Unsubscribe Compliance
- a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism must be present in all emails
- opt-out requests must be honored within 10 days.
Content Compliance
- The email address you send from must be accurate and not a fake one (spammers often fake the email they’re sending from to avoid detection)
- Relevant subject lines relative to your email’s content and not deceptive (spammers often use misleading subject lines to trick people into opening their emails)
- A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present (use your email signature for this and put it at the bottom of the email)
Audit Your Campaigns Periodically – even though using email service providers ensures a high rate of deliverability, they can’t guarantee ALL your emails are reaching the inbox and not being spam filtered or blocked. Most ESPs are from the US and consequently most of their white lists are with the largest US email providers. However, in the US there are many, many small broadband providers and dialup providers who aren’t whitelisted with these ESPs. If you don’t live in the US then it’s very likely these ESPs won’t be whitelisted with even the largest email providers in your country (this is true even for Canada). So there are two things you can do about this:
1) Before joining an ESP ask if they are whitelisted with all of the major email providers in your area (especially the broadband ones). Pick the ESP who is on the most whitelists for your area.
2) Setup test email accounts with the most popular free email accounts in your area and send test emails to them. Then login to each account to see if it was delivered to the inbox, put in the spam folder or blocked.
If you’re in the US an excellent service to use for auditing your emails quickly is called Email Reach. It will show how your email fared with Gmail, AT&T, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, GMX and Hotmail email accounts and whether it reached the inbox, was marked as spam, or blocked and never reach the account. Email Reach shows how your email appears in Gmail, Outlook 2007, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, Windows Live, Apple Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Opera, EarthLink, Blackberry, Iphone, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile email accounts. It will also check if you are on any of the most widely used blacklists.
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