Increase Email Delivery with Permission-Based Emails
A well-planned, well-written email marketing campaign can be an extremely cost effective means of promoting your company. But great emails mean nothing if they don't make it to your client's inbox, which is why steps taken to increase the rate of email delivery are worthwhile. Email marketing researcher Return Path's 2008 report found that emails from legitimate email servers still only averaged 56 percent email deliverability, while 20 percent were rejected, 8 percent went immediately to a junk folder, and 16 percent were bounces. So how can you increase the likelihood that your emails are getting to their intended recipients? One way is to make sure you obtain permission and, once you've done so, maintain your relationship with clients through the targeted, personalized emails they're expecting.
The five levels of permission for email delivery are opt-in, double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, opt-out, and negative opt-in. Opting-in is the most common form of permission. To opt-in, the client checks a box that says they want to receive email from your company or organization. Double opting-in is considered the gold standard in permission-based email marketing because the client has to essentially subscribe twice to be included on your email list. They first request to be added to your email list, and then they'll receive an email they're expected to respond to that restates their desire to be added. The risk to double opt-ins, however, is that if the client doesn't know they need to or chooses not to reply to the confirmation email, their subscription will be lost.
To increase the credibility of your email services and prevent the risk of no reply in double opting-in, you may consider confirmed opt-in instead. In confirmed opt-in, immediately after subscribing to an email list the client will receive an email reminding them of their subscription. In this email, remind subscribers to perform an email blacklist check. They're then given an immediate opportunity to unsubscribe from your email list. This is a great chance to establish that first contact with your subscriber and give them a preview of the emails they can expect to receive. Encourage them to add your email address to their address book. You may even provide instructions for specific email service providers to make it really simple.
Negative opting-in is the most ill-advised form of email marketing because it very closely resembles spam. This type of email marketing involves obtaining an email address from a variety of sources, with subscribers only able to opt-out if they reply to the email or click an unsubscribe link in the body of an email. If you've ordered something from a catalog before and noticed that, before you clicked submit, a box was automatically checked to receive emails from the company, you've experienced negative opting-in. This is a quick and easy way to build your email list, but it is also a tricky form of permission because a subscriber may automatically receive your emails as spam, not realizing how you obtained their address.
About the Author
Written by Mel Bryson. Complete email delivery solutions including email blacklist check, email deliverability, email rendering diagnostics. More info at http://www.emailreach.com
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