Here's one way to tell transactional email vs marketing email: have a court slap you for putting what it says is advertising or marketing content in your opt-in confirmation email. This court decision happened inside the EU, however it is also a cautionary tale for anyone in the U.S., or Canada, or really anywhere that has national email marketing laws.
"Which copyright date should be on a website?" someone asked us recently. Webmasters are often confused about which date they should use as their copyright date on a website. In fact, a whole lot of sites have the wrong copyright date on their website. As an Internet policy institute, and because our CEO is an Internet policy lawyer, we often get questions unrelated to our core offering of email sender certification and deliverability services, and we are happy to answer them if we can. The answer to this one is actually really easy, and will make perfect sense to you once we explain it.
Did you know that there are a lot of regular words that can help push your email to the spam folder if everything else isn't squeaky clean? Remember George Carlin's "7 words you can't say on tv"? Well there are a whole lot more words that you can't say in email without risking your email being a candidate for further scrutiny and possibly going to the spam folder. In fact one of the things that is most surprising to many email senders is just how many words there are that, when in their email, and if their email doesn't otherwise adhere to best practices, can trip up the spam filters. They are even more surprised when they learn what some of those words are, because they are very common words, words that seem (and often are) innocent, and yet the spam filters will chew on them, and if your email contains enough of these words, or has these words along with some other factors, they will then spit your email out directly into the spam folder.
Conventional wisdom says that personalizing email subject lines in email marketing and other commercial email, such as putting someone's first name in the subject line by using tags or other automations, increases the open rate for that email marketing. n fact, if you do a web search, such as in Google, for "email personalization open rates", you will find over 16million results, most of which tell you that personalizing email subject lines in your email marketing will boost your open rate. That may have been true some years ago, but not necessarily so much now.
You may be surprised to learn who comes out the winner in the plain text email vs HTML match. Whether you go plain text email or HTML can impact many things, including deliverability and engagement, which of course are the most important rates for your email campaigns. Digital marketing solutions provider Vendasta actually conducted research on which gets not just better deliverability, but better traction in terms of response when it comes to HTML vs plain text emails, and what they found may seem counter-intuitive. (In case you're not sure whether the email you are sending is HTML email, basically if it's not plain text, then it's HTML. Using a template? It's HTML. Using email stationary? It's HTML.)
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.
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 I 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.
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.
Do not use a noreply email address in the email you send out; just don't do it. Don't send out email with a noreply email address as the 'from' email address, don't send out email from an address that can't accept replies, just don't go near any type of noreply email address at all. Besides being the opposite of best practices, think about what happens if you reply to a noreply email. When someone to whom you send email doesn't notice the noreply email address from which you sent the email, they will reply and either get a bounce (frustrating) or get no response (also frustrating). And if they do notice the noreply email address, that on its own will frustrate them. Why would you want to frustrate your customers, leads, or others to whom you are sending email? But beyond that, there are important technical reasons to not use noreply email addresses. Here they are.
Have you ever wondered what the majority of your users are using to read their email? The answer may surprise you - even stun you!
