Make Sure Your Email Gets Through - Part 2

By: Chris Lewis

Since there was such a great response to this subject, we now explore new ways to get your email through and read by the recipients.  We have found that effective email marketing is not a one-time ordeal but a conversation with the recipient.

User questions are great content for newsletters - The goal is to create more ways to encourage the recipient to open your email or benefit from the content. To do this you need to have content they will enjoy or benefit from.  If you create a weekly or monthly newsletter, get together with a group that deal with clients and see what questions have come up. If some people are asking the same questions, then it will be certain others will be interested in the answers.

Use your brand in the subject line - Spark interest in the reader and make them comfortable with opening your email.

Test your links - Emails with dead links are obviously bad, but you would be surprised how many emails do go out without a good test of these critical links.  Many SPAM filters will test these links to make sure they are live, and if not, will score down the emails and many recipients will not even get them.  Right before you are about to hit Send, send a test message to yourself, or better yet, someone else, and test to make sure every single link in your email is active. Even after the email goes out, for a day or two, test the links in the email again.  With active marketing departments that change things up a lot, you never know when something might change that effects your email.

Send a Plain Text version of your email along with the HTML version - Many SPAM scoring systems like to see an alternative plain-text version of emails.  If you are using Campaign Enterprise, after you have completed your HTML message, you can go into the Plain Text editor and import the HTML into the plain text area.  It strips away all HTML tags and allows people without HTML viewers to be the message.  Watch out to make sure your plain text version of the message is the same as the HTML version. If you make changes to your HTML message, update your plain text version too.  If you don't some SPAM scorers will think you are trying to trying to send two different messages.