No shortcuts, but checklists for deliverability success

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on February 15, 2008

Let's be honest, this whole email delivery business is very frustrating. Even pristine, highly skilled senders run into trouble now and then, as this piece from Practical Ecommerce reports.

What's a legitimate marketer to do? Other than slump wearily in the bar stool, order another whiskey and pontificate on the unfairness of life, love and Hotmail's anti-spam technology?

Ah, but we are made of sterner stuff. We can face the reality that it's neither fair nor unfair. It just is. And the rules of the delivery game mean that the fault for problems usually lies close to home.

That's a message that comes through good and strong from Mickey Chandler's blog post, and he takes the trouble to give us many explanations of the things you might be doing to get your emails blocked.

For marketers, spam is usually defined as "not my email." But Mickey reminds us that recipients can mark mail as spam for all sorts of reasons. Including the fact that your message just looks kind of wrong.

One way to avoid inadvertently sending "messed up" email is to use a pre-campaign checklist. You can create your own, but the following articles offer their versions for you to build from:

Your 10-Point quality-control checklist from Stefan Pollard
Things to check before you launch your email campaign from Tamara Gielen
Your email campaign launch checklist from Janine Popick
Before you hit send from Karen Gedney

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | 2 comment(s) - add yours!
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | as a biweekly newsletter

Sign-up for the Email Marketing Reports NEWSLETTER
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.

2 Comments:

All great points here by Mark and others for both checklist style prevention and the increasing "customer is always right" sentiment (I've rarely met an ISP Abuse desk person that really cares what emails look like, as long as their userbase is not complaining about it).

A mirror is definitely the first tool ESP deliverability staff should use when helping a client through the vast majority of deliverability issues. However, it is important for marketers to choose ESPs with dedicated staff and experts that can both hold the mirror and be expert enough to correct issues and then facilitate the appropriate correction with the ISP in question. Band-aids rarely last long in this industry and can sometimes even makes things worse. It is also important to point out, that showing off your best practices ahead of time, (I should point out the obvious – authenticating your mail should be high on any check list) and using an ESP that has certification options such as Habeas or Return Path, can help head off some of these unwanted surprises when the pressure is on and the message must get out there. Unless you have a magic deliverability wand, but I tend not to lend mine out.
By Jeremy Saibil, Director Deliverability, on 15 February, 2008

Thanks Jeremy. If I buy you a beer, would you let me borrow that wand?

I should add that if your ESP has no deliverability help to offer but you're loathe to change to one that does (or if you use software), there are a growing number of deliverability services out there. Here's a list.
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on 18 February, 2008