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).

While the recession is still in full blow online sales have gone up 15% to £50bn. Yet to really  secure  those sales retailers have found that they just have to go one step further and this time it’s personal!

Echo E-Business Management’s managing director Deborah Collier says “Personalisation gives any etailer the competitive edge. Branding is important but the ability to engage customers and understand them is crucial in tough times.”

Personalisation has been a hot topic for some time, helping brands improve one-to-one marketing, customer segmentation, up and cross-selling. But today, it’s all about predicting what the customer wants before they even know they want it and then making them think it was their decision in the first place.

One etailer springs to mind as a brilliant example of personalised shopping: Amazon. Each time you log in they suggest new books, CD’s or DVD’s according to your previous purchases. But personalisation is more complex than this.

Guy Westlake, senior product marketing manager EMEA at ecommerce provider Vignette, suggests: “The most cutting-edge technologies track customers’ actions on your site and build a profile of their wants and behaviours from there. Within one or two clicks on the site, you can build up a picture of the consumer.”

Three-step process

However, in what may be seen as personalisation heresy, Westlake explains that, as a rule, our behaviour is never that individual and even if it were, you could never give every single person exactly what they wanted. Instead, he advocates a three-step process:

• Use technology to harness the wisdom of crowds and understand your consumer to personalise the product offering. “It’s low cost, high return and has a short lead time to implement,” Westlake says.
• Personalise the online experience taking the lead from social networking. “Retailers underestimate that customers love talking to each other. They like to have ownership of brands and it creates advocates further along the loyalty ladder,” he reveals.
• Allow users to add their own further levels of personalisation. Westlake explains: “Sites such as the BBC’s draw users into the experience, create ownership of the online environment and make it a port of call rather than a sales channel.”

The biggest problem etailers face is people abandoning their baskets moments before checking out. One suggestion is to introduce a ‘Click to Call’ button allowing customers to talk through their purchase with an assistant. Customers feel reassured that they are getting the same level of service online as in store. Also, another problem is people spending a lot of time clicking through pages and abandoning the site leaving it inactive. One way to combat this is to include pop ups to remind the customer that they have un-purchased items in their basket.

Another problem is the log in procedure made simple by using Facebook connect- one click allows the site to use the data on Facebook to automatically create an online account- this speeds up the purchase process as this is where many people abandon their baskets.

Personalisation is now the new differentiating factor as retailers boost their websites and niche etailers pop up out of the blue. You want to stand out from the crowd- then make it personal.

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In exchange for upgrading from a competitor’s product, we’ll give you:

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The process works as follows:

• Use the form below to express your interest
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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

As the Digital Economy Bill was debated in the House of Commons this week, we want to know how it will affect your business?

The Act includes provisions about:

-The online infringement of copyright, including copyright and music companies’ rights and about penalties for infringement
-The functions of Ofcom
-Internet domain registries
-The functions of the Channel Four Television Corporation
-The regulation of television and radio services
-The regulation of the use of the electromagnetic spectrum
-The Video Recordings Act 1984
-Public lending right in relation to electronic publications
-Amendment of the Communications Act 2003 requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to disclose details of customers who repeatedly infringe copyright, on production of sufficient evidence, with a possible fine of £250,000 for non-compliance
-The requirement that ISPs block access to sites that allow “substantial” infringement

For more information, the full act is available here. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2010/ukpga_20100024_en_1

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