As an entrepreneur, you understand the importance of maintaining a positive relationship with your customers and subscribers. A better customer experience means more revenue and increased customer loyalty. The same idea applies to those individuals who are considering making a purchase from your website or establishment. Your lead generation efforts are all for nothing if you don’t follow a set of suggested practices. These are the basics; rather, the essentials of great email marketing.

The team who creates content for the Fusebox aims to provide you with articles to help you adopt suggested sender practices, Infusionsoft’s Acceptable Use Policy, in addition to managing spam complaints, email boundaries and threshold levels. You might have heard us mention this (and other topics) in our Don’t Pee in the Pool Campaign last month.

As such, we occasionally encounter questions about obeying the suggested practices, regrettably, these concerns revolve around the general lack of understanding around legitimate commercial email. Let’s take this classic:

“I send email every day to friends and family — Why are there so many rules around sending a simple email?”

Sending an email seems as innocuous as going to the grocery store or making a phone call. In reality, bad email-sending habits not only reflect your reputation as a business owner, but also the reputation of Email Service Providers (such as Infusionsoft) from where you send your messages. Unfortunately, we burden the effects of poor sending practices and do our best to leverage the relationships with providers to deliver messages for our thousands of customers.  This applies to both unconfirmed opt-in, confirmed opt-in, platinum and transactional IP pools.

While we do offer platinum IPs, using them won’t necessarily improve your deliverability. In fact, if you’re a novice email marketer, odds are you could just dig your own grave with a weak email reputation. That said, everyone, no matter their experience level should consider the following points for their next email campaign. 

Here are some discussion points around this topic, surrounding delivering commercial email:

1. Given that you send a thousand emails, you are allotted only one spam complaint. The magic number in the industry is one-tenth of one percent … 0.1%. At Infusionsoft (including many ESPs), If you get two or more complaints from those 1000, your account may be flagged for review.
2.  No ISP should be treated the same. Each ISP manages unique complaint rate thresholds. They vary between .1 and .5%. The agreed industry standard is .1%. My advice is, don’t market to the thresholds, market to what your customers and prospects want.
3. An unsurprising 20% of surveyed respondents admitted to using the “Report Spam” button to unsubscribe from senders. Source: Email Sender and Provider Coalition (2007)
4. It may be tempting to assume permission.  Don’t! ReturnPath’s Stephanie Colleton advises the after effect is likely to receive more spam complaints, an irresponsive list and weakened metrics. Very valid points, especially when it’s more important than ever to deliver value to recipients and measure the effectiveness (open rates, click-though rates, conversion, etc).
5. The better path to have a cleaner and more active list.  One can achieve this by simply obtaining upfront permission, sending a confirmation message, delivering targeted value to recipients. In addition marketers should not bury the unsubscribe link (possibly, include it on the top); and always provide delivery options with respect to content and frequency.

Within Infusionsoft, you can keep track of your spam complaint rate by regularly checking the Email Compliant Summary report located within your Infusionsoft application.  This report keeps track of the number of emails sent per day and the number of ISP spam complaints registered. We highly recommend that you take advantage of this report to ensure that you are keeping the spam complaints down to a minimum of 0.1%. Our Email Compliance Specialist, James Thompson, wrote an in-depth article on keeping spam complaints down. I seriously recommend that you read it. (And now that I’m serious, go ahead and print it, too.)

Email deliverability is much more than managing Spam. It’s doing good by your subscribers and being even more respectful. I would recommend that you should treat every email as if it were your last — leave a great lasting impression with your subscribers. A great way to do good is to offer insightful perspective and not tasteless pitches. An example of this is the Infusionsoft Vault. It’s a great example of finding the balance of useful information and a blend of nurture marketing.

As you can see, we’ve published quite a few articles about email delivery, but we’re always on the hunt for more. If there is anything else concerning email deliverability that you would like to see on the Fusebox, let us know in the comments below!

You might also like these blog entries:

• Why Do Email Messages Go to Spam?
• Interesting Stats on B2B Marketing & Sales
• The Infusionsoft Success Path, Revisited.