The Deliverability Golden Rule: Send only email to others as you would have email sent to you…

Ensuring that your solicited newsletter is successfully delivered to your recipients entails a tricky scuffle in this age where spamming is an intensifying issue. Your newsletter is sent to only those who subscribed to it, but the risk that your email is not delivered and is marked as SPAM is present. This depends highly on the way you format your emails and how you write your subject line. Your email deliverability is an important issue as the acquirement of customers and prospects is intricate and undeliverable emails imply a loss of those subscribers. After having crafted a perfect newsletter, its deliverability as a whole is what matters. Undeliverable emails and email bounce backs are requiring more and more concern. Open rates can experience a drastic decrease due to incorrect spam filter classification. Generally, the CAN-SPAM act applies to commercial emails which are sent to advertise or promote products or services. If your newsletter includes advertisements, the recipient can view it as being commercial and hence the CAN-SPAM act can pertain. So, how can you prevent your legitimate newsletter from being marked as SPAM?

• Never send unsolicited emails. Ensure that people on your subscriber list are willing to receive your newsletter before sending. Provide an opt-out option in your newsletter to allow recipients to unsubscribe if they wish to.
• When collecting names and email addresses from your website, ask the new subscribers to add your email address to their address book. This will prevent SPAM filters from blocking your newsletter.
• Whenever a subscriber wants to be removed from your subscriber list, delete his email address from your subscriber list. Else, you will henceforth be recognized as SPAM.
• HTML emails are becoming more popular and most SPAM is HTML formatted. Thus, differentiating between opt-in newsletters and SPAM messages is difficult. Therefore, if you are sending your newsletter in HTML format, send a plain text alternative newsletter as well.
• Investigate about newsletter advertisers before placing their advertisements in your newsletter. Your newsletter will be filtered in case their website URL has been previously used to send SPAM.
• Your language used in your newsletter should be appropriate. Do not include topics such as making money or pornography which make your email look like SPAM. Do not use extra punctuation or odd spelling in your message.
• Use images scarcely as messages that are entirely images are considered as SPAM.
• Include a link to files via a website URL instead of making use of attachments. With the growing of insertion of viruses in attachments, the recipient can tag your newsletter as SPAM to avoid virus intrusion.

An effective way of ensuring that your newsletter is delivered and not marked as SPAM is to use an email marketing firm to distribute your newsletter. Octeth is a recognized firm and its product, oemPro, grants the anti-spam rating feature which determines if your newsletter will be tagged as SPAM. With features like bounce management and use of strong permission policies, email deliverability will hence not be of high concern.