Email Deliverability: Best Practices and Future Trends - Best Practices
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Here are a few more best practices, to ensure that your email is rendered the way you designed it, and that you are positioned to limit the amount of spam complaints against you.
Provide a Feedback Email/Contact Address
If you use an automated mailing system, and you have the standard "do not reply to this email" statement on it, you give your prospects nowhere to turn if they want to file a complaint or respond to an offer. Perhaps your unsubscribe link is not working properly, and the user has clicked on it, but still receives mail. It may not even be your fault, but if you are a big email sender and have a few hundred thousand subscribers, you could get sued if it continues. An illustration is the case of passionup.com, who blatantly ignored unsubscribe requests, until Yahoo pursued legal action against them in 2003.
Simply providing the email address of your customer care division should be enough. Also include a link that allows the user to change the email address(es) at which they would like to receive your newsletter, so that if they change their primary email address, they can still receive your mail.
Design Dos and Don'ts
Include a text version of your email that is user friendly and easily readable. There are several email marketing products that allow you to send both HTML and text versions of an email. This will give your deliverability a boost and will make your email render properly, no matter what email service your subscriber is using (some email providers don't render graphics properly, others require a text form for deliverability).
Hand Code Properly
Some HTML editors are inconsistent across browsers (Microsoft FrontPage, anyone?). Macromedia's Dreamweaver is my personal favorite, but the purists have it right: only upload code that has being edited in a text editor like Notepad. Avoid CSS, not only because of cross browser compatibility, but some email providers have been found to strip away CSS that is put in head tags.
Do ensure that all links are working.
Avoid Flash and JavaScript
Embedded flash may not render properly, and JavaScript may be stripped off. Images and text alone often make a beautiful design; besides, going overboard with animations will slow down loading time and will not necessarily make for the best design.
Track your conversion and open rates. This will tell you the effectiveness of your emails. Some web analytics packages allow you to track your email; you can also pay a professional agency to do it.
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