Email Deliverability – Getting Started
One of the biggest challenges in email marketing is email deliverability – no point in preparing a great newsletter if no one receives it, right?
There is a lot info out there, but it would take several years of your life to implement all the ideas. So, I’ve put together four simple tips, that won’t cost you a penny and more importantly, should only take a couple of minutes to organise.
1. Content
Send quality content and ensure your messages don’t look too “spammy”. Avoid the overuse of CAPITALS and words like Free, Special offer and of course Viagra etc.
2. HTML v Text Emails
If sending html emails try and use html & images sparingly. Also, why not send a text version of your email as well [more].
Note: In tests we performed on our own GroupMail newsletter here, sending html & text at the same time gave us the highest deliverability rate (Compared to just sending text only or html only emails).
3. Email Attachments
Lots of anti-virus software/filters will strip out attachments from your email. If you need to send attachments, it’d be better to link to the attachment on a website.
4. Whitelisting
Another good idea is to ask your recipient to whitelist your email address when they’re signing up to your newsletter – you could include something along the lines of “To ensure delivery of our newsletter to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add yourname@youraddress.com to your address book, contact list (Gmail) or Safe Senders List.”
Thats it, free, quick & easy to set-up (wish everything was that simple) – so off you go and implement before you send your next email newsletter.
Next: I’ll talk about blacklists, ISP’s and email accreditation (Warning! this content will be boring (but important 
).
Rob
GroupMail Team
What is greylisted, the same as belonging to a black list?
No greylisting is different, in short a server receiving incoming mail, doesn’t recognise the sending server and temporarily rejects the message. The sending server sees the message has been rejected and retries it at a later time (if its a properly configured server), the receiving server usually accepts the retried email message.
More details on this process here
Is there an addon planned within Groupmail enterprise etc. for testing the spam attributes in messages when setting them up?
I used to get about 5% of my emails bounced back to me because of mailbox full, invalid address etc, but overnight (about 12 months ago) I stopped getting all these bounce backs, instead I just get a handfull.
This worries me, because I’m wondering if a lot of my emails aren’t getting through, any thoughts?
I run a foreign language newsletter (Afrikaans) for 6years now but still have to attach my newsletter as an attachment rather than have it in the email body itself due to the fact that its being prepared by my editor in both word and pdf and the word format has compatibility issues with my canadian autoresponder.
My preference is to embed the 12 page newsletter in the email itself. Can you advise on how this be done and if groupmail can handle something like that. I have stopped using groupmail purely because of the time it takes to send out the 3 thousand emails. Maybe I should reconsider?
Hennie Greeff
JHerzog:
This is something we’ve been thinking about for a while (many many conversations
). We’re just setting out some plans for the year.. you think it would be helpful for all GroupMail customers?
Rob:
Tough question .. to be honest it’s difficult to say. Sorry for the sales pitch, but the one suggestion I’d have is to try and track your newsletter to see how many are opening your email – http://www.group-metrics.com.
Hennie:
Firstly, your newsletter needs to be created in a true HTML Editor such as Microsoft FrontPage, Dreamweaver or even our own Message Editor in GroupMail. Word is not a true HTML Editor [this may be part of the reason you are experiencing these problems] and should not be used to create your HTML Messages, as it tends to add a lot of extra formatting and XML, which causes problems when sending as a HTML Message or viewing the recieved message.
With regards to the speed of sending 3,000 messages, this could be down to the Message Size, if you’re using lots of images which are stored locally on your PC, this will cause the size of the message to be extremely large and in turn take ages to send. If you are using images, you should maybe reference them from a public website rather than embed them into the HTML Message, this would certainly reduce its size and the message would be much faster at sending.
Hennie: I’d suggest getting in touch with our support team, and we can certainly check this out, no problem.
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