Back to The Basics – How is your email perceived?

To continue with the theme of email Bests Practices topics, I think it’s fair to state that both the ISPs and their email recipient clients are able to differentiate between legitimate marketers, and spammers. But the ISP and the email recipient share a frustration with the legitimate marketers. They notice inconsistencies in recognizing the need for best email delivery practices by the legitimate marketers.

When all is said and done, it is the ISP, and the email recipient perception that will affect your deliverability. As a whole, both parties, act as the combined force for deciding whether or not they accept your email to the recipient inbox.

To break this down, most ISPs are mainly concerned about certain technical factors about the email itself including; the header and subject line information, the body of the email, the reputation and past performance of the sending network. So you want to ensure the content and technical setup in your emails can pass the filters, gateways and servers designed by the ISPs for their customer’s privacy; furthermore, you want to ensure that your emails are recognized by the human ISPs postmaster employees, as your email subscribers – for more on this see the five R’s of email.

With the email recipient, the issues become more about the presentation, the intent of the email, and the recognition of the sender, and less about technical specifics; therefore, it is important that you ensure that your emails are recognized by the email recipient, as legitimate email. It is imperative that your intentions and practices are clear and conspicuous to the email recipient at the time of subscribing and with each message being delivered. By ensuring both the ISP and email recipient are satisfied, increase the likelihood that your email will make it to the recipient inbox.

So, are your issues technical or presentational? Do you know how some ISPs interact and collaborate with their clients to combat spam? Are you aware of the differences in how the ISPs and email recipients in other countries regard data collection and protection?

The answers could be as simple as a consistent “from domain”, ensuring a proper DNS setup, a broken URL link which does not go to a legitimate “Subscribe” or “Privacy” link, or a misinterpretation of countries data protection legislation.

So ask yourself – “Where do my sending practices need tweaking?”