The Role of Content in Your Emails

EMAIL DELIVERED MANAGE MONITOR MONETIZE THE ROLE OF CONTENT IN YOUR EMAILS A primary factor in inbox placement is CONTENT! And it's not enough to simply "mask" trigger words or get a low "spam score" in your email software when you test against spam filters. CONTENT Most of those are simply checking against databases that review keywords, not scan- ning the emails in the same manner that the ISPS do. And as you've probably guessed, the ISPS are much more So... assuming that everything else is in place, then you'll want to carefully look at your con- tent and how that's playing into your deliver- ability, specifically inbox placement. HERE ARE A HANDFUL OF THINGS TO LOOK AT THAT COULD BE IMPACTING DELIVERY RATES, AND MORE SPECIFICALLY, INBOX PLACEMENT: (Keep in mind, it's not always enough to just use a link tracker to mask the links. Not only can ISPS see past that tracking link, but there are also blacklists, such as Barracuda, that are actually clicking through all of the links in a message to see the intent of the messages). 1. LINKS IN YOUR EMAIL MESSAGES NOTE: This includes links to images in your mes- sages, if you're using HTML. We were troubleshooting for someone a few weeks back and they were trying to figure out why they were going to the spam folders.. Well, they had 18 (yes, EIGHTEEN) links going to the offer. This falls under the "looks and feels like spam to the ISPS". This is almost, if not equally, as bad as the one liner emails that say "To find out the secret to [fill in the blank], click here" with nothing else in the email message! # of Links 2. NUMBER OF LINKS IN YOUR MESSAGES. I had a prospect contact me this week to ask what we could do to help him get out of the spam folder. After reading his content, it was clear that nobody could really help him with his existing content. He needs to rework the messaging in order to fix his problem. PERIOD. (It was borderline pornographic, and by his complaints, was not what his audience expected to see either.) 3. OVERALL CONTENT 4. HTML CONTENT AND FORMATTING Just as your webpages show up differ- ently in different browswers, your HTML emails show up differently in different clients. Not to mention, if there are any code errors that the ISPS don't want to see, you'll get dinged on that too. FOR MORE INFORMATION To receive more information on the role of content in inbox placement, visit: http://www.emaildelivered.com/role-email-content. And Remember to sign up for the FREE Email Delivered Pulse newsletter for articles, tips, and recommended resources for email marketers. www.EmailDelivered.com