How to Ensure Email Delivery

Posted by Leo on February 27th, 2008 at 12:56pm

It is wonderful that you have a large email list. However, how do you ensure that you have the lowest bounce rate possible, and the email is bringing you the best result? Let us talk about email delivery here.

1. Make sure your contents are relevant
If you have a shopping site, it is a good idea to segment your email list to the products of interest. Base on the segment you can send emails out with highly targeted content - and hence a jump in conversion.

2. Are You a Safe Sender?
In the welcome email, make sure you ask the subscriber to add your email address as a safe sender. If your email landed in the junk mail folder, it is very likely that it will not be read.

3. How often do you send? What do you send?
Don’t over/under promise. If you claimed to send monthly, send monthly. Don’t annoy your subscribers with ‘Act now! Offer close in 48 hours’ every few days. Moreover, send newsletters with information rather than just products on special.

4. Is your email spammy?
Make sure you go through the spam test (provided by most email services) and eliminate any spammy words / characters etc. A line with 10 exclamation marks is not a good idea either.

5. Personalization
Use this carefully as spammers tend to do this now. However, an email with personalized header / subject is more likely to convert.

6. Make the new comers feel special
Along with the welcome email, why not send along your latest newsletter / recent offers?

7. Make sure you keep your permission from the subscriber
Double opt-in is important. Make sure your database keeps such information, in case you receive a complaint or even a law suit later.

8. Focus on what is most important
Open rate - for informative emails
Click through rate - for sales focused emails
I found these the most important. Every business has different KPI. Identify and focus on them.

9. Handle unsubscription promptly
Make sure your database handles subscription promptly. If someone unsubscribed, follow up with a ‘I’m sorry to see you go’ email and ask them to come back to visit your site more often.

10. Testing
Last but not least, a poorly designed / broken email design is very likely to drive people away, as this reflects your professionalism. Make sure you run enough testing before sending it out. To learn how to compile an HTML email, you can visit my older post Email Marketing Made Easy.

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