Improving Delivery For Your Html Newsletter

After all the effort you put into designing a newsletter, it would be a waste if it didn’t reach your clients. There are several ways to manage to avoid this issue, keep these in mind while creating your newsletters, as well as before sending them off.

The subject line of your email often gets scanned for words that are typically found in spam. Be sure to use words that cannot be interpreted as possible spam. The words “free,” or “cash,” often cause emails to get filtered into spam. Also, slightly abnormal punctuation, such as all caps letters or lots of consecutive exclamation marks, or other non-standard construction, would attract the attention of the spam filter. On a similar note, the text in the body of the email should also not contain any of these potential pitfalls.

It’s important to periodically update your email list and clean out any incorrect addresses or no longer valid addresses. If you repeatedly send to a list that contains these kinds of addresses, the chances of future emails getting delivered are less.

Your HTML code is also a source that attracts the attention of the spam filters. Any errors, a particular style of formatting, or the use of JavaScript, can all cause your newsletter to get flagged. It is also important to keep the ratio of words to images high: in other words, very little copy and many images or one large image will be a sure way to get the message separated out. Keep a reasonable balance of both to make sure the message is in a safe zone for delivery.

There is also free software available that will check your HTML newsletter, rate it and give you a recommendation about how likely it is to get filtered into spam. One such software is SPAMAssassin.org. The software will evaluate your message on a scale of 0 to 5, 0 being the rating that would allow your message to pass through the filters without any trouble. If you find particularly good software that serves this function, it is likely that it will also give suggested changes that you can make to your Newsletter to fix any potential flagged items.

One final way to improving your delivery rate is to request that your clients add your “”From” address to their list of contacts. Some email services do not accept emails from unknown senders, and hence the message again gets filtered into spam. If the address is added however, it increases the chances of its acceptance in the inbox.

Keep these few tips in mind and your newsletter will in all likelihood reach your clients!

By: James Kipling

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Jame Kipling is a best practices activist and advocate for sending email newsletters