It’s better to lower your volume and send to the cleanest records first.  Divide your list based on recent activity.  First, only send to addresses that have signed up, purchased or taken some sort of action with your company within the past 18 months.  After a month or so remove bad addresses, and mail to records 36 months and younger.   By cleaning up your content and rebuilding your reputation you can then feel more comfortable about sending occasional emails to your older inactive addresses.

After a couple of months of this type of list maintenance you should  be able to improve your reputation and deliverability rate significantly.  Monitoring your list is an ongoing process.   You will need to periodically isolate your inactive records and go through the same exercise.  Your goal is to stay in good stead with ISPs and other Email Clients.  Learn more about email deliverability by attending our Deliverability webinar by clicking here: http://www.boomerang.com/Static/EventRegistration.aspx.