E-mail: Best Practices for E-mail Marketing Communications

These five best practices, offered recently by The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), are intended to improve the likelihood of permission-based e-mail being delivered successfully to a recipient’s inbox -- and being read by the intended recipient.

1. Encourage customers and prospects to add your legitimate sending e-mail address to their personal”approved list/address book” and provide up-front instructions on how to do so in registration pages. Being an approved sender yields higher response rates and generates fewer complaints and blocked messages.

2. Carefully consider the content and presentation of marketing messages, as recipients are increasingly labeling any e-mail communication that’s irrelevant to them or looks suspicious as spam. Also, strive to create messages that strike a balance between images and system text, as many mailbox providers now routinely hide images in default settings.

3. Follow established protocols such as authentication and whitelisting criteria to ensure that e-mail messages pass muster with mailbox providers. Also register for all mailbox provider feedback loops. In general, aim to keep complaint rates (total complaints divided by total delivered e-mail) less than 0.1 percent. This will help you avoid temporary or long-term blocks.

4. Adopt good list hygiene and monitoring practices that help facilitate message delivery. Monitoring campaign delivery, open and click-through rates is essential, as a low open rate or high bounce rate may indicate a delivery issue.

5. Educate consumers and other stakeholders about anti-spam tools, technologies, laws and industry programs developed to separate legitimate communications from fraudulent messaging.

Louis Mastria, The DMA’s vice president for interactive and emerging media, notes, “Legitimate marketers must continue to monitor the evolving delivery landscape, especially emerging technologies that are helping to distinguish legitimate e-mail communications from fraudulent efforts.”

For more, visit: www.the-dma.org/antispam.