email marketing best practice

Follow our best practice guidelines for practical advice on how to :

• Avoid spam filters
• Get read
• Ensure effective email rendering in Outlook 2007
• Work with your recipients email software
• Understand deliverability and email authentication

Get Read

Don't overestimate the time your recipient will spend on your email. Use design as communication, rather than for design's sake - make it easy for the recipient to skim-read and instantly pinpoint items of interest. Don't use lengthy news items - include a summary and allow people to click through to your website to read the remainder if they're interested.

Consider the right time to send - will your customers be busy on Monday morning? Will they be in the right frame of mind on Friday afternoon? Experiment. Split your list into two and compare the response to different wording, designs, or campaigns sent at alternative times of day.

A well-written email with the correct balance of graphics and text and carefully placed links is more likely to reach the intended recipient and deliver your message effectively.

Ensure Effective Email Rendering in Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007, and not Internet Explorer to render HTML emails. This has the following implications:

• No support for animated gifs
• No support for Flash or other plug-ins
• No support for CSS Floats/Positioning
• No support for using images as bullet in unordered lists
• No support for background images
• No support for forms
• Limited support for background colour
• Alt tags will be modified

Work With Your Recipients Email Software

Don't design in isolation. Something that looks fantastic on your screen might not be the most practical solution for a large response. There are two major technical factors that you should consider - both features of the email software your recipients are likely to be using.

Image blocking: this is standard now on Outlook, and many large webmail services such as Gmail. Users with this option selected have to click to display your images. What this means is that if you rely on images alone to display the main points of your communication, then your message will have no initial impact.

You should therefore balance your use of text and graphics, so that those with image blocking enabled are able to see the 'point' of your email. It is likely that image blocking will become more and more common in the future.

Preview panes: A preview pane allows recipients to see a 'snatch' of their email and make a snap decision as to whether it is important or not. Preview panes display the left-hand side or (more commonly) the top few lines of an email. For this reason, you should put important descriptive content in the top left of your email.

mailboxFOX allows you to 'test send' as many times as you like, for no charge. Try to test your email on a number of email clients if possible, and don't assume that everybody will be using the same software as you.

Deliverability & authentication

Email marketers have to be concerned about getting their messages to their intended audience. Regardless of how many hours you spend on getting the copy just right and the care you put into your creative, it will all be wasted if your emails are not delivered.

We recommend reading the Direct Marketing Associations whitepaper 'Email Deliverability: How we Got Here and What Marketer's Should do About It'.

Authenticating that an email was sent from a valid source has become the first step ISP use in filtering spam. ISPs use authentication to verifying the claimed domain name in the emails they receive.

There are a number of ways ISPs authenticate a sender's domain name

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
• SenderID
• DomainKeys

To ensure the highest deliverability rates mailboxFOX ensure that when we set up a domain name for you we included all these best practices. Below we explain in more detail what these are:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

SPF allows the owner of an Internet domain to use special format of DNS TXT records to specify which machines are authorised to transmit email for that domain. For example, the owner of the clientname.co.uk can designate which machines are authorised to send email whose sender email address ends with "@clientname.co.uk".

Receivers checking SPF can reject messages from unauthorised machines before receiving the body of the message. SPF exploits the authority delegation scheme of the real Domain Name System.

SenderID

The Sender ID Framework is an email authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name from which email messages are sent.

Sender ID validates the origin of email messages by verifying the IP address of the sender against the alleged owner of the sending domain in a similar way to SPF

Domain Keys

DomainKeys provides a mechanism for verifying both the domain of each email sender and the integrity of the messages sent (i.e,. that they were not altered during transit). And, once the domain can be verified, it can be compared to the domain used by the sender in the From: field of the message to detect forgeries.

If it's a forgery, then it's spam or fraud, and it can be dropped without impact to the user. If it's not a forgery, then the domain is known, and a persistent reputation profile can be established for that sending domain that can be tied into anti-spam policy systems, shared between service providers, and even exposed to the user.