1. Sending to people who complain about your email, whether because they don’t remember opting in, they think you email too frequently, or your message is irrelevant. The reason itself is, well, irrelevant. What matters is they complain. They either report you as spam or as an abuser, or they might report you to the mail admin if it’s a B2B situation.

2. Hard bounces that result from sending to bad email addresses also harm your online sending reputation.

As an email deliverability consultant, ClickMail Marketing has email deliverability tools and expertise to help you keep your delivery rate—and your email marketing ROI—as high as can be.

Get those complainers off your list
As part of the email deliverability best practices we’ve developed, we can scrub your in-house email list against a list of almost 8 million known complainers. Think of them as the squeaky wheels of the email world. It doesn’t take much to set these folks off, so let’s just avoid them altogether, shall we? That protects your online sending reputation from the first threat.

Scrub those bad emails from your list
The other email deliverability best practice involves initiation an email connection but breaking off that connection before an email is actually sent, so we can determine which email addresses are bad. We get a 95% success rate with this, and it’s not easy to pull off. (As they say, “Do not try this at home.”) This screening takes care of threat #2, determining the bad email addresses without sending an email and risking your reputation.

Neither of these email deliverability practices adds names to your in-house email list. Instead, they take names off. You as the email marketer might think that sounds counterintuitive, but would you rather have a great online sending reputation and get through to the 80% of good names on your list? Or send to your whole list, damage your reputation, and not be able to send to anyone at all?

For more on these email deliverability best practices, contact ClickMail Marketing.

One, this is the age of integration. (For proof of that, see our new 2010 guide to choosing an ESP.) Just because you are doing one thing (blogging) doesn’t mean you should not do the other (email marketing). The more marketing channels you have, the better. Plus blogs and emails are delivered differently. A blog must be found by a reader, and then subscribed to, to be read. An email newsletter can be part of your email marketing program, sent to people already on your in-house email list. You can actively recruit email subscribers via a multitude of channels. And people are less likely to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed than they are to your email newsletter. Using a blog in combination with an email newsletter simply increases your reach, and therefore your ROI.

Two, the one can refer to the other, so they support each other (and cut down on the amount of content needed). Let’s say you have an email marketing program, but you don’t do an email newsletter because you’re concerned about coming up with content and getting it pushed out on time every week or month. (And anything that takes more staff time admittedly impacts your email marketing ROI.) You can repurpose the content from your blog to create that email newsletter content. Pick a few of the best blogs from the last month and include a compelling sentence about each in the newsletter, linked to that blog. You will reach a different audience, your in-house email list, while driving traffic to your blog. Conversely, your blog can refer back to your email newsletter. That’s what we do at ClickMail. We publish a monthly email marketing newsletter, then summarize that month’s issue in a blog post, linking back to the newsletter now archived on our website.

Three, this is the age of choice for consumers, even if your audience is B2B. They can choose how to communicate with you, and how you can communicate with them. They might choose Facebook or Twitter or signing up for your emails or subscribing to your blog…or a combination of two or more of these channels. If they prefer email and you’re only offering a blog, you might lose the opportunity to build a relationship with them when they decide to simply skip it and you. And any lost opportunities mean a lower ROI.

Which leads to reason four, email as a relationship building tool. Blogging can’t replace email for relationship building. Nor can you effectively use blogging for specials and promotions, or even surveys! There are still certain types of content most appropriate to email. Just like you might miss out on a subscriber (i.e. prospect) if you only offer a blog, no newsletter, so might you miss out on marketing if you don’t have the email list and channel for certain types of messages.

Blogging and email: You need both for maximize email marketing ROI. And if you need help with the latter, you know where to go.

Case in point: Smith Harmon released a short report on email rendering that shows most retailers failed a rendering test when viewing their emails in Hotmail using Firefox.

This is precisely why ClickMail Marketing preaches the following as an email marketing vendor:

1. Test, test, test: Use Pivotal Veracity to test your rendering across multiple email clients

2. Beware, beware, beware: OK, we don’t usually say “beware” but it’s getting to that point. We preach “stay current” because email is constantly changing. (You heard Facebook is getting into the email game, right?)

These two actions become email marketing best practices out of necessity. Gone are the days of a handful of email clients. Consumer choice has grown exponentially, not only in products and services they choose to buy, but how they choose to communicate and shop for those things they buy. It’s not an Outlook world any longer, even for B2B email marketing, because even if those on your in-house email list use Outlook when at their desks, they also see that same email from home and via their mobile phones.

How can ClickMail help? First off, we offer Pivotal Veracity eDesign Optimizer, a complete email rendering solution for testing email rendering in web-based, desktop and mobile email environments.

And we also write this email marketing blog, publish email marketing whitepapers, filter through and offer the best papers from other email marketing service providers, publish our monthly email marketing newsletter, and speak and teach at conferences. We take this whole “stay current” thing very seriously.

Don’t show up in any email marketing vendor’s “fail” report. Turn to ClickMail first. Even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing that’s the case.

Maybe we should retitle this blog post 3 email marketing best practices, making ClickMail number 3!

Your subject line is the second factor people consider when deciding whether or not to open your email. (The first is the From line.) Obviously, your subject line is critical to your email marketing ROI for that reason.

But that does not translate into get them to open the email at all costs, even if that means lying in the subject line.

Think about the spam you get, and how blatant those subject lines lies are, like the trickery of “How are you?” Yes, it will get you to open the email, because that subject line will have you wondering, “Who is this?” But then you feel cheated after you open it, right? And realize you fell for their ruse?

You’re guilty of that too, if your email subject lines aren’t quite honest. If you get someone to open your email by tricking them, you increase your open rate, but decrease your trust factor.

Is it worth that tradeoff?

Wordtracker sent an email recently with this subject line: “Bar brawls, industrial espionage and keyword research!”

That’s an attention getter! And it looked like it could easily be a trick. But it wasn’t. It really was part of their message.

As we’ve recently brought up, some in the email marketing industry seem to have an obsession with open rates to the point where they are willing to be if not quite dishonest, not quite truthful either.

I say, you’re getting a short-term gain (opens) at the risk of a long-term pain (unsubscribes or, worse, spam complaints).

If you can’t follow the email subject line best practices of being honest, maybe you need to rethink your offer in the first place? Or your relevance?

According to an email marketing report published by Merkle last year at this time, subscribers who opt-out of permission-based email give to primary reasons for doing so:

• 75% said the emails lack relevance
• 73% said the emails are sent too frequently
  

These are two factors definitely within your control! And two things that should never be happening!

If you are following email marketing best practices, you are ensuring relevance right from the beginning of your relationship with your subscriber. How? By promising content they want, then delivering on that content. Simply put, you stay relevant by keeping your word.

And remember: How often you email is part of relevance. Your content must appeal to your audience, but if you send them that content too often, you will become unwelcome…and therefore irrelevant.

Think about it. Three-quarters of the people unsubscribing are doing so because they aren’t getting what they want, when they want it. That’s it. That’s easy to fix.

Be a little more relevant. Be a little more considerate. And be a little better off when it comes to your unsubscribes.

P.S. See the January issue of the ClickMail Marketer for advice on using preference centers to improve your relevance. And keep reading this email marketing blog. It’s a topic we address quite often, because it is key among email marketing best practices!

Some unsubscribe processes are like that. And they are the opposite of email marketing best practices.

A few years ago, I subscribed to an industry newsletter to help me get a better understanding of the industry, as we were taking on a new client, and that knowledge was useful. After a few good years, the client went away. (It was a government client, and the contract changed hands.) I still get the email newsletter I signed up for all those years ago. Every time a new one shows up in my inbox, I delete it, I no longer need it.

Finally I decided to unsubscribe and be done with it. But I can’t.

Yes, in adherence to email marketing best practices, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. But it requires a username and password. Neither of which I remember getting in the first place, and I certainly don’t know them now, nor are they written down anywhere.

Offering the unsubscribe but then making it impossible to do so is like following the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.

Some email marketers see the unsubscribe option as a necessary evil, something they have to do to be CAN SPAM compliant. After all, they worked hard to get that email address onto their in-house list. Why would they want to let it off? So maybe they’re asking for a username and password to discourage the unsubscribe? Who knows!

But making it hard to unsubscribe is bad for the brand, because it creates ill will, and it might lead to you being labeled as spam instead.

Make sure you’re adhering to as many email marketing best practices as possible. Test your unsubscribe today. Make sure it’s easy to find and easy to do.

One reason for this unique approach is our focus on deliverability. In fact, when trying to categories ClickMail, it might be easiest to think of us as an email deliverability consultant. Sure, we can do anything your email marketing program might require, from email design and landing pages to deploying your email for you and helping you analyze your results. But the ability to improve email deliverability is one of the most important services we as a consultant can provide, because it’s your email deliverability that’s going to have a direct impact on your email marketing ROI.

Every email that doesn’t make it through is a lost opportunity for you. Think about it: If you’re email deliverability rate is 83%, that means a whopping 17% of your audience is NOT hearing from you! Even if you had a tiny list, say 5,000 names, that means 850 people won’t get your email!

Are you really prepared to leave that kind of money on the table?

And that’s where the email deliverability consultant comes in. We run tests putting your emails through different ESPs to find out which ESP offers the highest email deliverability for you. Plus we’ll analyze your email marketing templates to make sure they’re clean and not triggering any spam filters. We’ll take a look at your online sending reputation to see where you need to improve. And now we offer the ClickMail Deliverability Assessment to really delve into your email marketing program to find areas to improve email deliverability.

There are so many parts to email, it can be easy to get caught up in the strategy, the tactics, the message, the offer, the design, the list building, the landing pages, the…you get the picture. But without the highest possible email deliverability rate, all those other pieces won’t make much difference.

That’s why you need an email deliverability consultant. Find out more at www.clickmailmarketing.com.

From branding to budgeting, from lines to subject lines, this website serves up numbers, stats and data on a full range of email marketing topics. Choose a topic, and you’re presented with a laundry list of stats.

Whether you’re researching email marketing best practices or need some ammunition for convincing the boss, you’re like to find these email marketing stats useful!

And any tool that helps you improve your email marketing ROI is a tool worth knowing about.

The ClickMail Deliverability Assessment is designed for organizations that are looking to improve their email marketing ROI by using email deliverability tools. Even if you’re following email deliverability best practices, you’re no doubt ending up with some emails in the spam folder or blocked completely.

The ClickMail Deliverability Assessment combines email best practices, technology and ClickMail’s deliverability expertise for a service that provides:

• A Specific Deliverability Results Report for your IP addresses and domains
• A Detailed Sender Reputation Report and the key contributing factors
• An Infrastructure Scorecard comparing your infrastructure to email marketing best practices
• A Process Scorecard comparing your practices to best practices for email marketing
• A Certification Gap Analysis indicating steps necessary to achieve GoodMail certification
• A Value Analysis to help management compare improved email deliverability revenue potential to alternatives

The ClickMail Deliverability Assessment is delivered as an actionable report with detailed analysis and recommendations and a fully customizable value analysis.

To find out more, contact us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

That’s because it all starts with the subscriber: whether they want to hear from you, and how engaged they are with your email.

Moving forward, major ISPs will be measuring the subscriber engagement when determining whether or not your email is spam. An email deliverability best practice is to let the subscriber determine the boundaries of his or her relationship with you to make sure that engagement is higher later.

Which is why preference centers should be part of your email deliverability best practices, now more than ever.

Read more about preference centers and their impact on your email marketing delivery rate (and therefore email marketing ROI) in the latest ClickMail Marketer.