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The new service is being rolled out to current users of Google’s Gmail system this week. It creates a two-tier inbox: one for ‘priority mail’; and another for the remainder of a person’s emails. Google will also retain its spam filtering system.

The internet search giant has come up with the priority system to help users cope with the amount of emails they receive in a day.

Users can switch on the feature in a click, instead of setting filters and creating multiple folders as they had to with previous services. Gmail will then adapt the way it treats incoming emails based on the account owner’s pattern of usage.

This will mean that email marketers will have to alter their approach to current marketing by following best practice to ensure their email reaches the priority inbox. Sending email based on data such as previous purchases will increase their relevance, meaning better inbox positioning with less competition.

So how do you ensure that you are a ‘priority’?

Well Google will prioritize emails according to whether the account holder will reply to a message. Marketing emails – especially those sent from “do not reply” email accounts – will be at a disadvantage. It will also deprioritise emails that are routinely deleted without being read.

This means that emails should be as engaging as possible i.e. segregating your lists, following design and HTML best practice and cutting out irrelevant ‘blanket blasts’ to everyone. It might mean emailing less. Make the content interesting and avoid spam words to ensure that your email hits the ‘pinbox’.

So preparing for Gmail’s priority inbox is actually an exercise in being a better email marketer. Smarter inboxes like this are becoming more common, and most of the major webmail players have made noises about this recently, so you need to ensure that you adapt your marketing strategy accordingly.

Even though Apple has refused to support Flash on their iphones and ipads, the opportunities are still endless. Sky have recently launched their ipad app, meaning users can watch Sky Sports live.

Below is just an outline of what an ipad could mean for your business and how it will change the face of email marketing forever.

Although the ipad is meant for personal rather than business use, it still has its relevance in today’s corporate world.  The benefit of sending emails to customers who have ipads (not that you would be able to get hold of this information) is that they are more likely to read the email. When at work consumers are busy working and replying to the more important emails, meaning your email often gets overlooked or seen as spam. However, this changes when the email is read on a device like an ipad as consumers often spend time browsing through their emails at a leisurely pace. 

The next issue is visibility. The preview pane in Outlook is small and people can only see the top of the email, which contains a header with the company logo and no real information, which doesn’t  convey your message well. Some webmail clients, such as Google Mail, Yahoo etc also disable images within emails. This helps to destroy your brand image and appears unprofessional. The best ones to test to ensure that the majority of your audience don’t experience any issues or irregularities in rendering are Yahoo!, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail and AOL. Test these periodically to ensure that email client changes and upgrades don’t affect your emails.Contrast all of this to the iPad. Images are displayed by default. The preview pane is much larger. This means that recipients be able to preview most of your email. There are also fewer distractions on the email client itself; Outlook has tons of sidebars, folders and options that not only take up valuable space but compete for attention with emails.

Another advantage from a technical point of view is that the iPad email client uses the same rendering engine as the Safari web browser. This means that if something displays fine in Safari, it will appear almost exactly the same in an iPad email. And Safari will display things almost exactly the same as Firefox, Chrome and, if you’re careful, the later versions of Internet Explorer. Since Safari supports HTML 5, so does the iPad email client. One of the main features of HTML 5 is the ability to embed images directly in the page. If the iPad takes off this could lead to a boom in video email marketing.

I would encourage all email marketers to get hold of an iPad and start testing. You need to see how your emails look on this new device and make sure that they are rendering correctly. This is just the beginning of how email marketing will change over the next few years so make sure you keep abreast of the latest technological advances and social revolutions.

Ensuring email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle especially with developments in spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Not all email is equally important to a recipient and so there is often a gap between email a recipient is happy receiving and email a recipient both wants and is expecting enough to complain about not receiving.

To ensure that your email deliverability is the best it can be follow these 7 steps

1. Verification

The number one step in the battle for deliverability is confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list. You can do this by using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the subscriber. They must click that unique link verifying that they own the email address and did actually request to subscribe.

2. Email Addresses

When asking visitors to subscribe, you should be asking for their “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Google or Hotmail. Free email accounts tend to be used far less.

3. Bounce Backs

Always remove undeliverable addresses as soon as possible. An address that consistently  bounces should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

4. Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and the difference between the two can be hard to distinguish. Always consider plain text emails too as deliverability failure is around 1.2% compare to 2.5% with HTML.

5. Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

• Advertising

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

• Language

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography.

• Images

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

• Attachments

Avoid attachments where possible by including a web link instead- where complete avoidance is not feasible. Many people are still afraid of the spread of viruses through opening of attachments.

6. Relationships

Where possible contact the ISP and let them know about your email service. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

7. Legal Practice

There are a number of laws relating to email deliverability. It’s important to keep up to date with current legal practice and you must make sure you periodically review your current practice to ensure legal compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link to remove the subscriber from future messages (which must be swiftly tasked).

Email marketing remains one of the most important tools available to digital marketers since it provides a cost-effective technique for a company brand to reach prospects and customers with relevant, timely communications.

The importance of email marketing to digital marketers is clear from our latest email marketing census1 which showed that Email‟s share of the budget had increased to 23% of annual digital marketing budgets in 2008. Budgeted spend on email marketing was only slightly behind the budget for the website and search marketing, activities which tend to be much more widely discussed online.

Investment in email marketing reflects the results delivered, with respondents to our email census rating email as the best channel for return on investment after search engine optimisation, with almost two thirds of company respondents (78%) rating email as either “excellent” or “good”. Only 4% say that email is “poor” for ROI, with a further 18% describing it as “average”.

So there you go………email is the most effective form of digital marketing so if you don’t already have a nourish account sign up now to start your online campaign. Registration is free and takes only a few moments.

If so, the header can often shed some light on this issue. The header is basically a tracking record of the route the email you sent took and the stops it made along the way to get to the customer’s inbox.

Just like sending something across the country by post emails also need to stop off at various points, the headers show you this exact route and reveal these stops. They also show the details of the sender and the recipients. Headers also reveal more about the different ISP’s through the information they chose to include

Every email landing in an inbox is given a header. So why haven’t you seen one? This is more than likely because each email client (that’s the service or program you use to read you emails – like Outlook, Hotmail, Googlemail etc) hides these headers in a different way. They are hidden from view because unless you’re an email marketer trying to find out more about your email deliverability, the header is not that interesting to see.

For more information on how to see headers on different email platforms go to:

http://www.abika.com/Reports/Samples/emailheaderguide.htm

Know your audience, ask what they want, and deliver it.

Send frequently

Laws are not standard across Europe – depending on your market always check with the laws of the country you are dealing with. Below is a summary of the principles of UK law.

The basics

• The nature of your message must be clear to the recipient from the start- you must not disguise the origin or purpose of the message.
• You must always have an unsubscribe link (or  a way for users to unsubscribe).
• Recipients must have opted in to receive your updates.
  

There are two exceptions to the opt in rule:

• You can promote your business to employees of a Limited Company.
• If someone has bought (or negotiated to buy) something from you, and provided their email address, you can promote related goods and services to them.
• You must still provide an opt out service.

 ‘Forward to a Friend’ emails

• If you are planning a ‘forward to a friend’ email then you must make it clear that the recipient should only forward the email to people who will be happy to receive it.
• If you offer an incentive to people who forward the email, and it’s sent to people who are unhappy to receive it, then you are liable as the instigator of that email.
• You cannot ask a receiver to provide you with other people’s email addresses, unless you have the specific consent of those individuals – whether directly to you or via the original recipient.

 Summary:

• You can ask a recipient if they mind you passing on their details to a third party organisation to promote their products.
• You must ensure, however,  that the third party is reputable and complies with the law
• You can send genuine business-related emails to your existing customers, or to people who have left their details with you i.e. during an enquiry, provided the email is about a similar product/service.
• You MUST NOT treat competitions etc. as a way of building a mailing list – recipients must actually request to opt in to receive promotional emails
• You must ensure that the recipient has actually opted in. It is your responsibility to check this.
• You must always keep up to date with the legal principles surrounding email marketing.
• It may help to appoint somebody to do this.
• Breaches of legal principles can be costly both monetary and in terms of reputation.
• Always check the Data Protection Act- it is updated regularly and terms contained in the US version breach terms in the UK version.

Keep checking our news section for an update on Data Protection law and how it affects your business!

Stop…..check your email checklist!

Before you click send check your email checklist to avoid embarrassing mistakes. If you don’t have a checklist here are a few things we recommend putting on yours.

• Test your subject line for readability in different email programmes then…
• Check how your email appears in different email programmes
• Do the first 15 characters contain the main hook?
• Does it contain any spam filter words? – Free, click here, act now
• Does the link point to the correct landing page
• Does your email have the mandatory information – think about what you need to be putting in every email – i.e. a register now link, dates/times/location of events etc
• Most importantly think about how it will look to the recipient. Consider the design and layout – make the first sentence snappy and short.

And don’t forget…..check, check and check again…..

Use your checklist every time you send a newsletter and your email campaign will always run smoothly and efficiently.