Email Deliverability Myth #8 – No action, keep sending. What do all of these statements have in common? * Trying to sell Girl Scout cookies to an abandoned house * Trick-or-treeting at a house with the lights off * Trying to kill a T-rex with a pea shooter * Dont tug on superman’s cape * Don’t spit into the wind * Don’t pull the mask off an ‘ole Lone Ranger * And don’t keep sending to people that don’t interact, open, click, respond, etc. to your messages You just don’t do it. Email Deliverability Myth #9 – I can wait to mark my hard bounces as inactive. Why wait, set your hard bounces to 1 and forget about them. If you haven’t already, you should institute a no tolerance (mark as inactive after the first hard bounce) rule for hard bounces immediately. The longer you wait, the higher chance that this bad email address will receive an additional message from you. The other side to this is that if that email address has been turned in to a spam trap then you are a multi-time offender and that can get you blacklisted. Don’t pass go, don’t collect 200 dollars, mark these subscribers with an opt-out status immediately. On a side note to this myth with regards to status, don’t remove these subscribers from your database, mark them as opt-out in case these people get inadvertently added back to a list. This will ensure that they don’t get another message from you. Email Deliverability Myth #10 – I share an IP address, but it’s refreshed all the time so I don’t need to worry about any deliverability issues. This is a tough myth for many to understand. There are two opposite ends of the spectrum here. On one side you have the people that are sharing their IP with a group of others. In this scenario you are all responsible for each others reputations. In some cases, this can be mutually beneficial, especially if you’re paired with other good senders. This scenario also has a big risk. If there’s one bad apple in your group, they can ruin all of your reputations with a single bad decision. I’m not going to turn this myth into a shared versus dedicated IP rant, that can be saved for another post. Email Deliverability Myth #11 – Never send over the weekend. We have found that early morning (just after midnight) sends that land in the inbox by the time people are waking up do very well for B2C retail clients when sent over the weekend. This myth has really been debunked because different industries have different successes sending campaigns at different times. The best way to figure out if this works for you is to do an A/B split campaign to see what kind of results you pull. I’m not sure about any truth with this next statement but I’m going to throw it out there anyway and hope for some comments. The continued success could be because there are substantially less senders on weekends, making the volume on the ISP’s incoming mail servers much lighter. There, I said it, talk amongst yourselves. Email Deliverability Myth #12 – I’m worried about some of my email content words or phrases sounding “spammy†so it’s best to put it all in images. That way, it won’t get flagged as spam by ISPs. Bad, bad, bad idea. If you think your content is “spammyâ€then change your content, don’t mask it behind images. You need to maintain a good image-to-text ratio to stay out of the junk folder and or blocked by SPAM filters. There are plenty of free spam tests out there like Spam Assassin to score your message, giving you a good indication as to where your message will end up. If you want to go the extra step you can run a litmus test using Litmus’s extensive tools which will allow you to see how your message renders across most available email clients, perform spam filter testing, as well as give you a very detailed and organized set of analytics. Email Deliverability Myth #13 – If I make it difficult for people to opt-out of messages, I will have less opt-outs. Yes, you hit the nail on the head, you WILL have less opt-outs but MANY more SPAM complaints… FAIL. You must, must. must, have a clear functioning, and easy to use opt-out. I have seen some organizations that claim that it takes a few days to a week or so to opt you out of their database. This should be an instant action and the subscriber should be removed right away. I’m not sure why this is so difficult for some companies. If you think the subscriber is going to change their mind, you’re living in a dream world. People opt-out because they don’t want to hear from you. Don’t send them a message asking them if they are sure they want to opt-out, it will just frustrate them and then you will be dealing with myth #6.
