Email Marketing: 3 Crucial Steps For Getting Your Emails Delivered That No-One Talks About…
By Anna Johnson on March 23rd, 2010Effective email marketing – the kind that gets your emails opened, links clicked, and products sold – relies, first and foremost, on having your emails delivered to your subscribers in the first place. Here are three crucial – yet little discussed – steps for ensuring your emails get through to subscribers.
1. Use the same ‘from’ email address
Using a different email address is an obvious no-no, yet I see Internet marketers make this mistake ALL the time (I subscribe to a lot of lists). Internet marketers will go to great pains to ask new subscribers to ‘white list’ a particular email address, and then start using an entirely different email address to send those subscribers emails!
Each time you do this, you risk having your email go into the wrong folder (i.e. where subscribers have folders set up to receive your emails). If the ‘wrong folder’ happens to be someone’s inbox, then your email may be missed among all the other unsolicited emails and spam. If the wrong folder is their spam folder, then your email may get automatically deleted without a trace.
2. Quarantine risky emails
‘Risky’ emails are the email addresses of anyone who hasn’t joined your list via a confirmed opt-in process on your website. They’re ‘risky’ because you cannot be entirely sure that the owners of such email addresses really wanted to receive your emails in the first place.
Subscribers that fall into this category include those acquired via co-registration, sweepstakes or any kind of list purchase or rental.
Ideally, you want to use a different IP address (i.e. the address of the computer or server that is used to send your emails) to send emails to risky subscribers. That’s so that, if someone claims you are sending them spam and your IP address ends up being blacklisted, you won’t be inhibited from sending emails to your trusted list (which uses a different IP address).
3. Remove bounced email addresses
It goes without saying that anyone who unsubscribes from your list should be removed from your list as soon as possible – ideally, immediately. But you also want to remove email addresses that ‘bounce’ (i.e. where your email isn’t delivered because the email address is no longer valid, the recipient’s email box is full, or for some other technical reason). This is because you risk the ire – and blacklisting – of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that receive all those bounce messages.
