Emailserving Email Marketing Best Practices Quick Guide Written By: Shane Lee Assistant Marketing Manager
Page 2 Summary: Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising. It is cost effective, fast, and broad reaching. However, due to spam abuse over the internet in recent years, marketers now face 2 major issues when running their email ad campaigns: low deliverability and low response rates. This white paper will discuss some email marketing s best practices that should be used to tackle these two issues. It is applicable to all email campaigns and should be practiced to maximize results for your email campaigns. Finally, Emailserving will provide you with an all in one email marketing system that will help you get your emails delivered and increase your sales and conversions. Email marketing is a very effective and affordable way of communication for businesses to generate sales and conversions. It is ever evolving with new technologies, audience expectations, and CAN-SPAM compliances. As email marketers, we need to stay informed about the changes in order to thrive in this market. When used effectively, email marketing can be a cost-effective and personal way to reach customers and audiences. For email marketers, there are two main issues that confront their email marketing campaigns: Low Deliverability - Email that does not get delivered When used effectively, email marketing can be a costeffective and personal way to reach customers and audiences. Usually, emails that do not get delivered are associated with spam related problems. Low Response Rates - Failing to get a response with their email Low response rates themselves could come from various factors. This includes: poor audience definition, bad emailing lists, poor content, and unclear call to action. To help you with that, we have compiled some best practices to help you boost your delivery rate and ensure that your email campaigns are run successfully. Use this as a guide to effectively create an opt-in list and contents that will boost your deliverability, as well as pull in more sales and conversions for your campaigns.
Page 3 How Do You Acquire Your Email Addresses? With all the best practices revolving around permissionbased marketing, it s important that you follow suit and make sure that all your contacts are opted-in to receive information from you. Depending on how you answer this question, this could greatly affect the deliverability rate and the performance of your email marketing. Rates of return on email campaigns correspond directly to the quality of email recipients. With all the best practices revolving around permission-based marketing, it s important that you follow suit and make sure that all your contacts are opted-in to receive information from you. We ve compiled these three guidelines to help you acquire email addresses the right way. Following them will ensure that your recipients know and acknowledge that you have their contacts, which will make reaching out to them that much easier for you. 1. Send email only to those that have opted-in. People will be more accepting of your email and will more likely open it since they ve consented to it. 2. Obtain opt-in permission via common methods These include single opt-in, double opt-in, or confirmed opt-in. A good method of obtaining opt-in emails includes creating a subscription form for your website. Offer to deliver informative newsletters and updates on any deals or offers for your services if they subscribe. 3. Always be up-front. State clearly what the contact is opting-in for. After gaining their permission, the credibility of your brand and the quality of their customer experience depends partly on giving them what they thought they were receiving. Do not be misleading. Ensure that your lists are opted-in to increase your leads and conversions for your email campaigns.
Page 4 How Do You Acquire Your Email Addresses? Now that you ve ensured that your list is opted-in, it s time to work on content. Good content not only boosts the click rate of your emails, but also increases your deliverability rate as well. Here are some guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your messages get through. 1. Remind the contact why they are receiving this email. Include a link to opt-out and to update their profile information. 2. Ask contacts to add the from address to their address book. This ensures consistent delivery. 3. Be consistent with your emails. The basic formatting of your email marketing messages is not the place you want to differentiate yourself. As with a business letter, putting things where people expect them helps conveying the requested action you want from them. This in turn increases your rates of return from your contacts. 4. Include your privacy policy. Tell contacts how their profile information will and will not be used. Assure contacts that their information will never be rented or sold unless they specifically opt-in to partner email programs. 5. Make the subject line and body copy sensible and intuitive. Good content not only boosts the click rate of your emails, but also increases your deliverability rate as well. State up-front any terms or special conditions, such as with an offer or promotion. AVOID special characters or jumbles of letters and numbers as these can identify your mail as spam.
Page 5 6. Avoid CAPs, special characters, and certain words. Avoid Using These Spam Flagged Word Combinations in Your Subject and Content: Act Now All New Call Now Discount Free No Cost Save Up To Satisfaction Guaranteed You ve Been Selected Why Pay More These are common flags for Spam. Avoid profanity. On the side is a list of spam flags for reference on which words you should try to avoid in your subject line. 7. Balance images and text. Pleasing graphic design still applies; you want your message captivating but not distracting, and easy to read. 8. Test email content for spam identification. With Emailserving.com, we have an internal spam checker to make sure that your content is spam free. Use it before you send your emails to increase your deliverability.
Page 6 With Emailserving, we make sure that YOU get excellent delivery by doing the following: Anti-Spam Precautions We handle all spam complaints with utmost care and quickly deal with spammers that are receiving complaints before they start causing problems. We have a zero tolerance policy against spammers. We also maintain a strong reputation with our IP addresses, which mean better delivery for you. Giving You the Option to Filter out Bounces We give you the option to disable all emails that have bounced with one simple click. We realize that some bounced emails that don t work with one campaign might work with another (Soft Bounces), so we give you control in deciding when you want to filter out the bounced emails. This ensures that your lists are up-to-date, and also helps us maintain a better reputation with your emails. Helping You Manage Un-subscriptions Every email that you send has an option for the recipient to unsubscribe, and are automatically taken out of your contact list. With this feature, we help manage your email marketing and ensure high deliverability with all your campaigns. This will keep you subscribers happy as well as maintaining Can-Spam compliant. Dedicated (Static) IP Feature If you want to further increase your email deliverability, Emailserving gives you the option of purchasing a dedicated IP address. By purchasing a dedicated IP address (static IP) from Emailserving, it will significantly boost your email deliverability (up to 97-99%). You will have full control on the contents you send to prospects and your IP address that you send from is 100% separate from other users. This will ensure great deliverability and more effective email marketing campaigns. For more information, please visit here.
Page 7 About Emailserving.com Emailserving.com is an easy to use and affordable self served email marketing system designed for small businesses and medium enterprises. It will work around many of the limitations by doing it yourself. It will also give you the tools to create professional email ad campaigns and provide detailed reporting to give you a big picture on how your email marketing campaigns are working. Our email marketing services are fully scalable and affordable for businesses of any category. Sign Up Free Grow your business today with our proven email marketing system. Create Campaign Send engaging email ad campaigns to your prospects in minutes. Upgrade Price Plan Choose from unlimited monthly plans or pay-as-you-go. More Info More info on Dedicated IP upgrade. Emailserving Copyright 2010