At long last it is possible to sign up for a Yahoo Feedback Loop (FBL)! And we encourage you to do so!
ISPs are allowed to bounce your email for any reason, or even no reason at all. We've touched on this briefly before, but we think that it's time to make it crystal clear: ISPs do not have to accept and deliver your email. Or any email. Including, yes, again, YOUR email. Even if your email is double confirmed opt-in with a cherry on top, an ISP is under no obligation to accept or deliver your email.
Did you know that an automated out of office message (OOO messages) or autoresponder vacation message can hurt your email deliverability? In fact, there are a few different ways that those automatic out of office messages can hurt your email delivery, and for that reason, we advise you not to use them at all or, if you must, to use them very, very carefully.
A New York court yesterday affirmed that New York can charge sales tax on sales made through affiliates who are based in New York state. Known as "The Amazon Tax", and indeed the primary plaintiff in the case was Amazon, the rule says that so long as the affiliate is located in New York, and the company for whom the sales are generated has sales of at least $10,000 attributable to affiliates in New York, then the company must pay sales tax to the state of New York.
Including attachments in email without first communicating to the recipient that you will be doing so can really get your email into trouble. This is true for all types of email, including transactional email, one to one email, email marketing, and other bulk email.
Why would people who request your email, maybe even pay to receive your email, still report it as spam? Here's why. By way of example, we have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well-known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which we mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here's why.
We've talked before about the things that can artificially suppress open rates, and the dangers inherent in not being aware of the issues. And of course we've talked about the importance of continuing to monitor your open rates, even after iOS 15, because hey, the inbox providers continue to monitor them. Now we're going to share with you a real-life story about how a business gave a loyal subscriber the boot because that subscriber was reading email without loading images, and so the business assumed they were inactive. Don't make this mistake.
Customer service email response time expectations are such that a lead or customer expects to get an email reply to an email inquiry within minutes or, at worst, a few hours. That means that if you are taking more than a few hours to respond to a customer's email, and especially to a lead or prospect's email, you are both tarnishing your company's reputation, and losing out on business - in fact, you are effectively turning business away. Instead, answer it immediately, or at least as soon as you can, even if it's just to acknowledge it and say that you will get back to them more fully later.
Improving email deliverability rates is both an art and a science, and to really get results you need to have some expertise in both. And of course, that's one of the reasons that many companies pay someone to do it for them, be it an in-house email deliverability expert, an outside company such as ours, or a combination of both. But there are some fairly simple things that you can do on your own to help monitor and improve email deliverability, no experience needed! Here are three things that you can do that can make a big difference to your email deliverability rate, and all they will cost you is your time.
