I recently sent a work-related email to a colleague with some time sensitive information in it. Not being in email marketing mode, I included the words “time sensitive” in the subject line and hit send. Several days later when I hadn’t heard back, I called him to see if he had received my message. He hadn’t. After a little digging, he found it—yep—in the spam folder.

Deliverability is a serious issue for brands, not just because legitimate messages get siphoned out of the inbox and into the spam folder, but also because your sender reputation is at stake.

What Happens When Someone Marks Your Email as Spam?
When a subscriber marks your email as spam, his ISP will block future messages from you. Your email service provider will also keep track of this information, making it possible for ISPs to make judgments about future emails you send to other recipients. Every time someone hits the spam button, it chips away at your sender reputation, making it harder for you to reach your subscribers.

Why Legitimate Emails End Up In the Spam Folder
Spam filters are all well and good for keeping out the baddies, but what about your legitimate messages? What mistakes are you making and how can you fix them?

• You’re including questionable material in the subject line. Spammers use tactics like all caps, multiple exclamation marks, and key phrases (like my “time sensitive” email above) to get people to click.Fix: Create subject lines that communicate message content without using gimmicks.

• You’re not communicating the right expectations to subscribers. If you send messages more often than expected or send valueless content, your subscribers will get irritated and send you careening into the spam folder.Fix: Communicate clearly what types of messages you’ll be sending and how often. Each message should include valuable content such as special offers, useful information, or sales announcements.

• You’re using shady list-building practices. Purchased lists often include spam trap messages and closed accounts. Too many of these bounces will destroy your sender reputation. Not only that, it’s bad business practice.Fix: Use double opt-ins to build your list, ensuring that each subscriber legitimately meant to sign up and knows what to expect.

A strong sender reputation is essential for keeping your legitimate messages out of the spam folder. Focus on providing valuable content, presenting it in a reputable format, and keeping an eye on your email metrics in order to deal with potential problems before they spiral out of control.

How long do you have to snag your reader’s attention before you lose them? Say it with me: ten seconds or less. We’ve had this drilled into our heads, and great designers know what keeps people reading and what doesn’t. But what hasn’t been learned nearly so well is that your customer’s online attention is not only short, but also very narrow.

Usability guru, Jack Nielson, explains in a recent Alertbox Column that most users focus only on what interests them or what they expect will give them the answers that they need while ignoring the other content. Known as “Tunnel Vision,” this phenomenon can make the difference between click-throughs and deleted messages.

Let’s consider an example. You design a newsletter advertising your website’s 20 percent off sale. You include a headline, an image, a block of text that includes a coupon code, and a call to action that says “Shop Now.” Nielson’s usability research suggests that if you haven’t stated the coupon code in the headline or included it as part of the call to action, many subscribers won’t see it. It’s a phenomenon similar to banner blindness, where readers ignore portions of the screen that they think aren’t essential to the overall message. If the coupon code is necessary in order to receive the savings, you’ll need to follow a few design tips in order to keep it within your subscribers’ field of vision.

• Put important elements near each other.
  If your image shows sale items and information, try putting the coupon code within the image or as the image caption. If subscribers must read through a block of text in order to find the coupon code, they may miss it altogether.

• Include essential info in the link.
  People tend to focus on click-able elements within an email design. Your call to action button and any nearby links should contain the essential information you’re trying to communicate. So instead of using a call to action that says “Shop Now,” try “Save 20% with coupon code FALL2012.”

• Test with actual users.
  Designers have difficulty recognizing usability problems with their designs because they already know where the important information is and their eyes gravitate toward it. They might not recognize where tunnel vision might occur for the average subscriber. Creating simple A/B split tests can point out problems that keep your readers from noticing the important stuff amongst everything else.

Tunnel vision means that users often don’t see things that are right in front of them. By grouping important elements together and putting essential information where readers tend to look anyway, you can boost your click-through rates and ultimately, your conversions.

Increasing deliverability is a noble goal for every email marketer. And while you may be able to boost your rates with subject line and offer techniques, there is an underlying issue that often gets overlooked: list building.

The Wrong Approach to List Building

Despite the mountains of evidence showing the benefits of building your own email list, less than 45% of all email marketers use permission-based lists. That means that more than half of businesses who send emails on a regular basis buy, rent, or use co-registration to build email lists. That’s a problem for three reasons:

• People who don’t explicitly sign up for your newsletter will be more likely to send you to the spam folder.
• People who sign up for your list accidentally or only as a result of another promotion will be unlikely to remain active.
• Purchased or rented lists have high unsubscribe rates because they consist of people who haven’t showed any interest in your products or services.

How to Build a List That Jump Starts Deliverability

Deliverability depends heavily on your subscribers wanting the messages you send them. If they didn’t sign up to receive your messages or they don’t remember signing up, they’ll hit the spam button. Respecting your subscribers’ right to choose which messages they receive and which ones they don’t can make a huge difference in how many of your emails reach their intended destination. In order to achieve better deliverability rates, implement these proven list-building strategies.

• Use double opt-ins whenever possible. By sending an initial email with a link that must be clicked to complete the opt-in process, you increase the likelihood that your subscribers will remember signing up.
• Make it easier to unsubscribe. Sound counterintuitive? Look at it this way. If a subscriber can’t easily see the unsubscribe link, he’ll hit the spam button instead, which will chip away at your deliverability rates. By making the unsubscribe link more visible, you ensure that the email addresses on your list belong to people who still want what you have to offer.
• Monitor and remove both hard and soft bounces. A hard bounce should be removed immediately from your list, while a soft bounce can be retried several times before removal. Either way, don’t let bounces sabotage your deliverability.

At eConnect Email, we help you maintain stellar deliverability by helping you monitor the vital stats of every email campaign you send. Keeping your lists clean ensures that the highest number of emails possible will reach their intended destination, meaning greater return on the investment you’ve made.

Yahoo!’s new email visualization tool may be email marketing eye candy, but it has also revealed some noteworthy tidbits for email marketers. The map on the front page shows Yahoo! email usage volume by location as well as a continuously updated number of emails delivered every second by the Yahoo! mail network. Click on a continent, and you can receive the same information specific to that area, with additional clicks zooming in further to reveal more detailed information about the data used to determine whether a particular message lands in the inbox or the junk folder.

What Information Is Available?

Perhaps the most interesting pieces of information for email marketers are the trending keywords and the email verification criteria.

• Trending Keywords

Click on the green box on the left side of the map to view keywords showing up most often in the subject lines of emails that make it to the inbox. Click the “Show Spam Keywords” box at the bottom of the graph to see keywords appearing in messages that land in the spam folder.

• Email Verification Criteria

This information is buried a little deeper, but can be found by clicking on a continent on the main page, then on a point within that continent. Click on one of the envelopes labeled either “Junk” or “Inbox” to see a list of five criteria used to determine which emails go where, as well as a pass or fail designation for each.

What Does This Mean for Email Marketers?

Sure, it’s interesting, but can it really impact your email marketing strategy? We think it can, by offering some valuable information we could only guess at before.

• The subject line isn’t as important as you might think when it comes to spam determination. So you can forget your list of approved or banned subject line words (like “free”) as well as those odd variations that attempt to fool the filter (f.r.e.e.; f*r*e*e; f-r-e-e). The trending keyword feature demonstrates that previously anathema words like free actually show up in delivered messages a high percentage of the time. They also show up in junked messages, suggesting that subject line words might not play as important a role as once thought.

• Spam filters look at the email as a whole to determine in-box worthiness. Criteria such as a verified IP address, links, sender, and message content all play a part in determining which messages get marked as spam and which ones reach the inbox.

The bottom line? Stop trying to game the system and instead work towards creating engaging, useful emails that build relationships with your subscribers—the kind of emails we help clients create every day at eConnect Email.

In life, most things are far more complex than they appear at first glance.  Have you ever thought about what goes into making your shower water turn on in the morning?  What makes your microwave heat your food?  What makes your cell phone work?  What gets your piece of mail delivered to a totally different continent?  What gets your email delivered to any place in the world almost instantaneously?  Well, this post isn’t here to answer your questions about showers and microwaves, but maybe it will help answer some questions about email delivery and how it works.

#1) When emails get blocked by ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) can it be a result of content?

Yes, content can affect email blockage.  For instance, anything you put in your email that resembles spam can cause your email to be blocked.  Even if you only have an ad with links in it can cause you to be blocked.  Certain topics and words are generally associated with spammers and are good to avoid (making money, mortgage refinance, medication).  Disguising these words and others like them will only make you appear that much more of a spammer.

#2) Feedback loops—what are they and are they useful?

Feedback loops are basically just that—feedback from users.  Yahoo’s feedback loop, for example, has a spam button that will send a report when clicked by a user.  If you are getting lots of these, then you should probably take a look at what issues are causing complaints and why you are being associated with spam.

#3) What does my email reputation consist of?

Several things, actually.

• First would be your sending infrastructure.  Being compliant and having the latest standards in place is key.  Authentication also plays a vital role (spf records, domain keys, etc).
• Don’t buy email lists and start sending to people who haven’t signed up for your campaigns.  This will definitely add to your complaints and will hurt your reputation.  These spam complaints will damage your reputation.  Be worthy of the trust of your recipients.
• The longer you send from the same IP address, the more your reputation will grow.  Trust is built up over time, so if you are a new sender, use best practices in your campaigns—it will help build that trust.
• Consistency in volume is important.  Don’t send every other day, but you will have to send more than twice a year to have a good email reputation.

#4) Honeypot?  What is that?

A spam trap that is specially placed by blacklist makers and spam watchdogs.  What they do is create email addresses and place them strategically in places that only email harvesters would ever think to look.  This harvester adds them to his email lists and is subsequently caught in the act.  The main point is, don’t buy email lists.  It will get you on a blacklist faster than anything.