Making Sure Your Email Newsletter Sends Successfully

This Tuesday Tech Tip we’ll cover what it means to be compliant with the current CAN-SPAM act, which are rules you should follow in each of your email newsletter campaigns before you send them out. Otherwise you might very well be dealing with angry newsletter recipients, issues with your email newsletter software delivering your campaigns successfully, or your email newsletter going into people’s spam inboxes. First of all it is best to determine what types of message you’ll be sending, as depending on what type it is, it will be treated differently. Here are the major categories an email will fall into:

• Commercial – An email whose main purpose is advertisement or promotion of your company. This is required to follow CAN-SPAM laws.
• Transactional – An email a client would be expecting from a transaction they have just made with you, such as a receipt or confirmation email.
• One-on-One email communication – These are typically exempt from CAN-SPAM laws.

Here are the best ways to comply with CAN-SPAM and ensure your email will deliver successfully:

1. Make sure you have an unsubscribe option. The unsubscribe option needs to be available for at least 30 days after the email is sent.
2. Honor opt-outs within 10 business days.
3. Display your mailing address.
4. Make sure the email displays at least one sentence.
5. Monitor your emails (especially if this is contracted out).
6. Make sure you’re sending from a legitimate “from” address. Different email providers have ways of detecting the legitimacy of a “from” email address. For example, if you send email and you use the “yahoo.com” domain in your “from” address and you send that mail from somewhere other than Yahoo, that email will likely get rejected (bounced) by a significant number of ISPs (source: http://bit.ly/1v3beAx).
7. Don’t use deceitful subject lines or email headings. The subject should clearly communicate the content included in the body of the email.

Another wise thing to do to avoid being flagged as spam is to never purchase email lists. Instead provide multiple sign-up options for your email list – on your website, in your signature linking to a form, or social media. If you send out an email to recipients that didn’t specifically give you permission or aren’t aware that you are going to start sending this to them, it will be very likely it is flagged as spam.

Hopefully this article makes it more clear on what to do to ensure your email newsletter has a great chance of being delivered to everyone you want it delivered to. Nowadays, it is very easy for your email to get flagged as spam either by the recipient or by the email program, so it is very important that these rules are followed.