Is your email campaign in the junk folder?

While major advances have been made in social media, search, and mobile marketing, Email Marketing remains a highly effective tool for the modern marketer. Opt-in email marketing campaigns allow direct, informative communication with clients and prospects. But often legitimate communications get blocked by spam filters, preventing users from seeing the newsletters, announcements, and deals they have requested. Deliverability hurdles can hurt honest marketing communications.

Write Naturally – Don’t Sound Like Spam

This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to unintentionally make mistakes in the title and content of an email message. Excessive uses of caps or odd spellings can trigger spam filters. Additionally phrases like “free!” or “limited-time offer!” may increase your spam score. If these are important ideas to communicate to the receiver, provide a link to your website where this content won’t be penalized.

Use Clean HTML Code

Spam filters look for irregularities in HTML code to find spammers. Sloppy code with poor formatting and empty tags (i.e. <p></p>) are warning flags that could get your email sent to the junk folder. Write your code in a trusted editor and check it over before sending. Caution: copying material from MS Word is almost a surefire way to have errors in your code, as it contains all sorts of hidden formatting. Instead try copying code from a simple text editor like Text Wrangler or Microsoft Notepad.

Include a Plain Text Version

While rich HTML emails can provide a great user experience and opportunity for branding, some receivers will prefer plain text emails. Also, many spammers will skip this step, making this an opportunity to assert your authenticity. Make sure the plain text version matches the text in the HTML email as much as possible. Your email service provider (ESP) bundles these two versions together and the receiver can display the version of her preference.

Manage Image Size

Overly large images are major warning signs to spam filters. Spammers commonly display information in large images instead of text because the filter programs cannot “read” the content. Additionally, large images can make the email bulky. A common rule of thumb is to use 3 smaller images or 2 medium sized images in one email. The general recommendation for an email size is 10-60kb.

Maintain Your Reputation

Every email marketing message you send contributes to your IP address’ “reputation” as a sender. Internet service providers track email performance over time to tell if a source is reputable. Spam complaints, high message volume, high bounce rate, and repeated sending to invalid email addresses can lower your reputation over time. It’s important to monitor email bounce and engagement rates and maintain your list of addresses.

It’s impossible to guarantee that email marketing messages will reach everyone on the list, even if the receivers opt-in. Spam filters are constantly adapting to new techniques and false-positives are inevitable. However, following the best practices for email deliverability is essential for an effective email marketing campaign.

Have any other general tips to help with email campaigns? Let us know in the comments.

Artistic Sensations Quality Kids and Teen Room Decor

Every once in while it’s good to review the basics for conversion like, “What is working on my Home Page?” For this conversation, I selected a small but mighty retailer of teen and kids furniture, Artistic Sensations.  The Net Impact is currently running several Google Optimizer tests on this site including several to improve conversion.  Yes, you always want to improve conversion. Many of the elements on the current home page for Artistic Sensations are the results of previous tests.  What did we learn and how does it relate to this Home Page Pointers post?  Here are a few quick and easy take-aways:

Finally, keep testing and making changes.  All we know is that this version of your site is what the customer likes today.  As for tomorrow?

The hardest aspect of our business to explain to others is this issue of meeting and competing on the web only at the most current level of knowledge and capablility.  The “constantly temporary” or ever-changing aspect of this business means that staying the same means falling behind.  We have several customers who after reaching serp page one have seen their rank under attack by competitors who have copied our approach or found an equally strong way to battle back.  What I love about our team is the, “Bring it on!” attitude they take on when that happens.

That’s really the addictive aspect of this business.  It is a constant competition where you can look at your results every day (if not every second)!   You succeed through effort, skill and “current” knowledge.  So here’s to San Jose.  May there be lot’s of intriguing information that generates new ideas and helps us better drive more business for our clients.  Even if we can throw most of what we learn away in six months.

TNI just minutes ago finished a very interactive conference call with a team of people put together for the express purpose of winning a large multimedia marketing project.  On the call were creative, business development and brand strategy specialists from a major national marketing agency, two industry experts acting as consultants and two representatives from our firm, The Net Impact.  The agency team has their most important role of creating the pitch, coordinating materials and planning all of the off-line events and media placement.  The industry experts bring to the table what their name implies.  The Net Impact was on the call not only because we had worked successfully in the past to support the agency’s efforts, but also because the prospective clients wants to make 2009 the “Year of the Internet” for their marketing push.

To address this challenge, our online marketing team created a strategy to share with the group encompassing SEO, PPC, optimized press releases, advertorials for online media, email-newsletter campaigns and  social marketing all founded upon a web analytics approach that could demonstrate ROI.  We heard from the agency that “measurability” is going to be a key factor for this client.  How perfect for the web!  This client is more than a thousand miles away from our St. Louis home yet we will be as close to their statistics and performance as if we were in their office.   More importantly, our motto of “transparent results” means that the client and our partners in this collaboration will equally be able to measure web results 24/7/365.  You have to be confident in you ability to allow the entire team to grade your performance.

It’s exciting to be part of a campaign with other experts each sharing their main area of skill and experience in such a manner.  “Collaboration for a win,” where the client benefits and the various players contribute their efforts to the plan is clearly superior to the “Let one firm do it all” approach that most represents the past.  Indeed, why more clients don’t demand that each aspect of their campaign is managed by a recognized authority in that arena is a mystery.  Getting the win for the client is what counts.