It's really important to understand what is a click-through rate, what is a good click-through rate, and why you need to monitor your own email click-through rate. Click-through rate and open rate are the two metrics that are the twin canaries in the coal mine when it comes to email deliverability. When you monitor these two rates, you can be tipped off to deliverability issues that are brewing and nip them in the bud before they become serious problems, such as your email going to the spam folder or being rejected or blocked.
Do you have any idea what your open rates are for your mailings? If your answer is "no", well, you should, and we're going to tell you why. If your answer is "what's an open rate?", then, well, you probably have bigger problems than just not knowing what an open rate is, let alone what yours are. Either way, you could be (in fact likely are) having serious email deliverability problems, and have no idea.
Are you doing email delivery monitoring? We sure hope so, because inbox delivery monitoring is one of two critical ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your email campaigns (the other is tracking your open rates and click-through rates, which is another discussion for another day).
One of the things that spam filters look at is the text:image ratio of your email. Did you know that? If you've ever gotten one of those spam messages which has a big old image, and only a little text, or perhaps even one of those spam messages where the text is embedded in an image, you can understand the reason for this. It's because spammers likes to send messages with images and little text - because of course the spam filters are analyzing their text.
Address book importing. Odds are good that if you aren't doing it, you are either thinking about doing it, or you know someone who is doing it or thinking about doing it. Because, you see, it's all the rage. It's also an awful practice.
You should never send mass or bulk email through a new IP address before you warm up that new IP address. Warming up an IP address is a critical step towards not only having good deliverability, but also to making sure that your email isn't tagged as spam, or blocked. To illustrate the importance of warming up an IP address, we're going to tell you a story.
Most of us probably remember George Carlin's (may he rest in peace) "7 Words You Can't Say on TV". What fewer
realize is that there is a list of words that you may not want to say in email, as if there is already a reason for inbox providers to look askance at your email, they may push it over the edge, into spam filter territory. (If your email is otherwise squeaky clean then these won't matter as much, if at all.) And, actually, there are a whole lot more of them than seven.
Exactly what is a CAN-SPAM physical address? The CAN-SPAM Act, which is the U.S.' Federal email marketing law, requires that you include your physical mailing address in each and every bulk mailing, such as an email newsletter, email marketing, or other email to a mailing list. For some reason this requirement confuses people - maybe because it's so straight-forward, and people are used to complex, convoluted, and contradictory (the Three Cs of legislative drafting) language when it comes to the law. So what exactly does this mean in the context of CAN-SPAM?
Email address confirmation messages are those messages that email senders who use best practices send to people who sign up for their mailing lists. The purpose of the email confirmation message is to confirm that the person actually wants to be on, and consents to being put on, your mailing list before they get added to the mailing list. The problem is, some email senders see confirmation messages as a place to slip in a little advertising.
Here's one of those things that impacts email deliverability which can be so subtle, and yet so critical. It can bite you in the back without your realizing it, and then six months later you wonder why you have gangrene in your knees; it can be that difficult to connect the dots. That is until someone points it out to you, and then you have that forehead-slapping moment: of course! And that thing is that setting and meeting subscriber expectations will have a direct and demonstrable impact on your email deliverability (not to mention your email's effectiveness).
