Once your email is written and fully integrated as a template, you're that much closer to achieving a profitable mailing campaign! There are still some things you need to do, however, to reach this point. You still need to make sure that your email is not considered spam.
Thanks to a terrific site called Senderbase, a resource that monitors 25% of all emails sent in the world, you can spend less time worrying about this. According to Senderbase, 85% of all emails sent in the world end up in the hands of a mailer’s sworn enemy — the spam folder! Shocking, right? Senderbase provides phenomenal insight for any wannabe (or professional) mailer.
That's why it's more important than ever to ensure your email has the look and feel of legitimacy, as well as compatibility on all levels (and platforms).
To make sure of this, here’s a few steps that you can follow:
1 - Make sure that your email is compatible with all the major email providers
To do so, you can either use Email on Acid or Litmus.
Email on Acid sums it up best with their straight-to-the-point tagline:
“Quickly preview your emails to make sure they don't look like $*@%! in the inbox.”
The purpose of using a site like this is to preview how the email you'll be sending out will look in over 70 email clients and mobile devices.
"if you don't make it to the inbox, your message won't get across."
The Email on Acid service is terrific at identifying which (if any) filters might be blocking your email. And in the case that any webmail providers are, you’ll gain greater understanding and insight as to why - and hopefully these services will help get you out of the pinch that you’re in.
As far as Litmus goes, Litmus will help you test and track your emails more successfully through the help of previews (over 30+ email clients), with images on/off, analytic tools, and spam filter testing.
2 - Check your Spam Score
Thanks to a nifty free service from Postmark, they have an app that brings “spam checking” right to your fingertips.
To check your Spam Score, all you have to do is paste the contents of the email -- or more precisely, the full headers and content of the email in the spam checker box.
To obtain the full headers and content of any email, select ‘Show Original’ in gmail.
If you’re still unsure how to find this, Google has provided instructions on how to obtain this information for all the popular Webmail providers and Email clients here.
The Spam Score is on 0 to 10 scale… with 0 being the best score you can get.
So a good score would definitely be between 0 and 1 -- and this is a score you should definitely shoot for. Any number above 1 means that your email has the possibility of ending up in the Spam folder.
3 - Check your IP address
Didn't achieve a good score in Step 2? That’s OK, there’s still more you can do.
It’s highly recommended that you check to see if your IP address has anything to do with it — sometimes it can be a factor.
SenderScore is a great resource for IP address Spam checks.
Essentially the way SenderScore works is, it will analyze the IP address and determine whether it has seen a sufficient volume of email coming from a specific IP.
If you achieve a score of 85 or higher -- you can keep sending emails, as your IP address hasn’t been blacklisted. Rejoice! Because that’s good news.
If your score is only a little below that, you can check where it has been blacklisted on this site. Once this site is done analyzing your data, it will show you where your domain name and/or IP address has been blacklisted.
It even provides you with a link and the instructions you need to follow if you wish to start negotiating to get removed from that blacklist … which is incredibly helpful to you, if that’s the case.
If your score, however, is terrible — you should look into obtaining a new IP address.
What we learned
As you can see, Mailing is much more complicated than it may appear on the surface. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to cover 5 different sub-topics related to mailing in this 5 part series. It's the most we ever wrote about on one topic up until now!
So hang with us for the final part next week, you made it this far!
We're going to show you how to get "Unblacklisted" for those of you who maybe weren’t the best mailers in the past. We got you covered! Stay tuned.
