1) Importance of the address book

Most of the new email clients use ‘safe lists’ or an address book to determine how the email is treated. If your ‘From’ address is not listed you can find your images blocked or your email placed in a separate folder to the inbox. This makes it vital to standardise on your ‘From’ address and encourage recipients to add you.

2) IP Address

There has been a shift in emphasis from having an IP address that is not blacklisted to having an IP address that is white listed. This means email broadcasters that constantly change their IP address will experience deliverability issues. Emailcenter have built strong relationships with ISP’s to ensure our IP addresses are continually maintained on a white list.

3) Image Blocking

Many email clients block images as standard. This has two implications – firstly your email will not be displayed correctly and secondly the emails cannot be tracked for opens. Again this can be overcome by educating recipients to add you to their safe list or by replacing needless images with text.

4) Improved HTML rendering

More and more email clients are becoming better at rendering HTML. There is now no need to worry about producing a separate AOL version as long as basic principles are followed. For our briefing on this topic go to:
http://www.emailcenteruk.com/maxenews/html_email_client_compatability.pdf

5) Email volumes are increasing

As email marketing matures as a medium and marketers realise the benefits and become more proficient, volumes of newsletters and email promotions are rising. This has two implications. Firstly there is increased clutter in the inbox so marketers have to think carefully how their creative will win the recipients increasingly limited time. Secondly marketers are spending more of their time and budget on email marketing so choosing the right partner to provide productivity tools, cost savings and campaign reporting is crucial.

6) The importance of data cleansing

ISP’s use bounce rates to determine the legitimacy of the sender. If the bounce rate is consistently over 10% to a particular domain you are in danger of becoming blacklisted.