5:37 pm admin

Remember, 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.

Most of those are simply checking against databases that review keywords, not scanning the emails in the same manner that the ISPs do. And as you've probably guessed, the ISPs are much more sophisticated.

So... assuming that everything else is in place, then you'll want to carefully look at your email content and how that's playing into your deliverability, specifically inbox placement.

Here are a handful of things to look at that could be impacting delivery rates, and more specifically, inbox placement:

1. Links in your email messages (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).

NOTE: This includes links to images in your messages, if you're using HTML.

2. NUMBER of links in your messages. 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!

3. Overall content... 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.)

4. HTML content and formatting. Just as your webpages show up differently in different browsers, 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.

The best thing to do is send yourself a test message in each of the major email clients and massage the content until it gets to the inbox. Keep in mind, that different ISPs also weight the quality of "mailboxes" as well as the data going into it (so it's best to use mailboxes that are actually actively being used!).

Author: Heather Seitz

Attention Readers, Publishers, Editors, Bloggers, and Marketers: You may republish or syndicate this article without any charge. The only thing I ask is that you keep the newsletter article or blog post exactly as it was written and formatted, with no changes. You must also include full publication attribution and back links as indicated. This information has been provided by http://www.EmailDelivered.com and written by Heather Seitz.

For over a decade Heather Seitz used email marketing to build successful companies and had to solve the biggest barrier to consistent profitability: deliverability.  Today she is the Co-Founder and CEO of Email Delivered.

For more information on how to know the right content to send your subscribers at the right time and keep them engaged: Click here http://www.emaildelivered.com/role-email-content/. Remember to sign up for the FREE Email Delivered Pulse newsletter for articles, tips, and recommended resources for email marketers.

May 16, 2014