E-Mail Deliverability Top Five

1. Get and Confirm Permission
   Receiving permission from your subscribers is the crux of a successful email program. Capturing an opt-in and confirming it with a follow-up email is the best practice to ensure you only add recipients that want your email. To find out if you are sending something that is unwanted, look at your email from the eyes of your recipients. Will they anticipate receiving the email? Does it contain information that interests them? If the answer is "no," then you should not send it. It is likely to get filtered due to complaints or content and will cause harm to your deliverability, as well as your brand and profitability over time.
   
   
2. Send Highly Valuable & Highly Relevant Emails
   As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your users are looking to your email to provide them with relevant content - the content they expected when subscribing to receive your email in the first place. The age of email blasting is over. Begin capturing data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up. Over time you will be able to send more relevant content, which lessens the chance that your email will be interpreted as spam by your subscribers.
   
   
3. Set Content & Frequency Expectations Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued emails that do not meet subscriber expectations in terms of content or frequency. Did you promise valuable, informational content, but continue to send only product pitches? Did you promise a monthly newsletter, but send weekly promotions? A recent study* shows that 65% of men and 56% of women define spam as "email from a company that I have done business with that comes too often."
   
   
4. Use a Service Provider with a Good Reputation
   Commercial email is getting more difficult with the advent of the CAN-SPAM Act and the increase in ISP filtering. Staying up-to-date on current legislation and policies of ISPs and anti-spam groups is difficult to do on your own. Reputable service providers dedicate significant resources to managing ISP relationships, monitoring email deliveries, and evaluating current email laws. If you do not have similar resources or an in-house expert, outsourcing could be the best way to get your messages delivered.
   
   
5. Use a Recognizable, Short, and Consistent "From Address"
   Before even opening your email, a user has to recognize you, your company, your publication, and remember that they requested your email. This leads to many users accidentally reporting email that they opted-in to receive as spam or deleting it all together. The email "from address" is the first thing email recipients look at when deciding if they should open a message. It is important to keep this in mind with all email applications, but especially when mailing to AOL since their application only shows the email "from address" (info@xyzcompany.com) rather than the friendly "from name" (XYZ Company). If your email address looks like this (iqytchg@cz.upc.net) you are likely to receive a high number of spam complaints that could result in your email routing to the bulk folder or being blocked completely.