Okay, so I told you in a previous blog that the email subject line is very important.  This time I’m going to help you a little further by giving you a guideline to on how to write decent subject lines.

Don’t make the subject line too long.  You want the recipient to be able to read your whole message without it ending half way thr…..The subject line should be no more than 50 characters long.

Try to summarise your offer in your subject line.  Don’t be vague about it and just say “offer” or “sale”.  Try to let the customer know what is on offer or what you are reducing.  By doing this you are offering a first line of targeted marketing to your recipients and you may be able to entice more opens.  You also manage to avoid looking spammy by throwing in words like “free” and “offer” into the subject line.

Finally, try to leave CAPITAL LETTERS and punctuations!!! out of the subject line, this is just asking for your recipients to junk your folder.

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

As we continue our ongoing challenge of figuring out what exactly triggers spam filters we came across a few new ones and some ridiculous rules that the spam filters have. 

Web safe colours

Spam filters seem to have a certain issue with colours that go out of the pre-set 216 colours that were set as ‘web safe’ all those years ago when computers only supported 256 colours.  Why this is the case still is slightly baffling, but best to be safe about it.  I found this colour chart that will help you keep in the boundaries  

http://www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/makapage/pics/net216-2.gif . 

Web safe fonts

Keeping along the same lines as the previous point made, web safe fonts also apply to keeping the filters happy.  Once again, a quick search on google brought up a chart for you to view of acceptable fonts.  I think this might rank higher in importance than the web safe colours as you also have the added worry of the inbox converting your well chosen, and nicely suited fonts, to the dreaded times new roman format and completely ruining the look of your newsletter.  And we can’t be having that….

http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/img/Font-list-WinXP-Firefox-ClearType.png 

Wording

Remember, just because you haven’t used the word in a spammy context doesn’t mean that the spam filters will understand the context of it.  A prime example of this would be recently I was checking a newsletter we had created for spam problems and the system brought up that certain spam filters were marking the newsletter as pornography.  It turned out that a date in the newsletter (1918) had been caught by the spam filters as being pornographic (18). 

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

You have spent ages writing a well worded, perfectly designed email campaign.  You sit back, proudly, and marvel at your work.  But then you notice you’ve forgotten to put in a subject line for the campaign.  You take a second and then write the first thing that comes into your head…”New low prices on our [insert product name here]!”…Congratulations. You have just managed to ruin your email campaign.  You might as well have just mashed your face into the keyboard and sent that out instead, it wouldn’t have made any difference as no-one will read it. 

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

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

So how do we get through the spam filters?  Well the first thing to say is DON’T SPAM!  Hopefully at this point the people that are left reading this are legitimate companies who are honestly trying to contact their customers.  The fact that you’re a legitimate company already has you off to a good start and if you just adopt the principles I outlined in my previous blog “The Checklist Before your Campaign”, you’ll already have the foundations in place for a successful campaign.  The basics are in place, so now you have to understand how the spam filters work.  This way you can keep to the rules set by the filters and get your email into those inboxes.  For a basis of this explanation I’m going to dissect the hotmail filter to see how it works. 

Hotmail has a multi-level spam filter in place to ensure it provides a high level of security against spammers.   The first level is the Blacklist check.  Hotmail will check against its own and 3^rd party blacklists to see if your IP and sender domain have been labelled as blacklisted. 

How do I make sure I don’t end up on the Blacklist?

Well the first thing to do is check and make sure you’re not on there already.  DNS Stuff can be checked to see if your IP has been blacklisted.  If though, you’re signed up to a mailing program like mailingmanager, you need to check for their name on the blacklist.  We personally check to see if we have been blacklisted on a daily basis.   Okay, so you’re not on the blacklist.  Now it is time to implement prevention of going onto the blacklist.  As I already mentioned in my previous blog “The Checklist Before your Campaign” you need to have an unsubscribe link in there.  Another handy thing is to set up feedback loops with the main providers.  Hotmails’ feedback loop information is here.  The feedback loop allows you to receive complaints about spam from the recipients on your list.  The best course of action is to delete these users from your mailing list, which in turn will lower your complaint rate and should eventually make you eligible for the whitelist program (we’ll come across that later).  Once again, if you’re signed up to a mailing program you won’t have to worry about this as the system should have one set up for you and will delete subscribers accordingly. 

Hotmail also runs a volume filter at the same time.  Basically, like every major email provider, if you send too many emails at one time, the filter will be triggered and you run the risk of having your email junked or rejected.  You can find a more in-depth explanation of volume filters here. 

How do I stop my email being caught in the volume filter?

The best thing you can do is limit the amount of emails you send out per hour/day.  Best thing to do is stagger your email per hour to an acceptable level.  I know this means you won’t get as instant results as you previously did but at least you’re increasing your chances of deliverability and ultimately, higher open rates.  At mailingmanager we stagger the high volume customers send-out on their behalf already and is probably common practice with mailing program providers. 

Once it has passed through these filters it will then check against the IP whitelist to see if the sender is on it whilst the sender domain is checked against Sender Score and safe-lists.  If it is accepted as a part of the whitelist for the email provider it will be allowed to go to the inbox. 

How do I get on the whitelist?

To get on the whitelist of an email provider you must adhere to the rules that it lays down to the sender.  Hotmails whitelist rules are here.  Basically, you are judged on sender history, email reputation and complaint levels.  As long as you have followed my previous instructions you should be in a position to apply to whitelists. If you are not on a whitelist or safelist another filter will then check against verifying filters that assess the validity of the email.  This is becoming an ever more determining factor in whether your email will get delivered into the inbox. 

How do I verify my IP and Sender Domain?

As a legitimate company this isn’t a problem.  Just make sure your email has SPF, Domain Key and Sender ID records in your email.  These records allow the email providers to verify that you are who you say you are and protect you from MTA’s who could send out emails using your domain and damaging your email reputation.  So not only does it help your deliverability but can also protect your companies reputation.  Once again, if you’re already a mailingmanager customer, you will already have these in place as part of our service (and to keep our reputation in check!). 

Then comes the final part of the check.  The spam filters will check your message for common spammy words and phrases, poor html coding, over-use of images (see my blog “Design vs The Spam Filters” for more details).  How much this filter matters is utterly dependant on previous filters and how your email reputation has been rated. 

So to Quickly summarise….

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your bounce handling.

Make sure you have sufficient maintenance of your feedback loop.

Manage a consistent email campaign, that if has a large list, is staggered in its sending.

Apply to SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys for email verification.

Providing all the above are upheld, apply for email providers whitelist/safelist. And finally…. 

Send me a thank you email and money for helping you. 

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