Six ways to make email hit the mark

The ACMA's annual report was tabled last week with some startling statistics on email spam. According to the report, there has been a 21% increase in email spam complaints year on year. Spam volumes are continually rising Symantec now attributing over 90% of email sent in Australia to spam. While the high levels of spam are nothing new, the large rise in complaints show that Australians are getting increasingly fed up with unwanted email.

For digital marketers this is a significant problem as email is still the most powerful online direct marketing method. Recent studies have even shown GenY would prefer to give up their social networks than forgo email.

However ensuring your email marketing or newsletter reaches the intended target can be a challenge. Email providers have complex are charged with ensuring their customers only get legitimate email, most email providers and ISP have aggressive filtering processes attempting to weed out the good from the bad. Filters are is not perfect and legitimate email often gets caught in the trap.

But what can we do to ensure our emails have the best chance of avoiding the spam filter gauntlet? John Merakovsky, Director of leading email provider Experian CheetaMail in the Asia Pacific gives his top tips for making your emails matter.

make it easy to unsubscribe

As counter-intuitive as it seems, to get your emails through you might just have to make it easier for people to unsubscribe from your newsletters. As Merakovsky noted, making it easier to unsubscribe can stop your emails from languishing in the junk folder.

"People will often report spam as a means of getting off a subscription list, even though they legitimately subscribed in the first place. That's one of the things we have seen in cross industry studies. We get the direct data feeds from a lot of the ISP's and the global email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo!."

"Rather than trying to find the unsubscribe button (users) will often hit the report spam button instead. There is a really important message for legitimate email marketers as well. Make it easy to unsubscribe, because your abuse complaint rates also affect your deliverability."

Email providers usually flag spam emails used by the rate of spam reports.

make your content compelling

Making it easier to unsubscribe can prevent your emails from being erroneously reported as spam but the real focus should be making the content of the email  as relevant to your list as possible.

Give the recipients of your list content that doesn't make them want to unsubscribe in the first place. This will reduce the chance of spam reports. From his experience at CheetahMail, Merakovsky knows first hand how easily bad content, and a lot of spam reports, can directly affect deliverability.

"Each ISP and email provider maintains a threshold of abuse complaint ratios. It varies between them and its not published knowledge. But lets say its a 1% threshold. For every hundred emails sent if 1% of them are reported as spam, then they will send your emails into the junk folder."

Email providers use these because it is so difficult to differentiate spam. The quality of your list is critical so that you don't get flagged as junk and subsequently blacklisted. This can occur even if your email marketing is legitimate and following all current Australian regulations.

make list management a priority

A targeted list is essential when ensuring that your emails wont be tossed aside. "If you have a dirty list, that is a list with a lot of bounces, a lot of invalid addresses, that's also one of the  key things  that the filters look for" noted Mr Merakovsky.

It was for this reason that he cautioned against buying lists from unscrupulous providers. "You can sell on a general email address and typically the ones that are being sold around the place are old or they have false addresses and the first thing that happens when you mail to a list like that is that it bounces"

balance your content

"Particular types of spam have particular messages. We all know the Viagra and the Nigerian scam. There are keywords that are looked for and they change over time. However the content of the email is parsed for these keyword triggers." said Merakovsky

"One of the techniques that spammers have been using to avoid this is they are starting to send the email as a graphic so the spam filters cant read the image. The response to that from the ISP's is that emails that are unbalanced in terms of text and image will be rated poorly by the filters"

The key message for email marketers is - don't send emails that are just one big image. This is not only poor from a spam avoidance angle, but is also simply bad email marketing practice.

Most email clients including Gmail, won't automatically display images. So if your email marketing doesn't have text or even alt text for the images, then it may not even be visible to your subscribers.

consider using an using a commercial provider

Mr Merakovsky noted commercial providers has access that smaller organisations simply cant do in house. The sheer number of businesses using email means it prohibitive for many ISP's to work with each individual company.

John Merakovsky

However the commercial providers "get the data directly from the ISP's. In our abuse complaint reports, we can actually see the number of people who unsubscribed by using abuse complaints. If you are doing that as an organisation yourself, you don't get that visibility of data"

With email marketing, knowing you have a problem is often harder than fixing it. Knowing that abuse rates are climbing by using an established provider might help to create better content and gauge it's effectiveness.

spoofing will get you junked

E-mail spoofing is when the senders address and other parts of the e-mail header are altered to appear as though the e-mail originated from a different source. Spoofing is one of the first things filters will look for when determining junk mail.

If you are sending out email from your own email server, this shouldn't be too much of a problem, but if you are sending out marketing from a different IP from the address in the 'from' or 'reply-to' fields, you could run into problems. Most larger providers like CheetahMail use a number of authentication methods to get around this problem.

Whilst there are many things that you can do to increase your chances of getting your email in front of eyeballs, there are wide variety of email systems out there with a myriad of different filtering systems. However by following these tips, you can help to increase the chance of your emails hitting the mark and help your organisation maximise the return on investment.