Over the last few months we have worked with our clients to find some easy tweaks to their email campaigns that have a big boost on performance of the email campaigns. Here are our favourites:

1) Use a personal 'From' name

We have talked about this one in Maxenews a lot recently. Numerous clients have found that by using a real person's name and not simply the company name this has had a huge boost on open rates. Results are also sustained over time.

2) Check that bounce list

Over time most of you would have collected a list of addresses that have bounced a certain number of times and you therefore exclude these. A new client came Emailcenter and upon examining why some people in our office had stopped receiving the newsletter from them, we found it was because the old supplier had added the addresses to the bounce suppression list.

Why this had happened was unclear but presumably because the system was blacklisted or perhaps unable to distinguish between hard and soft bounces. We then discovered from this bounce list of 120,000 addresses 45,000 were valid increasing their list by around 20% overnight. This was achieved using a special email validation tool and then subsequently looking at the bounces.

3) A/B Testing

Very rarely do we see marketers testing elements of their email campaigns such as subject lines. With Maxemail it is extremely simple to do - just enter how many you want each version to go to and Maxemail will ensure no-one gets multiple copies of the email.

Our favourite split test was run by JML who looked at what would happen if they removed the top menu linking to various parts of their website from an email. Removing this reduced the click-thru rate but they found the conversion rate was much lower as people were clicking on this and drifting around the website rather than following the defined landing pages.

Again this is a simple 5 minute task to implement but results can be huge.

4) Checking the major spam filters

Clearly if your email gets blocked by an ISP or put into the junk folder this is going to have a huge impact on open rates. As an example a client was only achieving 3% open rates at Yahoo which accounts for 14% of their list in total. Upon analysing the Inbox Seeding tool in Maxemail they discovered every email to Yahoo was being classified as junk.

Upon further testing it was the URL where they stored their images that triggered this. A quick email to Yahoo removed this in 24 hours enabling them to boost their open rates to nearer 20% at Yahoo.

While you should always use a spam content checker this does not tell you what will happen to your email at the likes of Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL as they use different filters. You could of course also send to some test accounts but this takes a long time and is fiddly. This is why Inbox Seeding is the best tool as it covers all the major ISP's and takes 5 minutes to generate the results for you. The only issue is it does not tell you why an email is classified as junk but that is where the Emailcenter support team come in.

5) What does your email look like?

We have seen all sorts of email disasters and many of them are in how the email is displayed in the inbox. This has included:

• Black text on a black background
• The entire email being displayed as a grey image when image blocking is enabled
• Call-to-actions are hidden when background images are not being displayed

Don't expect your recipients to see the email in the same way you do. Check your email using a preview tool such as Inbox Preview in Maxemail as it is usually only small tweaks that will correct the look of the email.