In one email blast, up to 20 – 30% of your emails can be filtered out in a heart beat. Others can bounce and even more can remain unopened for a variety of reasons. Key facts surrounding email deliverability are listed below for your convenience.
CAN-SPAM Compliance
With the introduction in January 2004 of the Federal CAN-SPAM law, email rules and regulations went into effect to help with safer and more efficient handling of email and to mainly stop spamming. To make sure your email is compliant, a couple of main rules needed to be taken into account. First, you need to supply a valid postal mailing address in all or your commercial email messages. And secondly, each message needs to contain an unsubscribe link - that works – and removes recipients from further emailing per their request.
Opt-in
To avoid spam and people signing you up for emails you didn’t request, most major email companies require opt in. This means you must ask subscribers permission before subscribing them to lists and before transferring them to new lists (like uploading their database to new autoresponder companies). Some people even choose double-opt-in, meaning you need to confirm your subscription by clicking a link in an automated email reply to your form sign up request. This helps stamp the time and ISP to provide validity in case protesters come forth saying they did not sign up and point the finger at you, saying you are a spamming (which can cause your hosting to be revoked). I made that mistake once, never again.
Freebie Addresses
When people sign up today, they are so sick of email spam that they often use throw-away email addresses from free sites like Yahoo.com or AOL.com. These are difficult to use long-term with marketers and especially those trying to transfer lists. This is just part of the business though. Some marketers have even resorted to stating on Opt-in forms that they will not accept MSN, Yahoo and especially AOL email addresses. This is foolish and can cost you a lot of subscribers. As long as you make sure you are following the rules and show people how to White list your email address, your email’s should be delivered without any issue.
Content Filters
To protect readers from spam and other unwanted messages, many of which can harm computer and software systems with viruses and bugs, filters are in place with email hosting companies. Targeted for filtering are items including: attachments, some images (text messages are preferred by some providers over HTML, for example), URLs to undesirable websites within your message, harmful and spamming-type content in the body of your message and in the message subject line. I would suggest no more than 3 links in your email to your subscribers. 2 in the body of your message and one
in the P.S. of your email, that’s if you use one which you should ;).
So before jumping into email campaigns, study any Help areas your email or autoresponder company provides. I personally use Aweber and have not had a problem using their service. You can find more out about them at http://www.aweber.com.
Learn what works best in order to get your emails to their destination. And learn the laws. Ignorance of the laws is not an excuse to do what you want. And the results could harm you and your campaigns.
