Below you will find guidelines for email marketing that everyone should follow. These guidelines will help grow your list, preserve the health of your list and help your emails get delivered to the inbox (versus marked as Spam).
1. Subject Lines
a. Don’t use subject lines that make it seem like the recipient is expecting the email (e.g. As You Requested, or by including RE: in the subject line, as if your email is a reply to them).
b. Don’t use subject lines that imply that money is waiting for them (e.g. Claim What is Owed to You Here…).
c. Don’t use subject lines that make it seem like something is theirs if they only “confirm” or “claim” (e.g. Confirm Your Order…).
d. Basically, don’t use deceptive subject lines.
e. Use creative subject lines that spike their curiosity, but DO NOT mislead or deceive.
f. Use the following article as a reference…
https://www.autopilothq.com/blog/email-spam-trigger-words/
2. Content
a. Make sure the actual content and language used within your emails is clearly written, easy to understand, grammatically correct and without typos – this is more important than you might think. Every email you send is a chance to represent your brand professionally, make it count.
b. Edit and proofread each email before sending, don’t just load your email templates and schedule/send.
c. Send a test email to yourself and check it on a mobile device – well over 65% of recipients open your emails on their mobile devices. Make sure your emails look perfect on mobile devices. Only then are you truly ready to schedule/send.
3. Review Stats Daily
a. Every day, before your next email send is scheduled, review the previous send’s stats, making sure that open rates are good for all ISPs and that complaint rates are low for all ISPs (below .10% if the open rate is 10%; below .20% if the open rate is 20% – this should be checked per ISP; click here for more info on acceptable complaint rates).
b. If complaint rates are above those thresholds then that is a red flag and should be accounted for in the next send. At the very least, if you see a spike in complaint rates above these thresholds, DO NOT add any new data for that ISP on your next send; wait till complaint rates “normalize” then resume adding new data.
c. If you have a Yahoo complaint issue then assume you have a Gmail complaint issue, as Gmail does not provide complaint feedback; Gmail complaint rate will always show as 0%, so just assume your Gmail complaint rate is the same as your Yahoo’s.