Email Deliverability: Best Practices and Future Trends
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The first part of this series went over email deliverability issues and began discussing best practices. This article continues our discussion of best practices (including ways of making sure your message is relevant to your prospects) and looks to the future when authentication and reputation will matter even more than they do currently.
"The fastest do not win races, nor do the strong win battles, nor do the wise get all they want, but time and chance happen to them all."
--The Bible
Improving Email Deliverability: Outcomes
In the previous article on email deliverability we looked at the way spam has driven email providers to take stronger measures to make it harder to deliver email to their subscribers, decreasing the deliverability of marketing messages. I advised marketers and website owners, in response, to use the opportunity to increase the browsing experience of their subscribers, which would at the same time increase their odds of getting their emails delivered, opened and acted upon. The points I mentioned included following a checklist of best practices to ensure the email is delivered to the inbox folder of the user, and designing for preview panes by avoiding large graphics at the top of the email.
In this article we will look at ways of ensuring that your desired outcome is carried out, while still following best practices so as to ensure that your message is not misinterpreted and that there are a minimum amount of complaints (user can't unsubscribe or other issues) directed against your site.
We will also look at how the sender's reputation will affect email deliverability in the future, and the form it will probably take.
Before you Send the Email
The most important thing that will affect your email campaign is the one thing you can not have factored in: how your prospect feels when your email gets into his/her box. Still, you can increase the likelihood of getting your prospect to do your desired outcome by targeting a specific profile in your email campaigns.
You can target specific users with specific offers (micro segmenting your mailing list) and you can also design emails with an eye to the seasons in the year. Brick- and-mortar businesses do this to perfection; for example, a clothing shop's winter line catalog is very different from its summer line catalogue.
Website Marketing 
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