By Vincent Betancourt
February 3rd, 2010
Let’s face it, spam filters can make a marketer’s life a nightmare, but there are some tricks that you should know to ensure a high delivery rate for your next e-mail campaign.
To help avoid the ‘junk e-mail’ folder, resist the following:
- Spam-type words
i.e. – free, #1, no cost, guarantee, marketing, credit card, etc. To see a whole list, visit this helpful site: Mannix Marketing, Inc.
- Red text
- All capital letters
- Incomplete information
- Excessive punctuation !!!, ???
- Excessive use of “click here” especially in all capital letters
- No “From:” address
- Misleading (or missing) subject line
At Canyon, we use Constant Contact to distribute and track e-mail marketing campaigns. This web-based e-mail marketing service allows marketers to easily and efficiently develop HTML/Text-based e-mail marketing campaigns at the touch of a button. Plus, it allows you to instantly upload distribution lists, track progress and view on-demand reports to help measure campaign success and track ROI.
Following these helpful guidelines and suggestions will help you avoid the junk mail folder and make it into your customers’ and prospects’ inboxes.
Do you have any tips to add to this list?
Michelle, February 20th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Thanks V for the list and the blog post, certainly good stuff. I dont have anything to add to the actual list per se, but wanted to make a comment on emails in general. We are trying to do less html “pretty” emails and more text only emails because of the amount of users reading emails on their mobile devices…and if an email looks more like a short, personal’Note” people may take the time to read it. Have you seen any successes with doing text only / shorter “note” – like emails? Would love to hear your feedback in this area.
Thanks – Michelle
Jared Bodnar, March 1st, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Michelle,
Yes. We typically use text-only e-mails for our ‘drip’ marketing campaigns that are deployed through our Marketing Automation software because we can associate those e-mails with a particular sales contact name. That way, the e-mail comes from their sales rep and appears as if someone typed out a quick note for them. For purely ‘promotional’ e-mails, we still like HTML because 1) we can still send text-based versions in the back-end code for people with mobile devices, 2) it allows us to create a visual hierarchy so the reader knows which information is most important rather than having to read an entire block of copy and 3) there is a body of research that has found that the vast majority of ‘opt-in’ subscribers prefer HTML to text, and HTML e-mails generate higher response rates. As for text, we think the subject line is the most important 7 words you can use, because that’s what will determine whether the recipient opens the e-mail in the first place.
Thanks,
Jared
