Email campaigns can be somewhat frustrating if you haven’t done them before. There are a number of things you must keep in mind when you are planning on doing email marketing. Here are a few tips on how you can ensure deliverability and responses to your campaigns. 

Subject Lines

Let’s say you receive an email with the following subject line:

WANT TO SEE THIS LOVELY PUPPY!!!????!!!

What is wrong with this subject line? The all-caps make it seem spammy. The excessive punctuation doesn’t really help it in that department either. Third, why would a business send an email about a puppy (unless they literally put puppies up for adoption?) Trigger words that are noted as generally spammy can be difficult to incorporate into your campaign. Chances are you wouldn’t open this email if you got it IF it got past your spam filter.

Bounces and Unsubscribes

Have you ever gotten a “Delivery Failed” message or a message saying that an address doesn’t exist? This is known as a hard bounce. This means that for one reason or another, the address you sent to is unreachable. Remove these from your sending list and most email services will do so automatically. 

You must also discontinue sending emails to those that unsubscribe to your mailing list. You should include a link where recipients can unsubscribe in each email. Subscribers can also unsubscribe in writing and I’ve even seen cases of unsubs over the phone. There are several international laws that require that you acknowledge these and never include them in a campaign again.  

Copy

You’ve managed to get past the spam filters and your prospect has actually opened the message. Now its time for the most important part, the content. Make sure you keep you content brief, when was the last time you read a really long email? Other things to look out for: make sure spelling and grammar are correct and make sure you don’t overdo your keywords.

Links and Attachments

Here’s an email security tip: Never open an attachment from an unfamiliar email address. Many spam filters will also stop emails with attachments as these tend to contain harmful malware. 

Many companies also have data limits on the size of emails they can receive. For some, this can be a quite small 5mb or less. To avoid this, don’t send too large or too many photos in your message. Also, avoid embedding videos and forms in your email to keep the filesize down.