Getting your email through to your recipient’s inbox is the latest challenge facing email marketers. ISP’s are becoming more ruthless but with a few simple steps you can ensure your campaigns reach their intended destination.

1) “Whitelist” your email servers

Many ISP’s are now giving legitimate permission based email marketers the opportunity to join their ‘safe’ list of email senders. This will guarantee your email gets through to your recipients at that ISP. If you are using a web-based tool or an email broadcaster ask them what steps they have taken to achieve this accreditation. If you have an in-house system explore the web pages of the major ISP’s for white list details.

2) Analyse your bounce messages and clean your list

One of the methods ISP’s use to determine whether the sender is a spammer or not is the amount of invalid addresses they are sending to at a particular domain. AOL in particular utilises this method.

Remove all bounces that are a result of gone-aways or bad addresses to stay clean. To do this you must have a broadcasting solution that provides reports on bounced email addresses and why the email bounced otherwise you will not be able to accurately process the bad emails.

3) Use content checking software

Specialist software tools are available for checking your email against specific rules to give you a Spam score. The higher the score the more likely your email will be picked up as Spam by ISP’s. These tools give you an opportunity to correct the email before it is sent.

4) Record the opt-in process

Independent SPAM bodies such as Spamcop heavily influence whether your server becomes blacklisted. When Spamcop receives reports of Spam from your servers they will send you an alert email. To avoid potentially becoming blacklisted you must reply with the details of when the recipient opted in. This process is likely to become more common in the future so it is important to try and standardise the opt-in process across the company and record this is a single database to enable you to respond quicker.

5) Split large mailings into batches

For high volume consumer mailings (50K + emails) there is the potential for your email not to be delivered simply because of the number of emails you are trying to deliver to a particular ISP simultaneously. Hotmail in particular uses this method of determining if an email is Spam when they receive at least several thousand emails simultaneously. There are two options for marketers in this instance. Firstly they can split the email into a several batches. Secondly they can run their campaign over several different servers.

6) Check your provider at Spamcop

Ask your current provider for the IP address that they send your emails from. You can check this against www.spamcop.net or other similar Spam blacklist sites which many ISP’s and corporates use to filter incoming email.

7) From address and origination statement

The ‘From’ name and address are the most important things in getting your email opened and recognised by recipients. However if they do not recognise the ‘From’ address then you will increase the chances of your message being reported as Spam. This is also why it is important to place an origination statement in every email for those recipients that have forgotten they have opted-in. If you remind them it is not an unsolicited email then they almost certainly will not click on the ‘Report as Spam’ button.

8) Test every campaign

Each ISP is changing the way they classify email as Spam all of the time. Create yourself several test accounts with the major ISP’s such as Hotmail and Yahoo and turn on the Spam filters. When you send your test emails to these accounts you will immediately identify any issues if your email lands in the junk email folder. From then on it is a case of narrowing down what it could be. To do this remove paragraphs of text one-by-one until you find the offending areas and then analyse which words or phrases need changing.

9) Get a dedicated IP address or in-house software

If you are sending over 50,000 emails a month it is worth ensuring you have a dedicated IP address. This ensures you are in complete control of what is sent via the IP address and therefore can ensure no ‘high-risk’ mailings are sent which could cause your IP address to be blocked.

An alternative to this is to deploy an in-house software solution such as Maxemail inHouse. This would automatically give you a dedicated IP address. Additional benefits of this method are the cost savings you would make on your email delivery charges and the fact that your server and software would be 100% focussed on processing your emails rather than placing your emails in a queue with other organisations campaigns.

10) Unsubscribe process

There is nothing more likely to get recipients pressing the Spam button than an unsubscribe function that is not working or when a recipient receives an email after opting out. Ensure that you use a foolproof system that works immediately.