Best Practices for Building an Email Campaign

HTML Email

• HTML email messages should contain at least 50% images and 50% HTML text content using <font tags>. The higher the content to images ratio, the lower your overall spam filter score will be in popular mail filters like Spam Assassin.  A good rule to adopt is that if it looks like text, it should be text. Avoid displaying text as an image. Many email clients are now disabling image viewing, so an HTML email composed entirely of images will not be displayed correctly to these recipients and consequently, the message delivered in the email gets lost.
• At the top of the HTML message, against a white background, include a statement that says: "Unable to view the images in this email? Click here to view it on the Web." and link to a Web-based version of the HTML email. This will allow hotmail and yahoo users who have images disabled by default, to read the entire HTML email message with images displayed.
• Include this unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email (copy and paste into your email). The MLID and EMAL values will be prepopulated when we send the email.
  
  http://www.infoyouaskedfor.com/u.php?m=<<MLID>>&e=<<EMAL-URL>>

General Email and CANSPAM Requirements

• Include your company's physical mailing address at the bottom of each email piece you send.
• A conspicuously displayed unsubscribe link must be included within every email
• Subject lines must be descriptive in nature about the content of the email. There are specific civil penalties about the use of deceptive subject lines.
• The from line should be from you or your business and not a sales pitch or marketing message
• Avoid using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS in the subject line.  Do not use exclamation marks (!) or question marks (?) in the subject line. 
• Do not start your subject line with a dollar sign ($), the word “Free” or “Buy”, a customer’s username, or the word “Hello”. Do not use these words anywhere in the subject line: “for only”, “FREE”, “GUARANTEED”, “savings”, or the word “approved”.

Obtaining Opt-in Email Addresses

• The CANSPAM law specifically bans the practice of harvesting emails through an automated means. This would mean it’s now illegal to obtain email addresses is to by crawling websites. This includes purchasing harvested email addresses from someone else.

Avoiding the Junk Mail Folder

• At the top of your email, include a statement asking the recipient to add you to their safe-list or their address book to avoid interruption in the email delivery of your messages. "To avoid interruption in email delivery, please add youremail@yourcompany.com to your safe-list or address book."
• Send your email using Leader Technologies' Bonded Sender program, which will guarantee higher delivery of your emails to hotmail recipients as well as whitelisting to other ISPs.

Optimizing Email Deliverability

• All email recipient lists are run through our mastermail database of known bad and unsubscribed email addresses to clean your email list prior to delivery insuring a higher deliverability rate for your email campaign. This list is updated in real time and maintained by Leader Technologies.
• The best time to deliver your email is during normal business hours Tuesday through Thursday. If your email lands in inboxes during the normal work day, it is more likely to be opened and clicked. The exception to sending emails on weekends is if your message is relevant to the weekend crowd.
• Personalizing the subject line and/or email content with the recipients First Name may give you a higher open rate and click through rate.

Targeting Responsive Customers

• Leader Technologies automatically tracks the individual click through and open rate activity for each customer. After an email campaign has launched and the recipient activity has diminished after approx (1) week, we can pull out a list of people who opened the email and clicked on any of the links that were tracked in the campaign. You can use this data to send a follow-up email to just those people who responded to your first campaign.

Getting better responses from Email Campaigns

• Collect as much information from your customers as possible, so you can later target specific groups within your list to deliver your message to.
• Send targeted email messages to smaller subsets of your list, rather than sending to the whole group.
• Do not send emails to the same customers more than once a week.
• Avoid pre-checking the opt-in boxes on registration forms
• Provide an incentive to encourage customers to optin on the registration or data collection page.
• Send personalized email messages or send with personalized subject lines
• Test different email formats with smaller subsets of your email list and compare results to see which messages are most effective at motivating your customers to act.
• Use a special tracking link on your web site so you can monitor click through activity once the customer lands on your site.
• Send followup email campaigns to customers who responded or didn't respond to previous emails.