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By Tom Kulzer AWeber CEO

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission
Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses
When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance
Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format
Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content
Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL
Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases
Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images
Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments
With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance
The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation
Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all.

Several reputation services are:

http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php

http://www.bondedsender.com

http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting
Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

I personally use and recommend AWeber’s AutoResponder services, because they offer 99%+ deliverability.

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Travis Millward
http://traviskmillward.com/blog

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Confirmed opt-in as defined by SpamHaus, who is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world:

There are alot of misconceptions about building a double, or confirmed opt-in list. With the help of AWeber, I’m going to bust some of these myths.

 

Myth 1: My List Size Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Some addresses entered into your form will not confirm — that much is true. The percentage of addresses that don’t confirm depends on many factors, including the quality of your traffic and how effective your thank-you page, confirmation message and incentive for confirming are.

Percentages aside, there are compelling reasons that having fewer addresses on your list is a good thing.

Sometimes Less is Better

I know. You may be asking, “How can a decreased list size be a good thing?” Well, let’s consider:

5-20% of all web form submissions are undeliverable right off the bat.

This means that of your total list size you can cut that by 5-20% because these email addresses are simply dead. Remember these are not temporary undeliverable but permanent dead addresses.

Now, add on the bogus and malicious sign ups that undoubtedly will happen. For example, someone comes to your website and decides to put in bob@aol.com. Well, bob@aol.com was once a real email address and because you were not using confirmed opt-in you are now classified as an unintentional spammer.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm found that only 68% of users always enter a valid email address. 

So, nearly a third of respondents knowingly enter bogus email addresses.

- Source

ISPs do not differentiate between unintentional spammers or actual spammers. The potential for you to be blocked or even worse, blacklisted, remains the same.

Less Can Be More Too

A study done by AWeber shows that using confirmed opt-in also reduces unsubscribes and complaints. This means that you keep more of your subscribers (the ones that actually want your email).

Myth 2: My Mailing List Is Different! I Don’t Need Confirmed Opt-In.

Let’s be clear, confirmed opt-in is for all businesses, plain and simple. Anyone collecting subscribers and in turn sending email needs to confirm that those people intended to sign up to your mailing list and want to receive your email.

In this age of email regulations and massive volumes of spam email, deliverability can be an issue. Why increase your chances of not getting delivered by putting yourself at risk.

Myth 3: No One Else Uses Confirmed Opt-In. Why Should I?

This is simply not accurate. Our own campaigns here at AWeber use confirmed opt-in for all email marketing activities. When someone signs up for a Test Drive of AWeber, they must confirm.

After setting up an account, if they want to receive our customer training email course, they must confirm. The same goes for our affiliates and their email training. Even when someone subscribes to our blog, they must confirm.

Ok, but AWeber must practice what they preach, who else?

If you want to sign up for the mailing lists of these organizations you will need to first confirm:

CNN	Microsoft
Oprah, CNet	bellagio.com
IRS.gov	weather.com
ign.com	maxim.com
tgifridays.com	olivegarden.com
pbs.org	visitpa.com
Whitehouse.gov

The list goes on and on…

Myth 4: Subscribers In My Market Don’t Know How To Confirm.

The simple solution is to tell them. The first page after someone fills in an opt-in form, commonly called a “thank you page” should tell the visitor exactly what to do next. Often this is done most effectively with a picture showing visitors what the confirmation email will look like.

An excellent example is our test drive sign up video on the thank you page showing visitors what to do.

One variation of this myth is: 

“Subscribers in my market don’t know how to click an email link.”

Honestly, if they can’t click a link then you probably should be marketing your business offline. If someone can find your website online I guarantee they can click a link.

Myth 5: My Sales Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Have you tested this assumption? The answer is always, “No, but I just assume” or “No, my colleague told me it would hurt sales”.

It’s best not to assume anything, but rather to seek out your own answers by testing and observing your own campaigns. We have found from our own testing that while the raw number of email addresses on our list declined when we switched to confirmed opt-in, sales did not.

This means that the people who did confirm were the ones that truly wanted the information that they had to offer and the ones that didn’t were not left to bloat the mailing list.

Grow Your Business Without Risk

Will your results be exactly the same as AWeber or even anyone else? This can only be determined by proper testing and measuring.

Use confirmed opt-in as an opportunity to make sure that your lists are 100% clean and that you know without a doubt that 100% of the people receiving your mail have specifically requested it themselves.

Spend your time and energy building your business with subscribers who want to hear from you rather than dealing with issues created by people who don’t want to hear from you.