I received an email earlier from a company I no longer wanted to receive emails from but knew I had opted in for in the first place.  It got me thinking as I tried to unsubscribe from it, how important easy unsubscribe links are.

Now be honest, how many of you have seen an email you’ve received but either no longer require its services, or have had enough of the constant barrage of email promotions they have sent (I’ll talk about that problem another time) and just decided to press the spam button to stop them sending to you again? I’m afraid I am one of the people who have to say ‘yes’ to this question.  And I almost did it again with the email I was trying to unsubscribe from earlier.  Had I not been working in email marketing, I would have tapped that spam button straight away. 

Now obviously I didn’t do it this time just because of my job and out of respect for how hard it is to get a high level of deliverability at the moment.  But I also have the knowledge of being on the other side of the industry, and know how much I didn’t care about deliverability then. 

So here’s my thought….  Instead of placing an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page, why not stick it right at the top of the page.  Maybe even have a think at where the spam button is in Yahoo! and Hotmail browsers and position it as close to that as possible.  Ok, it’s not the most attractive first thing to look at, but if the link is in eyesight of the spam button when the email is first opened you stand a much greater chance that the recipient will choose to just unsubscribe from you.  And let’s face it, deliverability and avoiding the bulk folder is the priority. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk 

It seems to happen more and more that newsletters have to sacrifice the design for a better guarantee of inbox delivery.  Unfortunately this isn’t going to change; so best start redesigning.   As I spend quite a bit of time checking emails for spam filter ratings as part of my job at mailingmanager, the first thing that has to be taken into consideration is the text>html ratio.  Long gone are the days of having a fantastic looking layout with a small message.  Instead, you better make sure that there’s a lot of text to accompany that fancy template you have or you’re basically heading for a one way trip to the bulk folder. 

One thing you can do to even this up is make the newsletter multi-part.  Construct an html and text version of the email and send them both out at the same time.  As the email is sent as multi-part, it will arrive at your recipients’ inbox and then decide which format to deliver to that person.  This firstly, is a great way to get a much higher open rate as you are making sure both formats are covered and secondly you are increasing your text ratio. It’s also a good idea to get rid of the big images at the top of your newsletter.  This is for two reasons.  Firstly, the more images you have in the newsletter, the higher a spam rating you will have when the filter checks through it.  Secondly, you want to make sure the message of the newsletter gets through to the reader within the first few lines of your newsletter.  Usually a recipient will choose to read on or delete within the first few lines of an email, so it has to summarise the whole of the email in the first few lines.  As a good indicator of how your email should look, send previews to your outlook box.  If the full message of the email can be seen in the preview window in outlook, you’ve done a good job.  

If you need any guidelines on how a good email campaign should look, just go into your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account and have a look at the newsletters that are dropping into your inbox.  I’m sure around 90% of you will have an eBay email in there.  If you look at that, the email hasn’t gone over the top on design but managed to both keep the companies branding and the main message of the email.  In doing this, eBay have made a campaign which is both recognisable and also got the email into the inbox where they can expect a much higher open rate.  A perfectly constructed campaign.  The most important thing when constructing an email campaign is to be patient.  Test everything you do, and make sure that you are willing to compromise on design to get those email open rates higher. 

www.mailingmanager.co.uk 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk