design versus the spam filter

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Design versus the Spam Filter

It seems to happen more and more that newsletters have to sacrifice the design for a better guarantee of inbox delivery. Unfortunately this isn’t going to change; so best start redesigning.

As I spend quite a bit of time checking emails for spam filter ratings as part of my job at mailingmanager, the first thing that has to be taken into consideration is the text>html ratio. Long gone are the days of having a fantastic looking layout with a small message. Instead, you better make sure that there’s a lot of text to accompany that fancy template you have or you’re basically heading for a one way trip to the bulk folder.

One thing you can do to even this up is make the newsletter multi-part. Construct an html and text version of the email and send them both out at the same time. As the email is sent as multi-part, it will arrive at your recipients’ inbox and then decide which format to deliver to that person. This firstly, is a great way to get a much higher open rate as you are making sure both formats are covered and secondly you are increasing your text ratio.

It’s also a good idea to get rid of the big images at the top of your newsletter. This is for two reasons. Firstly, the more images you have in the newsletter, the higher a spam rating you will have when the filter checks through it. Secondly, you want to make sure the message of the newsletter gets through to the reader within the first few lines of your newsletter. Usually a recipient will choose to read on or delete within the first few lines of an email, so it has to summarise the whole of the email in the first few lines. As a good indicator of how your email should look, send previews to your outlook box. If the full message of the email can be seen in the preview window in outlook, you’ve done a good job.

If you need any guidelines on how a good email campaign should look, just go into your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account and have a look at the newsletters that are dropping into your inbox. I’m sure around 90% of you will have an eBay email in there. If you look at that, the email hasn’t gone over the top on design but managed to both keep the companies branding and the main message of the email. In doing this, eBay have made a campaign which is both recognisable and also got the email into the inbox where they can expect a much higher open rate. A perfectly constructed campaign.

The most important thing when constructing an email campaign is to be patient. Test everything you do, and make sure that you are willing to compromise on design to get those email open rates higher.

Alex Fenwick
www.mailingmanager.co.uk

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