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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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There are many amazing courses on list building available for you to help you
learn this extremely important aspect of your business. As you know, your list
will prove to be
your most valuable asset.

JVgiveawaysecrets.com

Now this is beneficial – 2 of the services that I use regularly can now be used together!

AWeber, for those who don’t know, is an autoresponder service.  It allows you to create a “list” of opt-in followers who have already given you permission to send them email messages.  Surely you’ve herad the adage “The Money is in The List”.  This is what they were talking about.

Twitter is a service which allows you to quickly communicate with friends, family, and co–workers (Or more importantly for this business, fellow marketers) through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?”

So what’s the big deal?

Today AWeber announced that they now have a feature that enables you to post a link from the emails you send your list to Twitter.

How is this beneficial?

It allows you to promote your email messages in 2 ways.

1 – There are probably ALOT of people following you on Twitter that aren’t on your list.  Now you can bring your AWeber email messages to all of those people.

2 – You can include a subscribe list at the end of each message, and hopefully grab new readers from Twitter, and add them to your AWeber list.

  Who knows how soon you could be increasing your sales with this super combo.  I suggest you check these services out today!

AWeber

Twitter